The synthesis of landscape that has been practiced in the Netherlands since the ninth century a.C. brings up two problems: On the one hand a problem of subdivision: how can vast, desert land without measure be surveyed, structured, colonized? On the other hand, a problem of distribution: how can the currents and turbulences of water be deflected, slowed down or accelerated?

The techniques, strategies and institutions - the sciences - that have emerged around these two sets of problems entertain a tense relationship. Sometimes they converge, sometimes complex differences emerge, but it seems also possible to oppose them in simple comparisons: The dividing “sciences of the land” define a metric space using a coordinate system. They use forms to organize material. They subordinate small things under big things. They allow for unpredictability only within the flexibility of the smallest, flickering grid units. The distributing “sciences of the water” on the other hand span a directional space starting from local shifts of direction. They let forms emerge from the play of forces within the material. With small manipulations, they unleash far-reaching cataclysms. They don’t deal with certainties, only with probabilities.

An echo of this tense relationship might be found in the administrative schism accompanying the great rearrangements of the Dutch landscape in the twentieth century: On the one hand, the apparatus of the welfare state with its humanist and social-democratic tradition strove for spatial planning and social housing, for the organized subdivision of the landscape. On the other hand, a technocratic machinery fuelled by commercial interests pushed great infrastructural and hydrological projects beyond moral concerns - take the extension of the highway network as an example. The effects of these interventions often eluded the control of spatial planning, sometimes even subverting its professed intentions.

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