Rivers and their basins are ruptures in the landscape, obstacles to overland travel and sometimes “natural” sites for lines of defense and political borders. They are also in a longitudinal sense conduits allowing the easy passage of water and everything else that water can bear, from shipborne commodities to sewage. Some sites along the river, inevitably points of passage on the conduit, can also be points of easy access to the river and become windows on the riverine world for a less accessible hinterland. Also, geography may favor a ford or a bridge, attracting trade routes. Such sites encourage the development of settlements and, ultimately, cities. The availability of the river as a medium of transport favors the development of commercial networks and, ultimately, manufactures and industry.
In Europe as elsewhere river basins have thus been the favored sites of urbanization and industry. This induces a new dynamic of technological co-production, whereby the development of the cities and the development of the river and its basin become linked. For example, technologies of shipping, of cargo handling, of railroads, of river engineering, of bridge and tunnel building, of ecological reconstruction and all kinds of urban technologies become interlinked in complex ways. In short, the river and the cities are co-produced as technological entities.
Nonetheless, river basins are inevitably loci of tension. There are, after all, opposite shores which may attract, but also repel. And the interests of upstream and downstream riparians, particularly in matters of water use and pollution, rarely coincide. In Europe, where countries are small relative to the river basins and borders are frequent – and till now frequently changing – these political tensions have sometimes become so acute that the technological co-production of cities and the river basin stagnates, in the course of the twentieth century sometimes quite abruptly.
The three papers in this session all explore this question of political obstacles to the technological co-production of rivers and their cities, albeit in dissimilar ways. The paper by Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast explores the situation of cities on the Oder and Neisse rivers, both shores of which, prior to WW2, were both solidly German – politically and culturally. With the fixation of the postwar Polish-German border on the Oder and Neisse rivers the formerly unified German cities now found themselves split across an unusually tense border. Jajeśniak-Quast describes how after the war both the cities and the river were in total disarray and how the demands of urban life and river management enforced cross-river/border technological cooperation even in the face of great emnity. The suggestion is that this enforced infrastructural cooperation laid the groundwork for later forms of cooperation in both the technical and the cultural spheres.
The paper by Karl-Erik Michelsen also involves a once unified but suddenly divided city, but in this case instead of a new border being drawn along the axis of the river, it has been thrown across it, thus effectively splitting the river basin into politically alien upstream and a downstream portions. The city is Imatra and the river the Vuoksi, flowing from Finland into, currently, Russia. The post-WW2 appropriation by the Soviet Union of portions of Finnish Karelia moved the border from a location past the river’s mouth in Lake Ladoga to a point halfway the river, in the process splitting Imatra in two.
The situation still prevails today, in spite of the demise of the Soviet Union and Michelsen shows how the political rupture has utterly debilitated grand plans to turn the river basin into “Finland’s Ruhr” and, presumably, Imatra into its Essen.
Finally, the paper by Cornelis Disco examines another kind of political tension in the Rhine basin, deriving from different attitudes on the part of upstream and downstream riparians toward pollution control. Despite the overt struggle being fought out among nation states within various international Rhine commissions, Disco argues that the important initiating actors were (primarily Dutch) urban waterworks agencies whose increasing dependence on clean Rhine water forced them to combine technological innovation with political organization. This ultimately resulted in a basin- wide association of regional urban waterworks associations which occupied the radical wing of the anti-pollution movement and functioned as a ceaseless goad for the recurrently stagnating official political process of negation among nation-states.