increasingly more pervasive, deafening and sneaky propaganda. Is there democracy without information?
During the session of the 14th of April, the City Council approved a request for funding to the Rome National Government in order to finance research aimed at designing a sublagunar subway and restoring the Arsenale-Tessera area. You can be pro or against the sublagunar subway: the dilemma is serious because on one hand you have the appealing possibility of quick connections for residents, on the other possible risks of the “caranto”, the upspringing of new touristic hotel areas and a potential further mass tourism invasion. Many Venice citizens are puzzled and unsure. What they need is information, which should be accurate, understandable and – most of all - unbiased. But what impartiality can be guaranteed by a research funded by the very same Council that, right or wrong, has been struggling for years for the approval of the project? Where can data and figures be found to support not only arguments in favor of the project, but against it too? The Council has been working on this for years. Its employees are paid to bring the project forward. Is there someone on the other side, to support alternative points of view?
The same problem, but hundreds times bigger, has risen and still stands for the MOSE project. The Consorzio Venezia Nuova, which has been appointed for the works, has already spent tens, maybe hundreds of billions liras to prepare the project, to fight against oppositions and to put forth biased information. Has anyone tried to counter it? There is an immense disproportion between the two sides. The opposers are nor fanatics nor environment fundamentalists; they are women and men who have some serious, sound doubts and who suggest interesting alternatives. They are doing this because they are driven by the love for their city and maybe by the inescapable rational approach which things, expenses and works should follow.
Let’s look at them: who are they, how do they fight? There is “Italia Nostra” ( a n.g.o. for environment and cultural heritage): have you ever seen their offices? Two tiny and grimy rooms let by the Alpini Association. The doors do not close, the toilet is down the basement. The president is a retired engineer who works there full time, and for free. The few councilors are Venetians, professionals, teachers and so on, who are dedicating all of their free time. They don’t even have the money for one part-time employee. They fight hard just to pay their phone or electricity bills. They work without being paid, and spend their own money. They are not driven by political ambitions, they do not look for power (they would jump on the other side if they would!). They are constantly seeking help from hydraulic specialists, from world weather experts, from engineers, and once in a while they are able to find some other idealist that work for free and hold some conference.
Besides Italia Nostra there are WWF, VAS, and some other small local group (Estuario Nostro, Airis, a few more). All volunteers, all without funds, all very tiny, fight against the more-than-billionaire Consorzio colossus. They do miracles. Not to mention Pax in Aqua, an association that has been funded in the past 5 years only by the scanty subscription fees of their supporters (3 millions lira per year) to fight against water-taxi drivers, lancioni, shippers, sailors. Their counterparts have offices that work full time and with generous funds; we have to study the documents, prepare our relations, and go to countless meetings arranging figures and speeches. I’d like to add one more note.
On the 15th of April the Gazzettino publishes the complaint of a lady which lives in Riva dei Sette Martiri. The cruising ships, even the small Greek ones, make her windows shudder at their passage. The same thing has been reported by the company Bucintoro, which has its offices at the end of Dogana. It’s easy to imagine, the lady says, the damage caused to the sea bed and to the shores by the giant propellers of those ships. But, here is the swift funding for a reassuring study: the Port Authority has commissioned a research that shows how the waves caused by the big ships are virtually irrelevant. Could the lady, could we Venice citizens, pay other professionals to prepare an alternative research, to make them study the (evident) underwater effects instead of how tall are the generated waves, like the Port experts did? Obviously not. Who could pay those professionals? The lady who lives ashore? This is the state of the art. Those who have an immediate economic interest move quickly, spend money and put forth biased – when not misleading – information. Those who refuse being misinformed can count only on their good will, on the courtesy of the press (the unbiased one) and on the voluntary work of generous lawyers and experts. It’s not enough. Maybe, in a really democratic country, the institutions should give funds to those groups who spend so much of their time and professionalism for common causes. But the institutions know very well that those troublemakers would rise problems and interfere with the projects of many economic and politic lobbies. They know better than to help those who are perceived as a potential thorn in the side.
It is uncommon for a man from the South, accustomed to horizons defined by rocks and cliffs, to come to love the boundless span of a lagoon landscape. Yet Edoardo Salzano from Naples, 73 years, urban scientist, former university professor and Faculty president, has been living in Venice for almost 30 years and has grown a true fondness for the Lagoon. He is a guardian of the lagoon because he has been studying it for a long time and for a long time has been refining tools to protect it and to spread public awareness. To Venice - where he has also been councillor - to its islands, to its fauna and vegetation, to its branching outline and to the menaces that threaten it, he has dedicated one of the most popular sections of a website opened some time ago and that has become a rich repository of news, opinions and forums about city planning, landscape and urban sciences (www.eddyburg.it).
To Mr Salzano’s eyes the lagoon is precious for its salt marshes and the play of tides which makes them rise and sink. For its major islands (Murano, Burano, Torcello, San Francesco del deserto, Pellestrina, Sant’Erasmo), the Lido and the minor islands, on which Venetians built monasteries and hospitals and where cargoes and sailors were quarantined. For its lights that show gradients from pink to the darkest red at the sunset. And also because it is a laboratory. “It is the result of the smart application of human action to nature”, he explains, “an application that uses tools like time, tidal flows, lunar phases. And constant maintenance, always building different arrangements”. A representative case, that is. Very much modern.
The lagoon is not a stable element. “It is a passing phase, a moment of passage in the conflict between river waters, that bring mud, and sea waters, that tend to bring that mud away from the basin. If the river forces win, the lagoon becomes a pond; if the sea forces win, it becomes sea”. Venetians wanted to preserve the lagoon for economical reasons. It was needed to build and repair ships in quiet waters. And, with its fishes, it was a source for food.
“The Venice Republic has maintained this balance for centuries. Giovanni Astengo, great urban scientist, often mentioned a channel called “of the scomenzera”. In its name was the method: every time that some work in the lagoon was started (“scomenzar”, for “cominciare”, “to begin”) everyone would monitor its effects. The work was continued only if the consequences were not harmful; otherwise it would be started over”.
And then, the equilibrium has gone. The most obvious symptom of this disruption is the high water phenomenon, which, in certain weather conditions, floods parts of Venice’s historical center. The lagoon has shown his hostile face (the terrible flood of 1966). But high water is not an illness that the city has been carrying for centuries, it is not a natural pathology caused by the fragile coexistence of land and sea. High water is an historical illness, Salzano points out. Until 1962 – according to the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, source of an impressive deal of historical studies and territory history – high water has never been an alarming event: during the decade of 1953 the lagoon level has exceeded 110 cm only 18 times. After 1962 the floods suddenly increased: 32 in the decade until ’72, 37 in the next. In the 1993-2002 decade they soared to 53.
