The Parliament of the Scheldts. Reflections on Politics and Play in Reimagining the Coastal Landscape of the Netherlands

This text reflects on the recent Landscape Makers Congress co-organised by Studio Inscape as a design intervention seeking to re-politicise the South-Western Delta region (SWD) of the Netherlands. Like many coastal regions around the world, the Dutch coast (including the SWD) is facing serious challenges from climate change. In the SWD, these challenges are taken up and politicised through the memory of a flood disaster that devastated the region in 1953. On the one hand, the legacy of this flood, which includes the coastal engineering structures of the Delta Works, makes the consequences of climate change salient to the region’s inhabitants. Frequently, inhabitants voice frustration with the impression that their concerns are not taken seriously enough and not translated into concrete political actions. On the other hand, the same legacy also silences debates and considerations on alternative ways of responding to the many challenges of the changing climate, restricting the scope of discussions to narrow anthropocentric narratives of the ‘threat’ of water and the ‘war’ between the Dutch and the sea. Using interactive theatre, the Landscape Makers Congress invited more than 100 regional inhabitants, policymakers, water engineers and representatives of environmental NGOs to consider the future of the landscape in the SWD from a range of different perspectives. During the day, participants represented one out of several more-than-human ‘landscape makers’ in a fictional parliament and engaged in debates on several key dilemmas and different spatial strategies, situated in different periods in the future (2030, 2050 and 2100). As the day progressed, the ‘parliament’ bore witness to some of the consequences of climate change as well as the consequences of the decisions they made themselves. Through plenary discussions, workshops and interventions during the day, the audience was engaged in discussions on some different futures that might be possible in the SWD and on whose values and interests should or should not be part of the process of constructing these futures. Based on our experiences on the day and activities in the region more generally, some reflections are offered on the different concepts and strategies operationalised in the Landscape Makers Congress: its playful use of multifocality, its dramatisation of temporality and its staging of a particular experience of politics. Thus, this text offers some reflections on community engagement using design-based methodologies in the context of politicised (and the politicisation of) environments.