Europolders a European program on polder landscape, heritage, and innovation

Abstract

Since the twelfth century, polder landscapes have characterized the Netherlands, in particular, but also have appeared across Europe—vast plains reclaimed from water and repurposed for crops and livestock, farmers and rural communities. Over the centuries, urbanization has brought domestic and international visitors seeking leisure activities in these cultural landscapes. But polders have lain mostly in the shade, as it were, of other landscapes, merely a link between hills, dunes, ocean beaches, and historic cities. The Europolders Program emancipates this characteristic landscape, and strengthens prosperity in it, showing it to be an attractive and interesting territory. The Netherlands has a remarkable hydraulic engineering reputation abroad, not only because of work they have done at home—to endless extraction, reclamation and drainage, irrigation projects, dyke, channel, and harbor works—but also because they brought their expertise to the farthest corners of the world. Polders across Europe were shaped or at least influenced by Dutch (Frisian, Hollanders, Zeeuw) and Flemish people. The Europolders Program focuses on developing a European network of polder landscapes with extensive cultural and natural value. It aims to increase the accessibility, visibility, and awareness of historical polder landscapes, water management, and technological innovation, for the benefit of residents and visitors, and to strengthen regional economies.