Paesaggio, urbanizzazione e innovazione attraverso le acque e le centrali. Il processo storico in Canada e nel Québec / Landscape, urbanization and innovation through water and power plants.The historical process in Canada and Quebec

The Great St. Lawrence River has historically been the axis of hydroelectric development in Canada and industrial development in Quebec. After millennia of dynamic ecological equilibrium, anthropogenic pressures associated with navigability and hydroelectric development have profoundly altered the landscape, environment, and economy over the last two hundred years. The study identies several stages of development: from the pioneering to the industrial stages of the late XIXth Century – with the first large systems of canals, dams, and power plants – to the large plants of the early decades of the XXth Century, to the intensive hydroelectric development of the 1970s and 1980s, to the plan to exploit another watershed, the La Grande River, in the north. After the second industrial age, since the end of the XXth Century, there has been the problem of protecting and regenerating the abandoned anthropized, hydroelectric and industrial, heritage, while at the same time safeguarding the environment of new exploitation.