WATER PROJECT Direct Verzonden

This guide is about the Water Project, and about Rotterdam in the nineteenth century,a Rotterdam ‘forgotten but not gone’. Designed in 1854 by W.N. Rose, Town Architect toRotterdam, and J.A. Scholten, works surveyor of the Schieland Water Control Board, the WaterProject was a move to redress the town’s troublesome water-resources management andstructure its expansion into the outlying polders. This project, the first large-scale nineteenth-century upscaling operation in Rotterdam, is comprised of five ‘singels’, gently windingwatercourses accompanied by tree-lined avenues. Westersingel, Spoorsingel, Noordsingel,Crooswijksesingel and Boezemsingel together envelop the original triangular settlement likegrowth rings in a tree. The landscape architects J.D. Zocher Jr. and L.P. Zocher embeddedthese singels in a landscape-style setting, giving the Water Project the added resonance of amajor urban embellishment programme. This guide seeks to rediscover the Water Project inall its facets: as an intervention in the interests of water management, hygiene and urbanplanning, as a ‘gilt edge’for living pleasantly in natural surroundings, and as a city walk.Re-establishing the link between the singels, a link once lost from view, the guide invites Rotterdammers and visitors alike to take this nineteenth-centurywalk through the city in the pleasant and informative company ofcountless images, narratives and anecdotes