Venice and Sustainability
(extracted from Nicolas Whybrow, ‘Losing Venice: Conversations in a Sinking City’,
Performance and the Global City, ed. Hopkins and Solga, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, forthcoming 2013)
The city of Venice conveys an impression of sinking. It is known to be doing so literally –
some twenty-three centimetres in the last century – with the fabric and foundations of
buildings gradually dissolving and the seasonal floods of the acqua alta on the increase,
whilst figuratively the sheer weight of tourists – estimated at 16.5 million annually – can
be said to be forcing the city down and its citizens to ‘jump ship’ in a desperate bid to
save their futures.
According to Anna Somers Cocks – a leading figure in the long-standing and highlyrespected Venice in Peril initiative that strives to ensure the city’s structural integrity is
maintained – one of the reasons for the exodus is that there is a concerted drive by the
combined powers of the city council and ‘big business’ to turn the central area of Venice
into an exclusive tourist economy. The aim is to nurture a designated, if not ‘themed’,
centro storico for the streams of visitors, as opposed to investing in residential
infrastructure and amenities for ‘living citizens’. Seventy per cent of the overall
population of Venice now lives in the Mestre area on the mainland. Central Venice, with
its six districts (sestieri), accounts for approximately twenty per cent, with the remainder
spread over the various islands of the lagoon.
In Somers Cocks’s view, the town hall’s own recent withdrawal to the mainland of Mestre
is indicative of such a tactic of gradual displacement. Identifying the six sestieri of Venice
as a ‘historical centre’ is a recent initiative by the powers that be that is indicative of the
desire to transform the city wholly into a place for tourists. The move is dependent,
perversely, on actively fostering a myth of the death of indigenous central Venice. That
is, as a place with a rapidly aging population that is unworthy of inhabitation by
generations to come. But, Somers Cocks maintains, the tourist industry is only one side
of what is actually a twin strategy for the future of the city, the other being to develop
Venice as a major global port, involving heavy investment by the Chinese, who would
develop the current industrial port at Marghera – effectively squeezed in between Mestre
and the historical centre – into a form of European commercial trade gateway. From the
city council’s point of view this is the way to ensure the necessary but highly costly
financing of a reconfigured Venetian lagoon, which ultimately is the key to continued life
in the city, not least because it promises a simultaneous exercising of control over the
notorious problem of flooding (Somers Cocks 2010).
For Venice in Peril, however, whose priority has always been to preserve the built
environment of the city, but obviously not for the sole benefit of tourists, the effect of
these plans – necessarily involving the dragging of deep navigation channels – would in
fact be to raise the overall sea level. The situation is complicated further by the so-called
Project Moses initiative – already underway – to construct seventy-nine mobile steel
barriers protecting the three entrances to the Venice lagoon. Whilst Moses would seem
to make sense as a damming structure that kicks in as and when tides threaten to
exceed usual levels, its detractors – and there is an organised and vociferous lobbying
campaign in the shape of the Permanent ‘No Moses’ Assembly – are wholly
unconvinced. Not only is it misplaced and, indeed, disingenuous, in their view, to point to
the eventual existence of Moses as a justification for undertaking to deepen navigation
channels in the lagoon, but those channels already gouged at the three lagoon
entrances to accommodate the building of the Moses dam barriers themselves are held
to be directly responsible in fact for the massive flooding that occurred in 2008 and 2012.
For the ‘No Moses’ Assembly, solutions to the flooding and sinking of Venice are rather
to be found in measures to return the lagoon to its naturally shallow state and, if need
be, to raise the city’s foundations.
Work cited
Somers Cocks, Anna (2010) ‘The Political Impotence of Contemporary Venice’, keynote
lecture delivered at the interdisciplinary The Singularity of Venice symposium, Institute
for Advanced Study, University of Warwick, UK, 25th March.