![]() Their thinking about living with water has evolved in recent decades. The Oosterschelde Barrier, part of Delta Works As David Waggonner, the founder of Waggonner & Ball says, "They made a lot of mistakes, and they learned from those mistakes." ![]() The Dutch have learned there are no easy solutions. "From prehistoric times people have learned to live with water and in medieval times founded authorities tasked with water management and flood defense." "The Netherlands has a long history of water management because half of the country is based below sea level," says Lisette Heuer, global director of flood resilience for Royal HaskoningDHV, a firm with projects on five continents that participated in the New Orleans dialogues. The Netherlands takes exporting water knowledge so seriously that it has a Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, Henk Ovink, who travels the globe on behalf of Dutch experts. More than half the nation's 17 million people live on land below sea level. Water has been both a daily threat and a national identity for a country about the size of Maryland. They're the Silicon Valley of water management, a laboratory testing strategies that have evolved over the centuries. "The first Dutch Dialogue was done in New Orleans right after Katrina and became a model in the planning world for how we think about our watery future going forward."įor the Dutch, consulting with cities about their response to relative sea-level rise has become a growth industry. "It's self-evident that the Dutch have developed an expertise in water and water management that is unparalleled in the world and this was an opportunity for us to learn from them," says George Homewood, Norfolk's director of City Planning. The Dutch Dialogues is a traveling roadshow that is a cross between a seminar on local hydrology and a design charrette. The dialogues, initiated by Waggonner & Ball Architects, a New Orleans firm, and the Royal Dutch Embassy, are just one example of how a world increasingly imperiled by water is turning for guidance to a country where there is no retreat from rising seas. So the city imported expertise, staging the Dutch Dialogues, a traveling roadshow that is a cross between a seminar on local hydrology and a design charrette. And similar to the Netherlands, where two-thirds of the country is vulnerable to flooding, Norfolk is threatened by rising tides and intensified storms. ![]() Like the Netherlands, portions of Norfolk have arisen on wetlands and even creeks buried beneath fill. Norfolk, Virginia, was founded on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in the 17th century, but when the city needed new ideas to deal with sinking land and rising seas it turned to people with even more experience fighting flooding: the Dutch.
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