Telling an environmental history of Vienna's urban waters, this paper advocates the compound study of the evolution of fluvial and urban form. It traces the structural permanence of diverse types of running waters in a period of massive urban transformation from early modern times to present. The focus on the material effects, side-effects and afterlives of socio-natural processes offers novel perspectives to the reconstruction of city development. The featured cases show that long-term studies are vital in understanding the genesis of urban water bodies and urban form as a product of socio-natural processes. They inform us about the inertia of arrangements and the unforeseen perpetuation of site-specific effects of interventions. Societal interaction with natural elements such as Vienna's waters, we conclude, reverberates in the material and immaterial realm alike.

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This chapter reflects on land competition from a water perspective. Conceptual thoughts are enriched with evidence drawn from case studies as well as other published studies about both land and water. At the same time, it lays down an analytical framework for these case studies. Starting with a discussion of the inherent relationship between land and water, we explore recent disconnects in land and water studies that make it difficult to collate empirical evidence and comprehensive understanding of how competition between water and land are inherently linked. For us the term competition refers to gaining access to or control over—either land or water—and thus simultaneously captures social and material dimensions. To address these linkages, we employ the concept of waterscapes. One way of seeing waterscapes is through the lens of the competition that occurs at specific places, in various positions and on/across various scales, thereby capturing a combined view of land and water. The notion of waterscapes is mainly used by scholars from the fields of political ecology and critical geography thinking to explore how power is wielded, and in determining when and where who or what gets how much water/land. We briefly review the different notions of competition in disconnected literature concerning land and water in order to instil a further analytical dimension: whilst the term “competition” is increasingly used in land change science to refer to the global rush for land, water scholars refer rather to the various means of water governance