If Venice Dies

Salvatore Settis, André Naffis-Sahely

• Publisher: New Vessel Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781939931375
• eBook ISBN: 9781939931382
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Social Sciences

"This powerful book of cultural criticism" by the renowned art historian "shines a harsh light on" a historic city's destruction in the name of profit ( The Washington Post).
 
What is Venice worth? To whom do its irreplaceable treasures belong? This eloquent book by art historian Salvatore Settis urgently poses these questions, igniting a new debate about urban stewardship and cultural patrimony at large. As Venice grows increasingly unaffordable and inhospitable to its own residents, Venetians are abandoning their hometown at an alarming rate. At last count, there was only one local for every 140 visitors.
 
As it capitulates to tourists and those who profit from them, Venice's transformation into a lifeless shell of itself has become emblematic of the future of historic cities everywhere. In this blend of history and cultural analysis, written with wide-ranging erudition and élan, Settis makes a passionate plea to secure the soul of Venice.
 
"Anyone interested in learning what is really going on in Venice should read this book." —Donna Leon, author of My Venice and Other Essays and Death at La Fenice

CHAPTER XVIII

Venice: A Thinking Machine

“Ghetto” was a Venetian word that was eventually used all over the world. It originally meant “foundry” and this was the spot where the Jews were settled in 1516 once all the activities related to the foundry were relocated to the Arsenale. In his admirable essay The Foreigner, sociologist Richard Sennett writes:

The formation of the Jewish ghetto in Renaissance Venice suggests a more complicated story … The experience of Jews in the Venetian ghetto traced an enduring way of tying culture and political rights together … segregation was made into a positive human value, as though the segregated had been kept from contagion … The sanctity of verbal contract established a connection between economic rights and the rights of free speech.

In what was then “the most international city of the Renaissance,” or better yet, the “first ‘global city’ of the modern world,” the community of the ghetto grew “to think of society as a collective body” and “forms of collective representation” that hinged on an awareness of its rights. Sennett believes that the paradox of Venice’s urban shape (a community of people who were excluded and yet nevertheless developed a strong sense of self-awareness) is the key to understanding the formation of “social practices that transcended legal formulations and the state’s hegemony” where “the sanctity of verbal contract established a connection between economic rights and the rights of free speech.” Freedom of speech tends to neatly coincide with the right to the city.

These days, a blind presentism under the yoke of the market marginalizes every kind of dissent by relegating it to new ghettos. For example, the one inhabited by the Venetians who have clung to the historic center of their city and who are defending it from the monoculture of tourism and from the fashions of a self-indulgent architecture; or the one inhabited by people both in Venice and the rest of the world who are laying claim to the wide variety of models of urban living, and the quality of the historical forma urbis. This minority status, which belongs to the segregated who have “been kept from contagion,” can actually become a source of great strength. But it will become so only if the embattled citadel of the few manages to acquire enough self-awareness, develop planning skills and forms of social solidarity, and exercise the right to free speech. The practices developed by citizens associations, claiming the right to the city (on a global scale), the awareness of the high-minded goals of the Italian Constitution (for those within Italy), the awareness of Venice’s local issues, and the widespread diffusion of information, a capacity for debate, the link between the economic rights of citizens (as individuals and as a community) and the civic capital accumulated over the course of great spans of time: these are the concepts which will make it possible to create community spaces and forge a renewed self-consciousness so that cities will have a body and a soul, both in Venice and elsewhere.

