We all love the countryside. (Indeed, there’s good evidence that as humans, we really need to be out in it as much as possible—a need the Japanese call forest bathing.) But unless you really are in a completely wild part of the world, what you are often seeing, from England’s green and pleasant land to the Netherlands’ rich tapestry of dikes and polders, is a very carefully managed industrial landscape.
You may be familiar with the concept of an urban heat island (UHI). If you’re not, if you live in a big city, especially a capital one, your inner thermostat certainly does.
In the first part of our discussion on the huge potential for canals, rivers and waterways to not just be pretty parts of our industrial pasts but also to play a vital role in our digital futures, we talked about Europe’s vision for TEN-T—a cornerstone of European transport policy since the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992, which has crystallised in the last decade into a multi-billion euro drive to build an effective, EU-wide and multimodal transport network across Europe.
Back in 1989, when the first proposals for this World Wide Web thing were drafted (wonder whatever happened to that?), we were all going to see this great new film, ‘Honey, I Shrunk The Kids’ and Black Box (er, ok) were top of the charts—someone had the mad idea of installing cables under canal towpaths.
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