If this is an historical problem and does not depend from the lagoon physiology, which are the causes for high water? One is to be found in the Luigi Scano (“Venezia terre e acqua”, 1985) and Piero Bevilacqua’s (“Venezia e le acque”, 1995, new edition 1998) books. The story begins during the sixteenth century, when Cristoforo Sabbadino, water technician for the Republic, called for a series of urgent works to give back the lagoon its maximum capability, avoiding any work that could reduce its capacity: the “sovracomun” (“over city”), as the high water was then called, was not caused by the sea level rising, according to Sabbadino, but to the narrowing of the basin due to the debris left from the ingoing rivers. For this reason, in the following decades many river mouths were deflected out of the lagoon and all obstacles to the water intake and expansion were removed. Strict measures and harsh penalties were adopted against those who interred parts of the water surface to obtain land or rise banks or dared to privatize marshes to start a fishing farm.
“Venice learned to live in a vulnerable environment. It gained knowledge and know-how, which became the basis of its strength”, Salzano says. Its heroes where water technicians, fishermen and wood cutters. Upon their knowledge a managing class established, which guaranteed to the city continuity of government and richness. “The amphibian condition drove Venice to pursue natural safeguard techniques, without forcing, even when “great works” were needed: the deflection of rivers, the building, in 1744, of the Murazzi, a stone barrier which runs along the lagoon’s external border”. When, at the end of the 18th century, the autonomy of the Republic crumbled, Venice took another path. During the 19th century channels and streets were dug in the historical center, reducing the basin capacity. In the 1917, then, the industrial adventure of Porto Marghera was started, which brought lots of poisons and caused the drying of more lagoon areas. According to Scano’s figures, the lagoon basin has lost 7 thousand hectares during the last decades, while 8 thousand more have been subtracted by the fishing basins barriers: about a third of its whole surface. At the same time, the port mouths were deepened and channels were dug in order to allow ships to reach the port. Around 1965, at the Malamocco port mouth, the depth reached 57 meters, to allow oil tankers to load and unload crude from Marghera depots.
These two conditions – narrower lagoon, shallower seabed – are upsetting the past equilibrium and are quickening the flow of sea into the lagoon, Salzano explains. It is as if a faucet was completely opened to let water enter a recipient were some joker had put several stones: the water flows out and this is how Venice is submerging.
In order to contain high waters, in the late 80ies, the MoSE (Electromechanical Experimental Module) project was started. The first stone was posed by Silvio Berlusconi last may. MoSE is a mobile dam system built at the port mouths of Lido, Malamocco and Chioggia. A great concrete structure will be set upon the sea bed, upon which mobile barriers will be mounted. The barriers rise whenever the sea level exceeds 110 cm and stay up as long as the condition lasts, then they sink back.
According to the technicians of Consorzio Venezia Nuova (the pool of companies that designed the project) the use of the mobile barriers will be sporadic. They will rise, they assure, 3 to 5 times a year: this is the number of times that, in average, the sea level has exceeded 110 cm (but, the same sources say, in December 2002 alone the limit has been exceeded 15 times). No problem, they swear, for the lagoon life, that needs a constant water exchange in order to not become a lake, which would mean death; and the lagoon’s death means Venice’s death.
Salzano is a MoSE antagonist (and like him the most part of the environmentalist front: Italia Nostra of Venice has built a massive dossier). To his eyes, apart from technical matters, MoSE is a great artefact that conflicts with the history of natural maintenance that Venice can be proud of. It is an extremely expensive work, he adds: 2,300 millions euros for design and work (3,700 millions according to other sources); 9 millions euros a year for management and maintenance. Moreover, he insists, “it is not sure it will work and we cannot afford a “great work” at those prices that does not even guarantee positive results” (the MoSE examinations begin during the nineties: positive vote by an international expert committee – July ’98 – and by the Region – October ’98; negative vote – December 98 – by the Environmental Impact Evaluation Committee, canceled later by the Regional Court for a formal defect).
The dispute about MoSE has been going on for years. It divides technicians and political sides (the arguments in its favour are summarized below). The dams should start working in 2011. Until then Venice will have to live with high water anyway. “The work will heavily impact the lagoon”, adds Salzano. “Huge blocks of concrete will be laid on the sea bed, and they will sever the continuity between the lagoon and the open sea”.
A real alternative to MoSE does not exist. Nothing that is so technologically striking, anyway. The alternative calls for a different idea of Venice, it builds its reasons upon the causes for high water, with the purpose to remove or at least decrease its effects. Already during the first Massimo Cacciari administration two operations have been started, and they are continuing under Paolo Costa: the cleaning and digging of the rii (channels) now obstructed by debris and waste, in order to restore their former capacity and allow more room for water expansion; and the elevation of the city surface to a quota of 120 cm. These “cuci e scuci” interventions (stitch and unstitch), as Salzano calls them, are what Venice and its lagoon need. Salzano refers to the Great Masses Laboratory of CNR (Research National Committee) according to whom these and other “small works” (reopening of obstructed lagoon zones, seabed reshaping, rebuilding of the texture of natural channels, for instance) could reduce the high tides of an average 20-25 cm. “That would mean”, says Salzano, “that the frequency of high water would decrease to a few days for year, as it always has been since Venice is Venice”.
The defense.
The reasons for MoSE
There are several arguments in defense of MoSE. According to the technicians who are building it, during the 20th century the lagoon bed has sunk more than 23 cm relatively to the sea bed. This is due to the increase of the sea level (eustasy) and to the lowering of the land (subsidence). These are, according to the technicians, the main causes for high water. The digging of the oil tankers channel has been one of the causes for lagoon degradation, but it had no consequence on the phenomenon. It suffices to think, they add, that at the time of the 1966 flood the channel has not yet been dug.
The hypothesis that the opening of the fishing valleys and the filling of the oil tankers channel could decrease the tide levels inside the lagoon, according to the MoSE technicians, has been put under analysis. But results show that these interventions cannot have effect upon high water. Moreover, the lifting of whole land areas is not sufficient, because great doubts remain about methods and results. Such interventions, above all, would not insure a uniform lifting. They are hence unthinkable in such valuable and fragile historical centres as those of the lagoon cities.
