Remaking Hazardscapes: Fixing land and water boundaries in a fluid environment

Remaking hazardscapes

Through history, the borders of rivers have been reshaped for different purposes, such as gaining new arable lands, developing industry, or containing floods. States, cities and local institutions have erected dikes, embankments and flood expansion areas. This shifting and fixing of borders between land and water has also reproduced hazardscapes.

This seminar focuses on the moving (of) borders of rivers, how hazardscapes have been reproduced through history, and the consequences of fixed land-water borders on vulnerabilities and State- community relationships today. It addresses the history of the separation between water and land and of dealing with sediments in a fluid environment.

Programme

9:30 Hervé PIEGAY (ENS Lyon, FR)
“Fighting the river or living with it? The value of shifting riverscapes”

10:15 Alexis METZGER (UNIL, Switzerland)
“The Rhone and its water/land boundary in Switzerland“

Coffee break

11:30 Jeroen WARNER (Wageningen University & Research, NL)
“Challenges of (re)making space for the river – a tale of two countries”

Lunch break (lunch not provided by the organisers)

14:00 Antoine BROCHET (INRAE, France), Joana GUERRIN (INRAE, France)
“Individual vs collective adaptation to floods. Competing riskcapes of the Camargue delta (France)”

14:45 Luisa CORTESI (Erasmus University Rotterdam, NL)
“Waterland: questioning hydrotopias and proposing alternatives in an increasingly amphibious world”

Coffee break

16:00 Jenia MUKHERJEE (IIT Kharagpur, India)
“Pluralistic floods research: Deployment of and dissemination through multi-modal methodologies”

16:45 General discussion and conclusion of the seminar
 

Organised by Jonathan Bussard, Prof. René Véron & Prof. Emmanuel Reynard (UNIL-IGD) in the context of the project FluidGov - Towards a “fluid” governance: hydrosocial analysis of flood paradigms and management practices in Rhone and Ganges basins (Switzerland, France, India).
 

Free and open to all.
For more information and connection to the zoom session, please contact jonathan.bussard@unil.ch