Em. Prof. Moraitis Konstantinos & Postdoc Dr. Ioannidis Romanos

Title: “Wet dreams” of landscape admiration or “nightmares” of destruction: a session on water-scape cultural and environmental resilience

Chair:

Em. Prof. Moraitis Konstantinos

&

Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Ioannidis Romanos

National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Abstract/Description:

The provocative introductory term, ‘wet dreams’, attempts to metaphorically correlate erotic pleasure with the admiration and liquid sensation of water, probably with water in sensational motion. We may assert that feelings of admiration and pleasure, aesthetic or cultural, surely accompany the perception of water, in coastal landscapes or in terrestrial landscape surroundings, as in rivers or lakes’ scenery. An important number of culturally and politically significant cities, were constructed in immediate functional association with rivers and lakes. Moreover, the initial 17^th century use of the term “landscape”, “landschap” in Dutch, was correlated to a pioneer bourgeois society that linked its overall development with water management, through ingenious infrastructure interventions.

Those could be the positive dreamy references to the possible water resilience; references that may correlate landscape design, in urban or natural context, and with water-scape design. “Water-scape”, is a newly coined term that insists on the multilevel treatment, design treatment of water entities as a precious part of the ecosophic landscape sustainability. On the second part of the metaphoric description of our title, we refer to the “nightmares” of destruction, to nightmares as primordial as the biblical or mythical descriptions of cataclysmic floods. We usually address to these remote deluging memories, characterizing them as legendary. Nevertheless, cataclysmic floods, not exterminating the whole humanity but severely affecting parts of our societies, seem to be common to both our mythical and historical psyche and our contemporary living experience. We could actually insist on analogous incidents in Greece, in the country hosting the present Changing Cities conference. It would be more appropriate, however, to augment the scope of our session and refer to the international experience, insisting nevertheless on our principal demand: on the positive correlation with the nearby or out of the cities waterscapes, to the need to unveil previously covered streams and rivers, as for example in many Greek cities, to unveil their positive environmental and historic or cultural existence, to actively correlate them to urban resilience. In parallel, we could actually comment, in our session, the need for water protective infrastructural management, hoping for a positive reversal of the delusive nightmares.

Keywords and Themes of possible reference:

1. Positive reference to water-scape environment.
2. Water-scape design and management in urban context.
3. Water-scape design and management in natural context.
4. Protective infrastructural management.
5. The relation of water infrastructure and landscapes
6. Catastrophic floods in international context.
7. Recent catastrophic floods in Greece, in Thessaly in particular.
8. Water-scape resilience.
9. Historic and cultural importance of water-scape networks.