A really effective article from Franco Giliberto, “A conference about MoSE attracts Venice sea-goers more than the beach” talks about the zinc released in the environment by the mobile barriers anodic protection system. Twelve tons per year of this metal is a very large quantity of polluting matter, if you consider, as the IRSA (Water Research Institute of CNR, Research National Committee) expert says, that this quantity would represent by itself the 50% of the maximum allowed load for the whole Venice Lagoon drainage basin, as stated by the new City Plan.
You can easily understand why much concern has been expressed about the environmental compatibility of the continuing release of such a quantity of zinc in the water environment. Especially when you consider that the expected life of MoSE, which would develop underwater for a total length of 1572 meters, is of 50 to 100 years (the promoters themselves are unsure).
Zinc released by the anodic protection panes is a polluting substance persistent in water and in sediments and capable of accumulation along the food chain, so much that EU has proposed to ban its use in slaughterhouse devices.
Especially considering the vast areas of mollusk cultivation inside the Venice Lagoon, the figure about the zinc release should lead to think about the possible damage made to one of the most relevant items in lagoon economy, the cultivation of mussels, and the increase in the long run of the already significant difficulties in controlling the mussels quality for table consumption.
The project requires a total of 79 mobile barriers: 21 by Preporti, 20 by S.Nicolò and Malamocco, 18 by Chioggia. The average surface of each barrier is about 1000 square meters. The total external surface can be estimated around 75,000 square meters of iron, upon which toxic substances should be applied in order to try and limit the growth of molluscsand the associate biocenosis.
In the SIA the fouling growth is estimated at about 30 kg/year for square meter of mobile barrier surface, with a total encrusting production whose quantity and weight is easily calculated. It should be noted that, even if the Environmental Impact Evaluation Decree was canceled, the Environmental Impact Evaluation Committee technical report was not. That report still exists and represents an articulate and documented view, which deals with every critical aspect of the work and of its building. Now that the Plan Office is about to be started, perhaps it would be helpful to begin taking into consideration that report, given that its clearly stated assessments were never opposed with precise, well-grounded and unequivocal counterarguments.
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A dreadful project, as it affects the hard layer of clay consolidated in thousands of years (“caranto”) which is the geologic base of the entire system of the Venice lagoon islands. In addition, it introduces elements that severely ruin the gentle lagoon landscape, opening the way for even further real estate speculations.
Most of all, the project is disgraceful because its ultimate objectives radically clash with Venice and its heritage traditional values: it promotes mass tourism (which is much more harmful than high waters) and a “modernism” that could have appeared seductive at the Marinetti’s times but is definitely undergoing a deep crisis nowadays. It also denies ones of the most significant and inherent Venice quality: the lengthy times needed to walk around the town: slowness as a necessary condition for taking up a contemplative attitude.
“Sublagunare”, underwater lagoon subway, tomorrow the verdict
Three tube stations and a terminal in the middle of the lagoon
ALBERTO VITUCCI
VENICE. The independent consultants have turned down the project. Now the City Council entrusts the decision to an inner committee. The future of the lagoon subway is in the hands of a pool of municipality chief executives who will meet up tomorrow to express their opinions. However, also among the “insiders” there are some doubts.
Doubts regards the geologic aspect of the project and its environmental impact (especially concerning the four stations in the lagoon), its costs, and how will it be possible to dispose the million of tons of material that should be excavated in order to create space for a tunnel long more than 5 kilometres. Doubts also concern the project cost effectiveness. The Mayor Paolo Costa is very keen on the subway project. It is one of its administration priorities regardless the opposition of many environmentalist and culture pressure groups.
The project consists of an underwater railway connection between Tessera (Venice airport) and the Arsenale, for the transport of both goods and people, with in-between stops at Murano and Fondamente Nuove, and an interchange terminal in the middle of the lagoon for trains and waterbuses.
ACTV (the City Council transport company) has presented a project-financing scheme that estimates the project cost in approximately 300 million euro. 40% of the costs should be on ACTV (120 million euro) and the rest financed by the Municipality. According to the proponents, the subway will give «new life to the north-east side of the city», such as the Arsenale area. The opponents say that not only the project presents many cultural and environmental problems, but is not even economically feasible and will only bring even more mass tourism.
Some months ago the committee of experts entrusted by the Mayor Paolo Costa («The best experts in the world », he promised) has given the thumbs down to the project. Members of the committee were: Ennio Cascetta, professor at the University of Naples, Virginio Bettini (University of Venice IUAV), Alberto Burghignoli (University of Rome La Sapienza), Dino Rizzi (University of Venice Ca’ Foscari), Pier Vettor Grimani, Silvio Pancheri and Antonio Stefanon.
The committee of experts has raised a number of objections, also on the transport level. «On this basis the inner committee will attempt to provide the City Council some proposal for project adjustment», says Roberto Scibilia, the project manager. «And on the basis of both papers we will decide whether we will accept the ACTV proposal», says Marco Corsini, City Councillor for Public Works.
By September, the Municipality will have to take a final decision, regardless the embarrassment of the environmentalist members of the City Council and that part of the DS Party (Left Democrats) who have always opposed the under-water railway and in addition to the doubts expressed by the committee of experts.
To build the under-water subway, that for the first time would make the futuristic dream true under the lagoon waters, millions cubic meters of lagoon will need to be excavated. Stations will partially be built under water, with a platform and large vent-holes remaining on the surface. The larger station will be Murano – where the project foresees a goods interchange nod. Another station will be Fondamente Nuove, where an endless and fruitless debate about the creation of a frequent waterbus or ferry connection with TesseraAirport has been going on for years.
VENICE. The underwater subway project is becoming a hurdle-race. Yesterday, the inner committee entrusted by the City Council finished its works and delivered its report to the project manager, Mr Roberto Scibilia. The doubts over the project increase and sum up with those emerged from the independent committee that rejected the project two months ago. Now Mr Scibilia will have to sum up all the remarks and hand them over to the City Council that will need to take the final decision.
The final meeting chaired by the City General Director Ms Ilaria Bramezza had its moments of tension, for instance, when the Director invited all “not to release information to the press” and “only to give indications to the proponent (ACTV) in order for the project to go forward “. «It’s not up to us to pass or reject the project », said Ms Bramezza, «it will be a political decision ».
However, in the meantime, the number of technical negative evaluations increases. While experts of transportation ask for “more in-depth analysis” about passengers estimations, economists attempt to assess the project cost effectiveness and its impact on the city socio-economic structure.
Not to mention the environmentalists’ concerns.
This is a project of huge impact, also on the emotional level. It foresees a seven kilometres long tunnel under the lagoon with the train moving under the waters and the “caranto” hard clay layer. To build it, million of cubic meters of material will need to be excavated. Where and how shall this waste material be disposed, also to comply with the national laws on land reclamation? And this is not enough. The layout of the sub-water tunnel goes through a SIC (Site of European Community Interest) and thus is protected under EU regulations that only allow its City «preservation or environmental improvement ».
