Side event organized by Carola Hein, Professor and Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning at Delft University of Technology and 2024-2025 research-fellow at the Paris IAS (Sorbonne Université Chair), and Karl M. Wantzen, Professor at the University of Strasbourg and holder of the UNESCO « Rivers and Heritage - River Culture » Chair, as part of the 50th Anniversary of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Hydrologyical Programme and 60 years of UNESCO Water Sciences.

Onsite and online event, open to the public..
Talks in English.

Presentation

The side event provides hands-on insight into value-based approaches to connecting water, culture, heritage and sustainable development. Rivers are essential for life on Earth but they undergo a worldwide crisis, concerning their biocultural diversities, and socioecological functions. Climate change is exacerbating this problem, calling for transdisciplinary and transboundary solutions. The event will target on harmonization between humans and nature in riverscapes and port cities from three complementary perspectives:

1. The River Culture Concept aims to re-establish emotional linkages with the nature of aquatic socio-ecosystems. Moreover, it attempts to integrate knowledge and strategies including both, experiences of traditional societies and the analysis of adaptive strategies by non-human biota in analogy to the copying of physical mechanisms in nature known as bionics. A recent, interdisciplinary UNESCO publication has evidenced global patterns in biocultural diversification and rarefaction, and presented regional success stories for restoring human-river harmony.
2. By exploring the deep history of water and its heritage in the context of space and society and culture, the UNESCO Chair Water, Ports and Historic Cities promotes value-based approaches and methodologies for sustainable development, notably launching the open access peer reviewed journal BluePapers for connecting professionals from multiple disciplines, and the game Water Values, to collectively explore water, culture, and heritage from an international perspective with the aim to establish new visions and design strategies.
3. Both Chairs have elaborated international training courses to transfer these visions to young professionals and collaborate with the UNESCO Institute for Hydrological Education (IHE) Delft, which was created 60 years ago as part of the International Hydrological Decade. Today, it is the world reference for hydro system management training.

These three approaches and their applications will be presented and jointly discussed in the context of mitigating the global water and biocultural diversity crises.

Program

9am - 9.05am: Welcome
By Karl M. Wantzen and Carola Hein
9.05am - 9.30am: Connecting Water, culture, heritage and sustainable development. Paris – a city reconnects with the river Seine
By Carola Hein and Laurence Lestel
9.30am - 9.45am: 60 Years of Hydrological Education – IHE Delft and UNESCO
By Eddy Moors
9.45am - 10am: River Culture: live with the river, learn from the river, love the river
By Karl M. Wantzen
10am - 10.20am: Discussion
10.20am - 10.30am: Closing session
By Karl M. Wantzen and Carola Hein

Organizers

- UNESCO Chair “Rivers and Heritage” & EUCOR (The European Campus) Excellence Chair “Water and Sustainability”, Uni Strasbourg, France & KIT Karlsruhe, Germany
- UNESCO Chair “Water, Ports and Historic Cities”, TU Delft, The Netherlands

In collaboration with:

- IHE Delft – Institute for Water Education, Delft, The Netherlands
- Institute for Sustainability in Water and Cities (ITI Switch), University of Strasbourg
- Sorbonne University (METIS, Piren-Seine, ZA-Seine)
- Delft University of Technology/LDE PortCityFutures