Venice Planning Topographies: Towards a Comprehensive Space for Tourism
Luca Velo
Department of Architecture and Arts, IUAV University of Architecture in Venice, Italy
Abstract: In Venice and in the whole Venetian Region, tourism has become one of the first economic powers over the last decades. During the years of crisis, tourism was virtually the only economic source which seemed not to show any recession set against the manufacturing industries and industrial production in general. Although the Venice Region has a long touristic vocation related not only to its historic heritage but also including winter sports, as well as coastal (sea and lake) and health (springs or thermal baths) resorts, some conditions have changed. Many changes have occurred since the 70s, considered the period of extreme expansion of spaces, in terms of buildings and infrastructures for tourism in the Region by expansions of large parts of villages or local settlements with the direct consequence of a huge amount of land use. Venice today faces peculiar conditions where the struggle for inhabitants to keep their residential and daily lives comes up against the huge power of private investments oriented exclusively towards tourism. According to recent surveys there is no longer accommodation for longterm affordable renting throughout the island. Many local associations have striven, through provocative actions and initiatives, in order to defend a specific right to live the city. Following this general framework, the paper aims at documenting how the city has changed in terms of physical space, modification in use of public spaces and the lack of administrative local policies to defend local inhabitants in the city. Meanwhile, over the last five years some studies and researches, especially in the IUAV University in Venice, have stressed the accent to reuse and recycle spaces for
living or collective purposes, though local administration and public opinion generally shows itself to be unresponsive to these suggestions. Is there the need to display a reflection much more related to space and its specific role in a peculiar city like Venice? Especially during a new crisis due to the pandemic situation? This kind of work is oriented to read this phenomenon via a spatial lens through maps, re-drawings and interpretation of data coming from different sources. In order to show how the impact of tourism is apparently affecting the daily and ordinary spaces in the city of Venice, the study focuses on potential spatial planning initiatives towards a possible, hopefully alternative, scenario for the future.
Key words: mass tourism, mapping, Venice, urban space
