The Struggle for the Markerwaard

Abstract

One of the most impressive feats of Dutch hydro-engineering is the Zuiderzee reclamation project, a series of land reclamations during which four polders were created. The Netherlands turned its inland sea into a freshwater lake. However, one of the planned land reclamation projects, the Markerwaard polder, has never been realized. In its place today lies the Marker lake, a large freshwater body surrounded by an awkward silhouette of dikes and dams. Whereas the other Zuiderzee polders were reclaimed in the years between 1930 and 1970 without much controversy, the reclamation of the Markerwaard met powerful societal resistance. The future of the Markerwaard became a national debate until the reclamation was finally called off in 1990.

In between 1970 and 1990, ideas on land reclamation changed drastically. In order to fully understand this change, in this thesis I argue that it is necessary to understand how ideas on environmentalism, spatial problems, and protest culture intertwined and echoed within broader Dutch society. To analyse this change, the concept of socio-technical imaginaries is particularly wellsuited. In this thesis, I operationalize this concept into a framework for historical research. Using this framework, I subsequently demonstrate how the hegemonic imaginary on land reclamation projects was challenged in the early 1970s. This fuelled a major, society-wide debate on the future of the Markerwaard in the early 1980s, and a resistant imaginary rose. Elements of this resistant imaginary were incorporated in the hegemonic imaginary, which changed ideas on land reclamation. This ultimately resulted in the downfall of the Markerwaard polder.