ICOMOS (Institutional Council On Monuments and Sites)  Netherlands, in collaboration with scholars from the LeidenDelftErasmus Centre for Global Heritage and Development, published a new work presenting multidisciplinary research that connects water to heritage.

The society has not come to terms with its own water insecurity: chronic scarcity, over-extraction, natural catastrophes caused by water; the risks to both people and nature will increase as climate change will change the hydrology of the planet.

A discussion on water is needed, even if it is complicated because carries multiple economic, legal, political, and cultural values.
What is possible to do is learn from the past to tackle our future.

Water has served and sustained societies throughout the history of humankind.
The book explores landscapes, cities, engineering structures: a rich world of narratives, laws, practices and an extensive tangible network of infrastructure, buildings, and urban form.
It describes how people have modelled its course, shape and function of water for human settlements and the development of civilizations.

This book links the practices of the past to a present in which heritage and water are largely two separate disciplinary and professional fields and suggests the need of a common agenda and an integrated policy to address the preservation, transformation and adaptive reuse of historic water related structures.

The book is organized in five thematic sections that link practices of the past to the design of the present and visions of the future:

• drinking water management;
• water use in agriculture;
• water management for land reclamation and defense;
• river and coastal planning;
• port cities and waterfront regeneration.

For more information and to download the Pdf, here.