Age of Wonderland ‘Balancing Green and Fair Food´ discusses the complex issues that takes place in our globalized food system through inviting six creatives from around the world to exchange knowledge during the Dutch Design Week that took place from 17 to 25 October 2015. For the publication associated with this event, I wrote the essay “Wonderland Water” about the growing awareness of the Dutch and their relationship with the water.

Dijken zijn de dragers van het Nederlandse landschap. Toch bestond er nog geen boek over – juist omdat ze zo vanzelfsprekend zijn, vermoedelijk. Dat hebben de landschapsarchitecten van LOLA Landscape nu gedaan: Dijken van Nederland. Daarin heb ik een essay geschreven over … dijken als bron van innovatie.

In Designed for the Future, Jared Green asked eighty global leaders who shape our built and natural environments the same question: what gives you hope that a sustainable future is possible? I contributed a short essay about ZUS Architects and its transformation of Het Schieblock, an abandoned office building from the sixties, into the center of the revitalized neighborhood. Read my piece  below.

Dikes are the framework of the Dutch landscape. But even though there are so important, no book has been written about it. That is why the landscape architects of LOLA Landscape wrote it: Dutch Dikes. I contributed to this issue by writing an essay: dikes as a source of innovation. 

A film, an app, an artwork, a Twitter-campaign, a product: those are just a few examples of social design with water. They can get an issue on the agenda, create a community and launch new products. For the book compiled by Anne van der Zwaag on social design, Looks Good Feels Good Is Good, I wrote the chapter on water. The world is ready for designers who, rather than adding yet another chair to what is already there, devote their time and creativity to solving the world’s (water) problems.

Water is life – and death. As floods and droughts assume Biblical proportions in many areas in the world, the magnitude of the water issues we face is penetrating our awareness and our political and spatial agenda. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Netherlands, where mastery of the water has always been a condition for survival. If there is one element which is crucial to the Low Lands – for its sheer existence, for its landscape, for its identity – then that is water. The Dutch created land by pushing the water out with dikes and keeping it out with pumps. Now, however, the country that has refashioned its landscape so distinctly in order to keep water out, is letting it back in. For Landscape, the magazine of the British Landscape Institute, I wrote an essay based on my book in collaboration with Maartje van den Heuvel, Sweet&Salt: Water and the Dutch.

Read the essay here: Tracy Metz – Designin for water: the sweet & the salt of it – 2012 – Landscape Institute

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