Infrastructure v. Public Works 9: Norway’s National Tourist Route

DNP proposals range across several scales from infrastructure to buildings and explore how the Delta’s physical landscape can change to reflect its increasingly “urban” affiliations.

A useful precedent for this idea can be found in Norway’s National Tourist Route program. The program, based in sound economic logic organizes the experience of movement through that extraordinary landscape, and uses design to augment that experience.

The routes are populated by diversely scaled and programmed spaces dedicated to enriching the experience of tourists. These spaces include pedestrian bridges and overlooks and walkways, mountain lodges, and flood barriers that become buildings. Here are some images and descriptions of the designs.

Here are some more photos of the Tourist Route.

What does this have to do with the Delta?
Take a moment and reset your imaginations. Take away the mountains and snow of Norway, and imagine that one could bike, hike or otherwise tour the Delta, moving from pear tree orchards to historic town to riparian grove to marina to ferry to washout park to camp. That is not possible right now, not, at least, without braving sharing highways with drivers racing at breakneck speeds.

As California’s water debate shifts from whether to how, specific sites and physical interventions will increasingly be the focus of debate. The DNP anticipates that the Large Owner Axis, which is positioned along the long, north-south axis of the Delta, will be a key site of discussion.

The Large Owner Axis is so named because the owners of this string of islands is a collection of wealthy agricultural and absentee landowners, influential environmental groups, and multinational corporations. The configuration of the LOA islands also roughly corresponds to the area that a “through-Delta conveyance” would shuttle fresh water from the Sacramento River in the north to the pumping facilities in the southwest corner of the Delta.

The DNP proposes that the Large Owner Axis (and the Delta generally, for that matter) be conceived not merely as flood control, habitat, and water conveyance infrastructure, but also as a new space of tourism.

Norway’s National Tourist Route policy provides a road map to how California might escape the narrow visions associated with faction groupthink, technocratic realism, and lowest common denominator default positions symptomatic of a dysfunctional legislative environment where 1/3 majority rules.

You may wish to visit some of these past posts:

Thoughts on the so-called through-Delta component.
A critique of the PPIC’s and Dr. Jeffery Mount’s risk averse impediment to imagination.

Hat tip to Mason White for pointing the DNP in the direction of Norway’s National Route program, a great example of design synthesizing economic policy and infrastructure development.