Queering de rivier

Artikel door Shanna Koppejan

MSc Landschapsarchitectuur

In a time of alienation and polarisation, it is increasingly important to maintain an open dialogue with your neighbours, friends, family and other community members. It fosters empathy and opens up spaces to listen and challenge our ways of thinking. But why limit that to our human community? In the Netherlands, we have forced our views on the landscape for a long time. Specifically our rivers, we have canalised, controlled and straightened to the point where they are now held in place, surrounded by exploited and (re)claimed land. In this article, I want to start listening and challenging the business-as-usual. Inspired by studio Loom’s Rhine River Rehearsal, and René Boer’s question during this session: ‘Can we queer the Rhine?’. This article suggests an alternative, radical way of rethinking landscape and design.

So, what do I mean by queering? I see queering two-fold: as a rejection of traditional (human-defined) sexual and gender norms, and as Bell Hooks mentions: “'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Queering is a place for contestation, challenging the status quo, necessary to tackle urgencies of our time like climate change. Donna Haraway (2016) speaks of the need to respond to these urgencies by changing the story and narrating Gaia’s stories in an act of care. This means acknowledging that rivers, animals, and landscapes are not inert backdrops, but active participants in world-making. She suggests resisting easy resolutions and instead inhabiting a space of contestation, entanglement, and ongoing negotiation. But why is this necessary? Why is it time to start telling different stories? 

First of all, as landscape architects and spatial planners, we are constantly making our prejudices permanent in our designs, meaning that minorities and differences are often disregarded. For example, through the projection of heteronormativity and monosexuality on nature and spaces. That’s how houses are built for certain family structures, dismissing nontraditional constellations. René Boer (2023) describes smoothification in his book Smooth City. We are creating places that are polished and efficient, and therefore exclusionary and depoliticised. Public spaces are controlled by prioritising consumption, the increasing levels of surveillance and hostile architecture. It removes those who are seen as unwanted. Therefore, smoothification ‘increasingly prevents encounters across difference’ (Boer, 2023, p.242). It is nullifying any form of agency, imagination, and potential. Judith Butler (2024) explains in the book Who’s afraid of gender? how gender is mobilised by political actors to escalate fear of differences. Such fear only strengthens current power structures and displaces the fear of destruction from its actual conditions of production, like climate change and capitalism.

In relation to the river, the water becomes something to fear. Water safety is a topic many of us deal with in our studies and careers. The high water levels in the rivers are feared rather than the conditions of their production, like climate change, extractivism and anthropocentrism. Moreover, Amitav Ghosh (2021) in The Nutmeg’s curse explains that what ‘the Earth is really exhausted of is not its resources; what it has lost is meaning. Conquered, inert, supine, the Earth can no longer ennoble, nor delight, nor produce new aspirations. All it can inspire in its would-be conqueror’s mind is the kind of contempt that arises from familiarity. Over time this contempt has come to be planted so deep within cultures of modernity that it has become a part of its unseen foundations’ (p.82). Therefore, it is time to start reimagining, telling different stories and allowing for differences. Resisting binaries like nature/culture, male/female, us/them can help to recognise the multiplicity and fluidity of the river and all others around us. It should also be understood that this is not a new lens of looking at the river; it acknowledges that the river has always been queer. The river takes space, overflows boundaries, and constantly reinvents itself. Nature has in fact always been queer. Research increasingly shows that species have a wide range of sexualities, social structures, and ways of being, which reveals that queerness is not an exception in nature, but one of its many expressions.

But, we have straightened the river, polished it, and smoothed it. The landscape and river were not able to refuse this optimization, so how can we allow it to refuse? To queer and to disturb the order of things? In this next part of the text I suggest three ways of understanding and seeing our task as landscape architects and our relations to the water differently. This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully one that gets you thinking.