Venice is the paradigm of the historical city, but also of the modern city like Manhattan. It’s a thinking machine that allows us to ponder the very idea of the city, citizenship practices, urban life as sediments of history, as the experience of the here and now, as well as a project for a possible future. Its problems are complex in an unparalleled way due to its relationship to its surrounding environment and the huge disproportion between the supreme importance of the historical city and the government’s chronic incompetence, and finally due to the demographic, cultural, and economic decline currently afflicting it. However, to look at Venice and think only of Venice would be to miss the point entirely: the processes currently under way in that city, like the degradation of the historic city center and its loss of inhabitants, the rhetoric of a standardized modernity, and the blind pursuit of profit, can be found everywhere else on the planet. Like a critically ill patient, Venice’s wounds, more visible there than elsewhere, are proof of a widespread disease; and just like a celebrity patient, it attracts more attention than any other city in the world. Thus, whatever happens in Venice requires special scrutiny as both an indication and a laboratory of what fate has in store for the cities of the future.

Venice is the supreme example of a deeply disturbed balance between the center and the periphery, between nature and culture (between the city and the lagoon); but also of the greed and corruption that uses the city’s problems to turn a profit. The terrible flood of 1966 underlined its fragility in the face of tides and rising waters; thus, the idea of protecting it with a system of movable barriers situated at the mouths of harbors was hatched in 1976: the MOSE project. Then billed as a triumph of technology, this great public work grew old before it was even born, yet time has made only more clear the perverse relationship between the political establishment and construction companies. “It will definitely be operational by 1995,” Italy’s then Prime Minister Bettino Craxi announced in 1986. Yet by early 2016, work had still not been entirely completed. Meanwhile, politicians have brushed aside not only the doubts expressed by various experts and institutions, but also the 1998 negative findings of an official environmental impact study. Now we all know why, thanks to the recent revelations of the widespread corruption surrounding the scheme and the waste of public resources triggered by MOSE. The investigations have led to the indictment and/or implication of the former Venice mayor, Giorgio Orsoni, a former governor of the Veneto region, Giancarlo Galan, the former head of the Water Authority, as well as officials at the Court of Audit, the New Venice Consortium, the company awarded a monopoly on all work carried out on MOSE, and a host of other public officials, institutions, and businesses. In short, MOSE was:

more beneficial to the companies which were awarded monopolies to build it, and by the politicians who used it for illicit gains, than to the Venetian citizens for whom it was supposedly designed … In the meanwhile, MOSE swallowed up 6.2 billion euros worth of public funding, or a third of the 18.7 billion spent to protect the city since 1984, to which an additional 1.5 billion should be added to account for maintenance costs. The whole thing should have cost less than 2 billion … We have estimated that the cost of awarding a monopoly to build MOSE amounted to over 2 billion.

Economist Francesco Giavazzi and journalist Giorgio Barbieri, to whom we owe the above words from their impeccably written and researched 2014 book, Corruzione a norma di legge. La Lobby delle grandi opere che affonda l’Italia (Legal Corruption: How the Lobbyists of Great Public Works are Bankrupting Italy), also argue that corruption and criminal actions do not solely account for what happened: “The breaking of laws and the incidence of corruption are not mutually exclusive.” In fact, “the laws were specifically bent and broken to line the pocket of construction companies and politicians.” In “the absence of any realistic consideration of the fragility of the surrounding environment,” the pact forged between public servants and construction companies pursued a “single aim, that of maximizing the profits that could be earned from selling Venice’s name.” The cost/benefit ratio, which was favorable at first, has now been turned on its head, and the costs of the MOSE project far outweighed its advantages. The sheer scale of this corruption prompted Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s government to shut down the Water Autho...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I Forgetful Athens
• II A Venice without Venetians
• III The Invisible City
• IV Toward Chongqing
• V The Language of Skyscrapers
• VI The Forma Urbis: Aesthetic Redemption
• VII How Much Is Venice Worth?
• VIII The Paradox of Conservation, the Poetics of Reutilization
• IX Replicating Venice
• X History’s Supermarket
• XI The Truth of the Simulacrum
• XII Margins
• XIII The Right to the City
• XIV “Civic Capital” and the Right to Work
• XV Spaceships of Modernity
• XVI Venice and Manhattan
• XVII The Architect’s Ethics: Hippocrates and Vetruvius
• XVIII Venice: A Thinking Machine