Finally, we need to consider the project environmental impact, especially as regards the four stations, one of which will be a terminal in the middle of the lagoon for «waterbuses and trains interchange ». Stations will be partially underwater, but with surface access and will include vent-holes every 600 meters.
«It is complicated », confesses Mr Marco Corsini City Councillor for Public Works, «but this is an impactful project at all levels and we want to do things properly. The next step will be to examine the final report written by Mr Scibilia, and then, after the summer holidays, we will take a decision ».
Councillor Corsini and the Mayor staff intend to provide ACTV – that have proposed the project financing – indications on how to adjust the project and go forward. The Mayor Costa is very keen on this project, having included it not only within its electoral manifesto, but also among the priorities of its City Council for the next two years. The Mayor’s position causes some embarrassment in the left-green component of the City government coalition, especially among the Communist Re-foundation and Green parties, together with a good share of the Left-Democrats members of the coalition. «We have to analyse the matter more in-depth and only then we will take a decision», often say Paolo Cacciari, Communist Councillor for the Environment and Gianfranco Bettin, Green Deputy Mayor. But in the meantime the project goes on.
By the first week of September the City Council will decide whether to accept the ACTV proposal to build the subway with 120 million euro, and 180 million euro of public funding. «We will entrust a committee of experts, the best experts in the world», said Mayor Costa. But the committee has given a negative evaluation of the project, expressing doubts on economic, environmental and geologic aspects. That’s why the City Council has asked an inner committee to formulate a new assessment. «We will take a decision on the basis of both reports », informs Councillor Corsini.
Nevertheless, the storm on the underwater railway does not calm down. To be continued after the summer holidays.
On the 21st April 2003 the left wing political association April organised a crammed full meeting about “Another Venice”. The day after the meeting, I sent the chairman Paolo Peruzza these following notes.
Dear Paolo, I write you what I would have said if I had spoken during the meeting. Of course, as I write today and have not spoken yesterday, I will take into account some of what has been said.
I think that the issue treated in the meeting shows the will to build a new political project for the town. Well, no political project survives if it does not lay on a serious analysis of the current and most recent situation. This is what we have to do at first.
An approach that looks only a little beyond the contingent situation immediately leads us to understand that what is at stake today is not an evaluation of Mayor Costa’s and his Council. Should this evaluation be our only activity: (1) we would not understand the reasons why of the current crisis, (2) we would not go far in the definition of a political project.
My opinion is that - beyond the superficial differences in the style and in the cultural background (but we cannot expect all mayors to be great minds!) and perhaps in their awareness of the general interest - there is a substantial continuity in the strategy and political outlook of the various Councils that followed on one another since the early 90ies. Paolo Costa only continues (obviously with his style) the work set by Massimo Cacciari. To say it better, he places his choices in line with the policies shown by the previous city governments.
Very briefly, I would like to recall some events related to issues that I believe are crucial for this town.
A policy that makes tourism compatible with the city (and thus able to contribute to the citizens’ income without destroying the resources it is based on) requires a double-faced action.
On one hand, (as Prof. Paolo Costa wisely stated when he was not yet Mayor) a strict policy of “planned tourist rationing”. Costa outlined this policy during the discussion about the Expo, and Luigi Scano has developed it further in some of his neglected essays. Surely it is a difficult policy, because it is against the mainstream and because the City Council has very limited direct power on it (and the indirect influence is proportional to its perceived authority on the citizenship).
On the other hand, we need a scrupulous policy of monitoring the building usage destinations and their changes. This is an easier approach, already successfully implemented by previous City Councils (do you remember how Antonio Casellati and Maurizio Cecconi managed to stop the opening of any single fastfood restaurant in Venice?), because the Municipality holds quite effective measures to direct the council urban and building policy.
I only mention that the policy expressed in the above-stated two directions was extremely consistent with the message conveyed by Cacciari in his proposal for the city government, on which is candidature was launched. I am sorry to say, on the other hand, that since his early acts, the Cacciari’s Council behaviour was totally opposite. While they did not do a thing for planning of tourist accesses, they made an effort to dismantle all the measures for controlling the building usage destinations: they have withdrawn the Council resolution according to the national “Mammì” Law on the restrictions on the types of commercial activities allowed in the historical city centre and they radically changed the Urban Regulatory Plan exactly in relation with the building usage destinations. In its last phase, the Cacciari’s Council even endorsed the current Mayor’s project to build a sub-lagunar railway connecting Tessera with Murano and the Arsenale, only useful to increase the “stop-and-go” tourist flow.
Since the 70ies and up to the early 90ies, the steady policy of the centre-left political parties in Venice has been to favour public and council new house-building. Communists, socialists and Christian-democrats (not to mention smaller parties all more or less on the same line) have strictly followed their commitment of ”not a single new building for Venetian housing that is not publicly owned and made for Venetian people”. The ex Saffa, ex Trevisan, Sacca Fisola, Mazzorbo areas are all positive results of this policy. And the Mulino Stucky recovery did not start only because no agreement was found with the owners about the restrictions (I still use this dreadful word!) to apply to the residential buildings.
It would be interesting to make an analysis of the effects brought about by successive policy line: who has moved in the houses built by private operators with public funding, what are the prices for the tenants, what are the advantages for the owners? What is sure is that the real U-turn (from a 20 years old policy) happened with the “Giudecca Project” and other projects of the first Cacciari’s Council, and has never been assessed in an open discussion among political parties and in the town.
We should add that it was a policy change fully consistent with the “less State, more market” slogan, which sounded fashionable in the left wing national political arena during those years. No attention was given to the special Venetian situation that made – over the years - most market-supporters political parties, such as Republicans, Christian-democrats and Liberals promote and support the above-stated public house-building policy.
This is the field where I think the post-communist councils have behaved better, by expressing reasonable opposition to the continuous attempts to accelerate the implementation of the MoSE project at all costs.
The City Council weakness is that citizens and the national and international public have perceived the opposition to the MoSE more as a “concession” to the Green Party’s “demands” and “blackmailing”, rather than as a convinced belief that the movable gates are not proved to be effective and environmentally compatible.
The first Cacciari’s Council has born on the basis of a document that undertook as a priority commitment the objective of building the MetropolitanCity, putting in this framework the articulation of the current Venice council territory into more municipalities. The candidate Cacciari used to stress dramatically this priority.