Figure 1: The aquarium. The aquarium shows vertically how we horizontally gave the river boundaries and limited its fluid form. The glass reflects not the blue sky; this vertical river reflects people, the dikes and the boundaries that are the result of human action. It makes visible what we usually do not see. (Source: Shanna Koppejan, 2025)

First of all, one way of reimagining the river is understanding the ubiquity of water. One of Loom’s partners mentioned that if a brick is the river without water, then we are inhabiting the river in our houses. This gave me a feeling of connectedness with the river. Moreover, the river is just part of a bigger ubiquitous object of wetness, one of systems and cycles. We, as humans, have given boundaries to wetness while this wetness can also be understood as being everywhere all the time. This addresses a certain relationality and collectivity. Hydrofeminism and indigenous people, like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2025) in Theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead, suggest such a way of seeing all human and non-human bodies as interconnected through water. This stimulates different practices of care for interconnected systems, promoting fluid and interdependent relations. It also stimulates different interpretations of being in ecological time and space. This invites a broader question for landscape architects, planners, and all others: What would it mean to embrace wetness, and how can we practice care for the river as part of ourselves?

Another way to queer the river is to move away from the smooth, polished, and efficient towards porosity and diversity. Porosity, as opposed to smooth landscapes, can be created by leaving things unfinished, through participatory processes and by telling new stories. In my master thesis on convivial (’living with’) conservation in the floodplains, I found that many people actually want to participate in nature conservation actions. However, there are many rules (and other factors) in nature areas, which constrain people’s options to do so. It also became clear to me that stewardship and feeling connected to nature are tied to perceived agency and memories, which are often overlooked in design and nature management. Storytelling and working with the landscape open up space for people to recognise themselves as part of the landscape, rather than as detached observers. Amitav Ghosh explains that we should start telling our stories asking not when but where did it happen. The latter shapes the answers in accords to a degree of agency of the landscape itself and all that lies within it. In other words, this allows us to see all non-humans as actors and recognise the diversity around us. By designing for porosity, we create space for diversity to surface and for rivers and others to be fluid and follow the forms they choose.

Lastly, I want to address a perhaps more practical way of queering the river, and that is by critically reflecting on our map-making. What power structures and prejudices are we upholding with the way we design? For example, we often disregard the dynamics of the river, the landscape, and the people. It is not a static entity, but we are depicting it as one in our maps and visuals. It is also about representation and what assumptions we are strengthening. The most common style of our maps is called plain style, influenced by the Scientific Revolution, and is based on clearness, generalness and lack of personal beliefs. For example, the river is often shown in blue, while indigenous groups give it brown and green colours, resembling the actual colour. This style also became a tool for exploitation and colonialism. Plain style mapping leaves space for stereotyping because parts have to be filled in mentally and makes us vulnerable to hierarchy (Varanka, 2005). So, what if we consider personal experiences, narratives, dynamics, and relationships? Queering the river involves opposing learned rules of discipline, embracing the possibility of failure, and working with tools and materials that disrupt normative expectations of what a ‘good’ map should be. All in all, I hope this article inspired you to start listening, queering, and telling different stories.

Figure 2: Ubiquitous wetness. Understanding that all things are part of something bigger, connected

Figure 3: Weaving stories. Working with differences and diversity. (Source: Shanna Koppejan, 2025)

Figure 4: Linoleum print. Inspired by the book Terraforma: A book of speculative maps this earth is

References

Boer, R. (2023). Smooth city: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives. Valiz.

Butler, J. (2024). Who’s afraid of gender? Penguin Books.

Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis. The University of Chicago Press.

Haraway, D. (2016). Tentacular Thinking. In Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (pp. 30–57). Duke University Press.

Simpson, L. B. (2025). Theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead. Haymarket Books.

Varanka, D. (2005). The manly map: The English construction of gender in early modern cartography. In L. Dowler, J. Carubia, & B. Szczigiel (Eds.), Gender and landscape (pp. 223–239). Routledge.