Seawalls at Work: Envirotech and Labor on the North Sea Coast before 1800
Tim Soens|Greet De Block|Iason Jongepier
For more than a thousand years, the building of seawalls has been dominant strategy to cope with flood risk in coastal wetlands North Sea area. In debates on adaptation, seawall become symbol "hard" infrastructure contrasting "soft" engineering and "building-with-nature" technologies. Inspired by both environmental history STS, this article challenges narratives as inevitably evolving towards rigid infrastructures we know today. Throughout history, responded changing varying socio-spatial realities. Pronounced differences were not so much situated technical evolutions or external pressures, but rather organization labor (and capital), power knowledge claims embedded their interaction physical environment. Despite improvement-rhetoric, "modern" inherently "superior" "more effective" localized predecessors. They just corresponded different
Technology and Culture|PubMed