Everything was quickly forgotten. The prestigious Venice City Council did nothing on the national and regional level, played no role in attempting a systematic coordinated action with the neighbouring councils and the province, in order to make the metropolitan city true at least in the public awareness and in the administrative decision-making. Nevertheless, it is obvious that it should have not been difficult to make the metropolitan city alive (we might say the “Greater Venice”) at least in the people’s perception before than in the institutions. It would have meant to pursue the same route that less charismatic and less successful “communicators” than the “Philosopher-Mayor” have followed in other European towns: Lyon, Marseille and London.
Opening a bracket, I wonder what does it mean today to oppose again the new referendum for dividing Mestre and Venezia? However, Costa is not the one to blame.
On Friday, Francesco Indovina said in his speech that the proposal launched by Massimo Cacciari in 1988 were theoretical and unfeasible. I only partially agree with this position: those proposals recovered the previous - let’s call it “left-wing” – policies and revitalised them by adding new shine. However, Indovina is right when he says that those proposals were top-down and had no real relationship with the town. Surely, it was not the task of a group of intellectuals to build this relationship, and we all have to keep in mind the conditions of political parties in those years. Their task was however to keep a minimum level of coherence when passing from words to deeds. This did not happen.
Starting from those years, Venice has had an approach that I would call demagogical-mercantile to the city problems. An approach aimed at winning the generic public consensus more than to implement a real concrete project in the town, as was put forward in the proposals of the Istituto Gramsci.
In the meantime, the “more market, less State” slogan started to mow down its victims. The “relationship with the private sector” (in the first place the companies with building interests) became the driver of the urban policy. Restrictions became the enemies to demolish. All the measures that would have allowed the proper regulation of the city transformations were destroyed. In order “not to say no”, Fiat and Volkswagen were allowed to display their cars in the Venetian campi and in that very square, which sacral nature was celebrated in 1988.
Sure, all this happened with some style. Today we have even lost that style. The story of the Venice “new logo” is exemplificative and astonishing at the same time. Today, on the Gazzettino, the Mayor informs us that the scope of the new and (appalling) logo is to promote Venice in the world and to conquer other markets!!! As if Venice was not – and indeed it has been from many centuries - one of the biggest myths in the world. As if, Venice needed promotion, like an ordinary northeastern small firm. And as if Venice problem was not how to be governed to be up to that myth, in order not to be swallowed by it.
This question is difficult to answer. I will attempt, on the basis of what I have heard in the meeting on Friday.
First, I believe that we need to build a project for the city. Without emphasis, by critically collecting what has been produced in the past and what it might have been elaborated more recently.
I can foresee that two lines will emerge by working in this direction.
A line, which pervaded Armando Danella’s speech, finds the resource to valorise Venice future in the special characteristics of the city and its territory. It’s a line that I have tried to put forward many times and that I still believe is the only one able to save the city inherent values by casting them in a future for all. It is a difficult and strongly innovative direction, not in terms of formulation but in its possibility of implementation. It would need a strong determination and agreement, which are extraordinary goods these days.
The other line, outlined in Indovina’s words, tends to seize the opportunities that the current type of development provides in order to re-launch the economic and social city-life. It is a reasonable direction. However, I consider it very risky because it does not take into account the fact that the current development tends to homologate Venice with the rest of the world, and thus to destroy its inherent qualities that make it a real myth, an universal value and – at the same time – a durable resource for its people.
Perhaps it would be useful if the intellectual collective group, that “April for the left” can represent in Venice, would discuss in-depth these two directions and chose one. And on it would continue to work. How? With what “political” objectives? For the time being, continuing to think and study and discuss: like the Fabian society ages ago, before the birth of a workers party in Great Britain.
The law n.171, 16 April 1973, appoints to the State “the regulation of sea levels inside the lagoon, in order to save urban centres from high water” through “works that respect the hydro geological, ecological and environmental values and by no means hinder or compromise the maintenance of the lagoon’s physical unity and continuity”. According to the same special law, on the 27th of March 1975 the Council of Ministers approved the guidelines for the Venice area local plan and defines the criteria for the lagoon water level regulation works, under the State responsibility.
The guidelines state that “the preservation of the lagoon’s hydrogeological balance and the decrease of high water inside historical centres to levels that do not hinder the functionality of the ports and the development of everyday activities must be obtained through a fixed lagoon inlet regulation system, which could later be integrated with manoeuvrable parts, if necessary, depending from tide levels, up to the complete shutting up of the lagoon inlets.”
The same guidelines state that “in technical projects the influence of the hydrodynamic regime upon the expansion of tides inside the fish farms must be considered… also the already dried up areas of the so-called third industrial zone” not yet reserved for the expansion of the commercial port structures. Also that “more works can be planned to increase the reducing effect”:
- reduction of resistance to high tides in the northeast zone of the lagoon;
- reduction of sea beds to normal levels; sea beds are now deeply eroded by the currents, in the S.Nicolò channel… also in the lagoon intakes of the Malamocco and Chioggia port-channels;
- increase, through appropriate means, of the dissipation of energy from the tidal flow along the path of the port-channels”.
According to the guidelines, the Ministry of Public Works must be authorized, as per law n.404 of the 5th of August 1975, to call for an international tender for “the execution of necessary works to preserve the Venice lagoon hydrogeological equilibrium and to decrease high water levels inside the city centre”.
The tender is called for by a Ministerial Decree on the 11th of September 1975; the deadline, already fixed for the 31st of July 1976, is delayed to the 31st of December of the same year. Six projects are presented; one of them is deemed unacceptable by the Evaluating Commission, appointed by MD the 7th of April 1977, so only 5 remain. After 13 joint meetings and several workgroup meetings, the Evaluating Commission, on the 31st March 1978, states that no project can be accepted, although all of them are deemed worth of consideration; the contract can not therefore be appointed, however appropriate initiatives are called for in order to acquire the projects and to employ their specific contributions in a general plan for Venice and its lagoon.
The 5th of February 1979 the Venice City Council unanimously approves a document for the Ministry of Public Works, where, welcoming both the conclusions and the suggestions of the Evaluating Commission, the constitution of “a Committee from the Ministry… together with the Region, the local area, the cities of Venice and Chioggia“ is called for, in order to establish an “operative project”.
The same document states that “the expected solution shall have technical and operative characteristics according to the criteria of gradualism, flexibility and reversibility”, that “the regulation of the sea-lagoon relationship shall be obtained progressively, through appropriately articulated interventions that allow the protection of historical centres from high water to become more effective while the works continue; for the works, technical results from the implementation phase in S.Nicolò di Lido and Chioggia will be used, especially with respect to hydraulic aspects” and that “however, even if the work will be delayed, the interventions’ technical programs shall foresee the possibility of reaching, in time, the protection from exceptional high water with efficient systems”.
