4.2.1 Case Study: River Aire in Switzerland/France
Course subject(s)
Module 4. Designing the River
Renaturation of the Aire river
Let us now give a nice example of landscape architecture based on natural elements: the river Aire in Switzerland.
After fifteen years of work, the renaturation of the Aire river is almost complete. The design was made by landscape architects bureau ‘Superpositions’.
The river had been reined in to a canal – which was built between the second half of the 19th century and the 1940s- , as part of an effort to regulate its flow and to prevent flooding in the surrounding agricultural fields.
In 2001, a bid was launched to renature the course of the river. In other words, to eliminate the old canal and to allow the water to meander as it previously had. However, the winning idea was much broader and ambitious. It resulted in a beautiful natural park with many innovative nature based elements. The following video explains this exciting work and show the results.
The video described the river Aire project, which focused on giving more space to the river. This revitalization process is fundamental as protection against floods because if you pass the river into a more expansive space, the river extends as soon as there is a flood. This project aimed to emphasize, intensify and make visible the natural history and the history of man. Hence, it considers principles of minimum intervention, legibility, and reversibility on objects of the entire territory.
Room for Rivers: Perspectives on River Basin Management by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/room-for-rivers-perspectives-on-river-basin-management/.