The Green Heart

Résumé du livre

"Naples, Sydney, San Francisco and Tokyo all sit on a beautiful bay. In Cape Town, Table Mountain occupies a central place in the city. Rio de Janeiro has developed around the Tijuca National Park, with the Christ the Redeemer statue as its landmark. But only in the Netherlands can you find a metropolis with a vast rural area at its centre. The Green Heart is home to 700,000 people, and seven million people live around it. It is an iconic Dutch landscape, intertwined with the major cities of the Randstad. The contrast between the Green Heart and the Randstad is striking - they are different worlds that sometimes complement each other and sometimes slide past each other.A thousand years ago, the Green Heart was a peatland wilderness. Step by step, pioneers reclaimed the marshes and brought the area under cultivation. Today's landscape is the product of centuries of cultivation and occupation by many generations of residents and entrepreneurs. At its core, the Green Heart retained its rural character. The richness can be felt in the many characters of the Green Heart, from the Vechtplassen and the villages along the Vecht, to the ribbons of Alblasserwaard and Krimpenerwaard, vast peat meadow areas and old towns like Woerden, Gouda, Haastrecht or Leerdam. For city dwellers, the landscape of the Green Heart is a weekend destination; for residents, it is part of their identity.The national government, provinces, municipalities and water boards are working together on the challenges facing the Green Heart: subsidence, salination, water supply and drainage, drought, housing, nature and a healthy and attractive business climate. Mapping the cultural-historical significance and spatial quality of the Green Heart provides insight, inspiration and interpretation for making choices for the future. Without a story, 'landscape' remains abstract and is not connected to a greater whole. Without a pedigree, there is no understanding of common interests. This book is a biography of the Green Heart. It describes the long history of the Green Heart and the people who have shaped and coloured the landscape and those who continue to do so."--Publisher information.