On the 22nd of December 1979 a new high water event replays the damage and the drama of the ’66 flood. A few days later, on the 14th of January 1980, the City Council unanimously votes a resolution where, according to a governmental Law Decree of three days earlier which allowed the Ministry of Public Works to acquire the projects that entered the tender and to appoint professional tasks “for the technical solution to appropriately reduce high water in historical centres and to plan the interventions”, asks “the Parliament to converts the decree in law […], that the design phase be completed promptly and that exceptional procedures be designed even for the contracting phase”.
The document restates the contents of the 5th of February 1979 resolution and underlines the need for “a global reshaping of the lagoon”, for which it deems necessary:
“- the protection of shores through all interventions apt to refurbish them;
- the protection of estuary rivers and islands in the lagoon area;
- the constant monitoring and ensuing intervention upon the lagoon bed, in order to adjust it and to defend the city and its estuary;
- the continuous adjustment of the sea beds to the depth strictly necessary for navigation needs;”
also to set up “plans for getting back the largest part of areas and zones for the free expansion of tide”.
The 22nd and 23rd of December 1980 the Venice City Council approves (with the positive vote of PCI, PSI, PRI, PSDI, PLI, the negative vote of DC and the abstention of MSI) a resolution where the need “to proceed to a regulation of the sea-lagoon relationship” and “the absolute need to pursue a plan that reverts the degradation process in the lagoon ecosystem” are underlined. In particular, the resolution insists upon “interventions […] to protect and refurbish the shores”, upon “restoring and maintaining the sea beds”, upon measures to “stop the intake erosion, insure the vivification of all lagoon areas, protect the salt marshes”, upon “works needed to get back areas and zones for the free tidal expansion, including Valle Brenta, the dried areas of the third zone (except the reclaimed area A) and the fish farms”, upon the acceleration of “the planned conversion of the oil supply system, which shall instead be conveyed by means of oil ducts”.
On the matter of the interventions for “the regulation of the three lagoon inlets”, the document states that “they shall be experimental, gradual, reversible and flexible”, that they “shall preserve and never touch the physical and ecological unity of the lagoon”, that they shall “start from the Lido’s inlet” and “avoid works that could worsen, even temporarily, the hydrodynamic situation inside the lagoon”.
Meanwhile, on the 10th of March 1980 the Parliament converted to law the aforementioned Decree. The Ministry of Public Works acquires all projects in the tender and, on the 11th of June 1980, signs a convention with a group of important technicians: prof. Augusto Ghetti, prof. Enrico Marchi, prof. Pietro Matildi, prof. Roberto Passino and prof. Giannatonio Pezzoli, who are joined, after a further convention on the 1st of August of the same year, by prof. Jan Agema and dr. Roberto Frassetto.
These professionals officially submit their work, named “Feasibility study and principle plan” for “the protection of the Venice Lagoon from high water”, to the Ministry of Public Works on the 26th of June 1981. The project, in extreme summary, requires a series of two or more transversal fixed barriers (dams) in each of the three lagoon inlets (Lido, Malamocco and Chioggia), of which the inner ones shall have mobile and sinkable barriers capable to completely shut off the communication between sea and lagoon whenever the tide exceeds 1 / 1.10 meters above the average sea level [1].
The Ministry of Public Works, once received the “Feasibility study and principle plan”, forwards it to the Committee for the Safeguard of Venice, to the High Council for Public Works and to the City of Venice, with the intent of hearing the opinion of the local authorities.
The Committee for the Safeguard of Venice examines the paper during the sessions of the 23rd of September 1981 and the 13th of January 1982, and in the second occasion puts forth a positive principle evaluation.
The City of Venice, with the Province of Venice and the LagoonCities and Venice Hinterland, promotes the public exhibition of the Study’s essential items. At first, on the 24th of October 1981, in the Napoleon Wing of S. Mark’s Square, then in the former church of S.Leonardo in Cannaregio, finally in the Pellestrina island. It also publishes a great number of copies of a book containing its text and graphic works and promotes public debates.
More than 30 thousand people visit the exhibit. Remarkable is also the large participation to the public discussions promoted by the City and by other cultural and political organizations.
The City of Venice receives no less than thirteen articulated and motivated opinions, and several more observations and evaluations.
The debate at the Venice City Council began the 8th of February 1982 with a speech by the Mayor Mario Rigo and a long briefing by the vice-mayor Gianni Pellicani and ends the 22/23th of February 1982 with the unanimous vote for a paper where the “overall plan” is judged consistent with the City guidelines and of the “special law” but “only in respect to interventions to protect the lagoon urban centres from high water”.
This is because the “overall plan”:
“- proves the technical and managerial feasibility of works that can save urban centres from floods, wholly obeying the requirement to respect the lagoon physical and ecological unity;
- assures to contain the influence upon water pollution of the decrease of flows between sea and lagoon, if the planned antipollution programs are carried on;
- outlines solutions that can negligibly influence the full efficiency of the fundamental and inalienable functionality of the lagoon as a port, even in the perspective of a relevant increase in traffic, as planned and expected by the local authorities and the local plan”.
Stating again that “the reduction of high water is just a part of a more general intervention in order to hydrogeologically rebalance the lagoon, to restore the balance between the different parts in the ecosystem, to stop and reverse the degradation of the lagoon basin”, the Venice City Council invites the Government, consequently, “to define, together with the local authorities, a comprehensive plan/program… in order to achieve the aforementioned purposes and the decrease of tide levels”.
In that perspective, moreover, it states that:
“ – the completion of the whole lagoon antipollution plan is absolutely necessary and it must be carried on before completion of the works that will regulate the sea-lagoon relationship;
- all works necessary to the preservation, the restoration and the refurbishing of the shores, the protection of the estuary and island shores inside the lagoon, the reduction of erosion phenomena especially in the Malamocco basin, the monitoring of the sea beds and their constant keeping to levels necessary to navigation needs and at the same time compatible with the lagoon, islands and estuary protection, are to be carried on immediately, possibly through a rearrangement of the rural piers;
- the design and subsequent implementation of all works necessary to restore the free tide expansion areas can not be delayed;
- the already planned conversion of the oil supply system can not be delayed”.
