Man has always attempted to shape the environment  to his comfort, and no place is this more  

true than in the Netherlands. 17% of mainland  Netherlands is artificial and constructed by the  

Dutch themselves through a mixture of canals,  levies, pumping systems, and a lot of dirt. 

Most of this enlargement has been done in the  past 100 years, but those windmill spinning,  

tulip growing, wooden shoe wearing Dutch have been  

installing nationwide expansion  packs as far back as the 1300s.

How the hell did they do it? How  did they manage to build an area  

more than twice the size of Hong Kong  and make it fit for human habitation?

But to ask the how we must first ask the “Why?”  Why spend millions of euros building more land  

when you can do what the rest of  Europe did and simply steal some?

Ultimately, it comes down to the weather. Really.  A low-lying coastal state with heavy rains is  

prone to flooding, and not the kind where you  have to put your wellies on to go to the shop. The  

kind that kills thousands of people. A lot of the  flooding came from this area, the Zowder-Zay, when  

heavy rainfall and rising sea levels frequently  caused it to spill over. The flat terrain of the  

low countries means that the water can go for  miles before being stopped. For this reason,  

the Netherlands is a country of canals, which line  the cities and carries the water out into the sea.

While local governments had been constructing  minor dams here and there, filling in lakes and  

rivers for centuries, it wasn’t until 1916 when  the Dutch realized they needed to build...or die. 

Due to the First World War, food imports  were scarce and this was made worse by a  

large flood destroying vast swathes  of farmland. Several provinces went  

bankrupt trying to mitigate the damage and  the Netherlands was looming close to famine.

So in 1920, the Dutch parliament approved the  Zuiderzeewerken , a programme proposed by Engineer  

turned politician, Cornellis Lely. His idea was  to dam up the entrance to the Zuiderzee and put  

the inner lake to good economic use. The plan costed 200 million guilders,  

or 285 billion euros today. It constructed  the largest dam in European history,  

shifting 23 million cubic meters of soil. The  dam, called the Afsluitdyke is 32 kilometers long,  

7.25 meters above sea level, and is used as  a bridge to easily get from North Holland  

to Friesland. There’s also a  statue of Lely in the middle  

and what looks like a caravan park on one of the  islands, I don’t know for sure I can’t read Dutch

So how did they do it? While you  may think that they’d just dump  

vast amounts of dirt into the ocean until  it- wait that’s actually what they did? 

The Dutch more or less did just dump ton after  ton of dirt and rocks in the ocean, topping it  

off with soft clay and grass to keep it all in  place. This wasn’t all at once, mind you, as  

the Dutch first practiced with smaller distances  first, before building islands along the way as  

mid points and joining them up as they went. Then, pumping stations would be constructed  

to simply throw the water from  one side of the dam to the other.

Unlike every other public works project,  the dam was completed two years ahead of  

schedule on May 28th, 1932.  The Zuiderzee, now a lake,  

was renamed to the IJselmeer, after  the river IJsell that flows into it,  

and gradually, as the salt water was pumped  out and replaced by freshwater from the river,  

the lake became clean, fresh water. Most Dutch  drinking water today comes from this massive lake.

With this brand new lake of 1,800 square  kilometers, the Dutch had free reign to do  

whatever they wanted with it. Critically,  they had to make back all that money they  

spent on building the dam. Starting in  1927, the Dutch government built another dam  

around an area called the Wieringermeer , then  draining off the water to create new land.  

This made room for villages, farms, and  industry, which would grow GDP and the economy.

The next “polder” as they’re called, was  Nordoosdtpolder, which was going well until the  

Nazis arrived. While work was expected to stop,  the inquisitive Germans allowed it to continue  

as they had plans on building their own polders  in Germany and wanted to see how they worked. 

Interestingly, this project connected  the densely populated island of Urk  

to the rest of the mainland, and  the conservative island with it’s  

own distinct dialect was forced to mingle  with the rest of the Dutch population.

When the polder was completed after the  war, scientists found that a lot of the  

former coastline areas were affected by the  lack of water, and many farmers suffered as  

a result of poor crop yields. So, with that lesson learned,  

when it came to make the next polder in 1957, the  Flevoland polder, was built as an island, with a  

small river flowing past the original coastline  to preserve Helderland’s access to the sea.

Flevoland was built in two parts; North and  South. The Northern (or eastern) part was built  

first, followed by a short break, and  then continued with the Southern Half.  

Due to mass flooding and poverty  in the rural province of Zeeland,  

many farmers from the region moved up into  Flevoland to begin a new life, kickstarting the  

polder’s local economy. Furthermore, a housing  crisis in Amsterdam forced many people to move  

further away from the city, and many Dutch people  found Flevoland as the perfect place to move to.  

They named their new city “Leylstad”, after the  man who the islanders owe their homeland to.

In 1986, Flevoland was combined with  Noordoosdtpolder to create Greater Flevoland,  

and was official accepted as the 12th province of  the Netherlands. Today it is home to over 420,000  

people and has enough farmland to make the tiny  Netherlands the second largest exporter of food  

in the world, behind only the USA. Flevoland  is the largest artificial island in the world.

And then they built one more dam  across the lake...just in case.

But this isn’t the only massive ocean  infrastructure project that the Dutch  

have spent millions of guilders on. In 1953, after a horrific flood in the  

rural Zeeland province that killed over a thousand  people, the Dutch government set out on building  

the Delta Works just twenty days later. The plan  boarded up four of the largest openings to the  

estuaries in some of the largest barriers ever  conceived. Each fortification is over 40 meters  

wide and can withstand storm surges up to five  meters higher than average, which seems low but is  

about the height of your average two-story house.  Ultimately, these structures are set to survive up  

to 2,000 years given proper maintenance, and are  even designed with ecological concerns in mind;  

at the cost of millions more guilders, the Dutch  government allowed one of these barriers to have  

a gate to let in salt water, to ensure the many  plants and animals of the region aren’t disrupted.

In less than 70 years, the Dutch have almost  completely immunized themselves from flooding  

and created bountiful wealth for  their citizens in the process. 

I am not exaggerating when I say this is  one of the greatest achievements in human  

history, and the experts agree. In 1994,  the American Society of Civil Engineers  

declared this dam system to be one of the  seven engineering wonders of the modern world.

But the plans for more expansion didn’t end there.  There’s no shortage of proposed ideas for where to  

build in the future, with the next province of  Marker Wadden having begun construction in 2016.  

Due to the Ijsselmeer bay being cut off from  the ocean by the Zuiderzeewerken dam system,  

many of the local ecosystem has  suffered as a result through lack  

of regular tides and ocean salt water. By constructing many islands, shorelines,  

bays, and lagoons, ecologists hope  to foster new diverse ecosystems  

to make up for the disruption caused  by previous development works.

the Netherlands will continue to grow,  building her way into prosperity,  

as the population live, work, study, and play  in absolute safety, well below sea level.

Maybe one day the Dutch will stop  their quest to expand their shores.  

But for now, the people of  the Netherlands will continue 

making the Netherlands.