Book — Overview
Coherence, is Water21’s forthcoming book by Julian Jones, exploring why flooding, drought and pollution are not separate crises, but symptoms of the same underlying systems failure. Drawing on more than forty years of engineering, landscape design and field experience, the book examines how water really moves through soils, rivers and communities—and how modern infrastructure has drifted away from those natural processes. Rather than asking how we control water, Coherence asks a different question: how do we design landscapes that work with it?
Through practical projects, engineering insight and systems thinking, the book presents a framework for restoring healthy landscapes, resilient communities and a more coherent relationship with water.
Join the Coherence Community
Stay close to the signal and join a growing community exploring a different way of understanding landscapes. As Coherence develops, we’ll occasionally share essays, reflections from the field, advance chapters and news of the book’s publication.
Explore a selection of essays below.
Selected Essays, a collection of chapters and essays exploring the ideas behind the book.
+ An Infrastructure of Trust
How water governance shapes the resilience of landscapes.
+ Flooding is a Landscape Design Problem
Why flood management must move beyond defence toward system design.
+ The Sewage Crisis is a Failure of System Design
Why wastewater problems reflect deeper failures in how landscapes are planned.
The environmental conversation is full of urgency.
But urgency without clarity creates noise.
This book exposes the signal.
When we change how we see water, we change how we design systems.
