The water project

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 to Rotterdam, and J.A. Scholten, works surveyor of the Schieland Water Control Board, the Water Project was a move to redress the town's troublesome water-resources management and structure its expansion into the outlying polders. This project, the first large-scale nineteenth- century upscaling operation in Rotterdam, is comprised of five 'singels', gently winding watercourses accompanied by tree-lined avenues. Westersingel, Spoorsingel, Noordsingel, Crooswijksesingel and Boezemsingel together envelop the original triangular settlement like growth rings in a tree. The landscape architects J.D. Zocher Jr. and L.P. Zocher embedded these singels in a landscape-style setting, giving the Water Project the added resonance of a major urban embellishment programme. This guide seeks to rediscover the Water Project in all its facets: as an intervention in the interests of water management, hygiene and urban planning, 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-century walk through the city in the pleasant and informative company of countless images, narratives and anecdotes