Meanwhile, on the 14th of December 1981, the City Council of Chioggia approved (with positive vote by DC, PSI, PSDI and the abstention of PCI) a document where it is stated that it is “impossible to express… a positive opinion… without precise indications” in regard to “the sand debris transportation and removal system”, the “implementation of antipollution politics in the lagoon basin”, the “protection of the accessibility of the lagoon inlets”, the “possibility of interventions to protect the centres of Chioggia and Sottomarina from ordinary high water”.
During the session of the 27th may of 1982, The High Council for Public Works deems the overall plan “worth of approval” but expresses a remarkable deal of criticisms, underlining the need to carry on further research before starting the implementation phase.
Meanwhile, even the City Council of Venice (session of the 22/23th february 1982) wishes that the works should be contracted through a direct licence (“ concessione”), in order to start quickly. A consortium of companies is started off; its name is “Venezia Nuova”. The 18th of December 1982 a licensing contract is stipulated between the Venice Magistrate of Waters (on account of the Ministry of Public Works) and the Consortium. The Consortium would carry on part of the studies, research and experiments required by the Ministry of Public Works and it would build the central segment of the fixed barrier by the Lido lagoon inlet.
On the 15th of July 1983 the Corte dei Conti (State Bill Revisers’ Court) denies authorization to proceed, stating that, according to current laws, “building licence can be appointed by private contracts … only when explicitly allowed by a special law”, while “contracting shall happen after some kind of tender” and “the licence shall not involve the works management” but “only its building”.
Only after the Court intervention the story becomes known and new arguments are started. Bruno Visentini, president of PRI, writes: “ten years after the special law for Venice, its historical centre safeguard problems … are still unsolved. A consortium of companies is about to be appointed … with the task of carrying on the necessary works: beginning, how it seems, with an appointment for more studies and projects… and continuing with the appointment to carry on the works… But if we were to proceed in this way, relevant errors of method would be done and decisional competences would inadmissibly be eluded.
The appointment can not be about choices regarding the lagoon’s future… Such choices pertain to the politic apparatus… It seems, finally, that further studies, researches and experiments… and technical and scientific monitoring… cannot be appointed to the same contractor that carries on the works; they should be appointed to a different body, with great authority and capable to stand in open dialectic with the licensee.”
Animated discussions occur inside the IX Commission of the Deputies Chamber, which is examining several projects about Venice from DC, PCI and PRI. The 27th of October 1983, finally, the Commission unanimously votes a resolution that, although eluding the problem of the appointment of studies, experiments and implementation, requires that the Government “presents within 3 months a global report about the state of interventions for the protection of Venice” and “define a unitary and global plan for interventions, after hearing the local authorities”.
The Minister of Public Works, Franco Nicolazzi, does not heed the resolution and much less the criticisms towards the attempted use of the “ concessione” (private licencing contract). On the 24th of February 1984, in fact, a second general contract is signed between the Venice Magistrate of Waters and Consorzio Venezia Nuova. The contract is adjusted in order to bypass the formal objections of Corte dei Conti, but it is not different from the first in its contents and less so in its “philosophy”; this time the decree is registered, on the 10th of March 1984.
But, as we will see, arguments about the contract and its implications are not going to stop and they will stir the debate about the new special law for the Venice area, which is being discussed in the Parliament.
Few years after they were promulgated, the “special law” 171/1973 and the related DPR 791/1973 (about the conservative restoration of lagoon historical centres) already show their limits, their weaknesses, the cultural obsolescence of their inspiration. Their influence upon the upgrade of the urban historical texture has been scarce, almost void relatively to the purpose – albeit considered the most culturally and politically qualifying – of “managing” a relevant recovery of the urban heritage, insuring the success of both its “formal” and “social” outcome.
[…]
On the 27th of December 1983, approving the 1984 financial law, the Parliament allocates 200 billion liras for “new interventions for the protection of Venice”, with the commitment of two more allocations, for the same amount, to be allotted in the financial laws for 1985 and 1986.
On the last days of January 1984 the Venice city councillors submit to the Ministry of Public Works a “pre-law” draft, signed by all, containing proposals for the works to be done and the procedures for the interventions more closely involving the city responsibility.
On the 6th of February 1984 the Republican group of the Chamber presents its own law project, not substantially different from the City Council draft but more keen to specify the purposes and to set the procedures for the interventions under the State responsibility, i.e. the ones regarding the hydrogeological setup of the lagoon basin.
The 14th of June 1984 the Ministry of Public Works submits to the government its own draft for a law project, which is not approved as it is deemed unacceptable by the ministries of the Republican Party, who are also backed by those of the Liberal Party.
The 5th of July 1984 the PCI submits its own proposal which, in regard to the lagoon interventions, follows the republican one, while it is similar to the ministry draft under other aspects.
Meanwhile the Venice City Council votes several other documents, sometimes unitarily, sometimes not, condemning the delays of State and Parliament and criticizing the ministry draft, but never directly facing the real reason for the deadlock. This is on account of its attitude (formally correct, but surely functional to avoid the explosion of internal contradictions inside the PCI-PSI-PRI coalition which governs the city) to not express, as City Council, opinions about the ways the new law will regulate the decisional and managerial processes of works such as those inside the lagoon, under the State responsibility. While, on the contrary, the greatest arguments are really about the last contents of the new law (or, equivalently, about whether the new law should have those contents or not).
The multiplication of law proposals, in fact, and also the inability of the government to design its own proposal, are not results of “byzantinisms” or quarrels between factions. It is, at the contrary, the lining up of the political forces – certainly in an uncommon way respect to usual schemes – exclusively about some crucial “contents” both in terms of merit and method.
The law proposals, in fact, do not differ substantially on the matter of the conservative restoration of lagoon historical centres, or the water pollution elimination, or the intended funding for the Venetian productive activities; the contrasts are there, but they could probably be solved. Regarding the purposes of the lagoon interventions and the regulation of their implementation, however, the line-ups are visibly coherent with one or the other of the two “logics” that have been facing themselves for some time.
The first “logic” considers the lagoon a common water basin, essentially driven by “mechanical” laws, and it tries to eliminate the phenomenon of periodic floods of lagoon inhabited centres – the famous “high water” – through “engineering” interventions upon the communication inlets between sea and water: basically through the installation of tidal flow mobile regulation devices by those inlets.
The second “logic” considers the lagoon a complex and fragile ecosystem, driven by laws that, with a little stretch, are more akin to “cybernetics”; the preservation and global restoration of its basic characteristics of transition zone between sea and land should happen through a coordinated set of diffused works that could, among other things, reduce the tide levels and then preserve the urban centres from the more common medium-low “high water”, reducing so the purpose of the mobile barriers to stopping the tides of exceptional height and frequency.
