Exploring care through water ecology and prototyping.

This project began with an observation of the canal edges in Binckhorst, particularly around De Besturing. During repeated site visits, I noticed a contradiction: water was physically present everywhere, yet often disconnected from everyday spatial experience. While some local users, such as workers and artists, had already developed informal relationships with the water through swimming, sauna activities, and moments of rest, many canal edges remained inaccessible, hard, and underused.

Through mapping, observations, interviews, and collective research on care, I became interested in how water could support relationships between people, place, and ecology. Rather than approaching water only as infrastructure, I explored it as a shared environment that requires attention, maintenance, and coexistence.

The project developed through a series of material and filtration experiments inspired by floating wetland systems. Working with gravel, sand, activated carbon, geotextile fabric, and plants, I tested how water moves through different layers and how ecological processes could be translated into a spatial proposal. The experiments revealed unexpected challenges related to buoyancy, water pressure, and flow each one teaching me something the design alone could not have anticipated.

The proposal imagines a floating ecological edge that combines habitat creation, ecological processes, and opportunities for human engagement. It asks how small-scale interventions can encourage care through presence, interaction, and a renewed relationship between people and water in a transforming urban landscape.