Linking contemporary river restoration to economics, technology, politics, and society: Perspectives from a historical case study of the Po River Basin, Italy.

River restoration is a novel paradigm of 'mirescape' (land-and-water-scape) management that developed along with the emergence of aquatic ecology. River restoration can be seen as the application of an ecological perspective to return rivers to nature. However, the river restoration paradigm is also the contemporary iteration of historical phases of mirescape management. We review the long and varied recorded history of the Po River in northern Italy as a case study to illustrate the transformations and common themes of mirescape management. We find, first, that significant changes in mirescape management and river condition only occur in the context of larger social, political, technological and economic transformations. Second, we show how particular cultural understandings, economic interests, technological innovations and political powers have driven particular paradigms of mirescape management. These have tended towards increasing territorial separation of wet and dry. We find, third, that these separations lead not only to increasing economic precariousness for many, but also to increasingly severe disasters. We conclude that river restoration faces social and political challenges to becoming relevant at a mirescape scale, due to its lack of integration with land management, or with current social, political, technological and economic transformations. To act on this conclusion, we suggest philosophically aligned social movements that river restoration could work with to improve impact and uptake.

Systems of Power: A Spatial Envirotechnical Approach to Water Power and Industrialization in the Po Valley of Italy, ca.1880-1970.

Fossil fuels, more than water, are immediately associated with the industrial energy transition. Preindustrial energy sources, however, continued to play a role in industrial energy regimes. This was the case in the industrializing Po Valley, where water power remained crucial until the 1960s. The article analyzes the ways in which the technological and spatial features of mechanical hydropower and hydroelectricity combined with the spatial and environmental features of the Po watershed, as well as the different envirotechnical regimes associated with these configurations. Through this approach, it sheds lights on the radical change that hydropower underwent during industrialization: from discontinuous to continuous energy production, from diffusion to concentration of access to water resources, and from small- to large-scale, basin-wide system building and interdependency. Concentration, continuity, and large-scale interdependency transformed profoundly the social distribution of access to hydropower, and scaled up, without eliminating, the influence of environmental factors on water power production.