ABSTRACT
Open water in its multifarious appearances had major impacts on cities over time. In recent years cities all over Europe have redefined their water resources. In this context the paradigm of urban sustainable development can help to rethink former urban planning endeavors and to establish new ideas about the relation between city and nature and about the ways this relationship is molded. To do this the chapter looks at the sustainability endeavors of the cities of Mainz and Wiesbaden in the southwest of Germany with regards to their ‘open’ and ‘re-discovered’ urban waters. The urban waterscape in these cities is formed by the river Rhine, which connects both neighboring cities, as well as the small rivers and rivulets running through the urban area. In this chapter those urban waters are considered as socio-natural sites, where ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (technology) meet and new forms of human-nature interaction are continuously created. Seeing cities as part of the natural world, influenced by natural factors and leaving their ecological footstep in their ‘natural’ hinterland, and asking how this ‘urban nature’ was perceived and produced, the chapter hopes to establish the role of the ‘environmental memory’ of cities in the process of becoming ecologically sustainable. It will be argued that urban sustainability, though in itself no ‘historical’ concept, will be a fruitful research area in the quest for an intrinsic, historically defined urban ‘logic’.
