The Danube River and the Planning of Nature, 1856 - 1972

Abstract

In my dissertation, I study the role of nature in spatial, landscape, and urban planning. The main actor in this investigation is the Danube River: a watershed of 300,000 square miles, the infrastructure of myths since the Argonauts, and a defining geographic feature of the European Southeast. As a watershed it covers a vast space; its scale allows a synoptical view that reveals, rather than abstracts, the underlying ecological contingencies and environmental entities. It flows through the complex political geography of southeast Europe, a space of unresolved tensions that the river was often enlisted to resolve. As a myth, discourse, and identity, the Danube is burdened by these expectations and unrealized plans, furnishing a history of large ambitions, slow changes, and frustrating failures.

The Danube also serves as a methodological proxy for nature. Imagined as a route, a resource, or a rationale, the nature of the river’s unintentional environment – its material, non-human existence – commands, prompts, and authorizes our interventions, and at the same time resists our intentions. How were these multiple understandings of the river and its landscape used to support, challenge, or oppose ideas about spatial order? How was the relationship between the ecological and political orders that the Danube sets up negotiated through the environment? To answer these questions, I study infrastructural projects and plans of various scales that attempted to make political sense of a natural region or used nature as a rationale to justify political goals in a region that, while often fragmented by volatile nationalism, was also used as a testing site of international cooperation and collaboration.

I study the river itself as infrastructure: an environment that enables operations and activities, that encroaches upon vast areas of physical space, that spans time and political changes, that is inextricable from political power, and that, crucially, provides both the model and the canvas for further infrastructural imagination.

I focus on the period between the 1850s and 1970s, during which environmental issues were brought to the fore of political thinking in the move from nature conservation to environmentalism. It was also the age of exponential acceleration in global communications, trade, migrations, colonization, and decolonization. Calibrated by two world wars, it was a period of frequent environmental destructions and reconstructions. I look at the river as a facilitator of the 19th-century free trade, an enabler of National Socialist autarkic and colonial visions, and a hopeful guarantee of postwar technocratic prosperity. Within this general frame, I trace a trajectory of changing projections of the Danube River on the space of southeastern Europe, of the various ways that the Danube River was thought of as the region’s physical and metaphorical infrastructure.

The episodes of engineering and planning that I investigate engage landscapes of various sizes and scales: the construction of jetties in the Danube Delta in the mid-nineteenth century, the planning of the city of Vienna by the National Socialist regime, and the building of the Iron Gates Powerplant in the 1960s on the Danube between Yugoslavia and Romania. I home in on these specific points and explore how these local interventions enter the plans to overhaul the river’s physical environment at different scales. I pan along the river as an artery calibrated by these sites and zoom out to see the Danube Basin emerging as a hydrological entity, a conceptual and political unit, and a planning space.