PRI, PCI and PLI want to follow this second “logic”, and it is probably appropriate to remember that this is the logic of the former “special law for Venice” of 1973, which defines the guidelines for the governmental Venetian local plan of 1975, wholly developed and expressed by the local plan voted in 1980, by the observations and integrations submitted by the City of Venice in 1982 and by several documents voted, sometimes unanimously, by the same City during the last years.
PRI and PCI law proposals wholly and articulately state the purposes of the set of works to be carried out in the lagoon; moreover, they ask for the definition of a “global and unitary plan” (to be adopted by the Government and to be voted by the Parliament) for these interventions and for related necessary studies, research and experiments. In particular, they ask that the correlations between the planned interventions are underlined and their logical and chronological order is defined; and that that order shall be bonding in respect to every public funding for such interventions, with the exception of some categories of works: the merely “conservative” or “upholding” works , and/or urgent interventions.
The Ministry of Public Works, and DC, PSI and PSDI, seem to refer to the first “logic”. This is understood from the generic and non-specific way in which the Ministry’s draft states the purposes of the works in the lagoon, and from the absence of any programmatic frame for the interventions.
Both PRI and PCI proposals state, moreover, that the works can be contracted “in concessione” (with a private licensing contract), but at the same time ask:
- that the “concessione” shall be based upon a law which defines its main characteristics;
- that the “concessione” shall refer and conform to the unitary and global intervention plan;
- that the public authorities shall verify, monitor and eventually change the work project;
- that, finally, studies, research and experiments (except those strictly related to the executive details of the single works) and technical-scientific monitoring shall be appointed to body different from the “licensee” and that they shall get resources, tools and authority in order to fully and efficiently carry their work, even in contrast with the “licensee”.
The Ministry of Public Works’ draft completely ignores this set of problems. It is well known that the Ministry wants to appoint to the very same group of private companies, Consorzio Venezia Nuova Consortium, for both the works implementation (in the limited frame that we mentioned) and the relative studies, research, experiments and technical-scientific monitoring. Basically, the Ministry wants to appoint the same body for both the execution of the works and their evaluation and monitoring, before and after.
On the 3rd of October 1984 the IX Committee of the Deputy’s Chamber, after animated quarrels and frenetic mediations, unanimously approves a document which, approved by the relevant Committee in the Senate, becomes Law n.798, 29th November 1984.
The new law states that the works in the lagoon shall be targeted “to rebalance the lagoon, to stop and reverse the lagoon basin degradation process, to eliminate its causes, to reduce tidal levels inside the lagoon, to protect the islands historical centres through local interventions, and to shelter the lagoon urban centres from exceptional high tides also by means of works by the lagoon inlets, with mobile barriers to control tides”.
The logic under the law proposals from PRI and PCI, backed by PLI too, is therefore completely accepted and punctually described. In order to state how the works should be carried on, a Committee is to be created, composed by the Prime Minister, relevant ministers and local authorities’ representatives. The Committee shall “define guidelines, coordinate and monitor” but it is not explicitly stated that it shall define “the unitary and global plan for interventions” that was described in the law proposals and repeatedly asked for.
It is also stated that the works can be appointed by “concessione”, but its details are not defined. It is only stated that the Committee shall evaluate the contracts, leaving to a decree from the Ministry of Public Works (on the basis of conventions decided by the Committee) the task to define “the modalities and the forms of control upon the licensed works”. Finally, above all, not only it is not stated that studies, research and experiments shall be appointed to body other than the “licensee”, but it is explicitly mentioned that the concessione is “comprehensive”, both for works and for studies and projects.
Today’s clash between MoSE proponents and opposers has its roots - as Luigi Scano outlines in these pages written in 1985 – very far in the past. They dwell inside the two “logics” that Scano refers to: the one that sees the lagoon as “a common water basin basically driven by mechanical laws”, the other that sees the lagoon “as a compound and fragile ecosystem, driven by laws that, with a little stretch, are more akin to cybernetics, and is interested in preserving and restoring its basic characteristic of transition zone between sea and land through a set of coordinated and diffused works”.
While the opinions are the same, there are however two significant differences:
1) The “mechanicistic” logic was then backed, among local forces, almost exclusively by the PSI Craxi’s followers, represented by Gianni De Michelis, and by a minority group of DC members, while at the national level it was also backed by the powerful group of PSDI social-democrats. And, of course, by lobbies of the building industry and by the powerful engineering lobby. Now the same logic is backed by theNational government right-wing coalition and by a significant part of the Venice center-left council, starting with its most important representative: the City Mayor.
2) At that time, the “systemic” logic received great backing by the national public opinion, mostly in environmentalist and cultural sectors, also thanks also to the presence of relevant personalities like Bruno Visentini and Gianni Pellicani. The deep change in the political and cultural framework (Berlusconi does not represent just himself nor just the right-wing ideology) and the huge power of information control used by Consorzio Venezia Nuova (an information monopolist which gets public funding) played a significant role in weakening those who oppose the MoSE logic.
To gain consensus in a problem so complex such as the Lagoon’s balance, the monopoly of information is a winning weapon.
[1]For a wider discussion of essential items of the “Feasibility study and principle plan” and related happenings please refer to: Comune di Venezia, La salvaguardia fisica della laguna, (City of Venice, The Physical Safeguard of the Lagoon, by Luigi Scano, Francesco Gostoli and Caterina Barovier, Marsilio Editori, Venice, 1983.
1) I have started it off, and I have helped on it until its conclusion, but the Urban Regulatory Plan – “PRG” of Venice City Centre was finalised and presented at the City Council by Councillor Stefano Boato, and finally adopted being Councillor to Urban Planning Vittorio Salvagno.
2) The first act that opened the way to the "liberalization" was the Mayor Cacciari City Council revocation of the municipal regulation that, in compliance with a national law (n. 15/1987) allowed the Council to avoid the invasion of fast food and junk shops, even more effectively than the Urban Regulatory Plan.
3) In line with the above-mentioned act, the PRG has been significantly modified in order to allow easier changes in the usage destination (Mayor Cacciari, Councillor D’Agostino).
4) Erbani only mentions another very severe risk that threatens the town: the MoSE project, the underwater gates to be built at the “Bocche di Porto”. But this is another issue which is widely treated in this same directory.
5) Mayor Costa, interviewed by Erbani, connects the problems of Venice with the lack of employment. Yet he knows very well that for each person that leaves Venice to work, ten persons come. From decades, the number of employment vacancies is higher than the available work force, as recalled last 15th of April by Mario Infelise in a letter written to Repubblica (published at the bottom)
A blow with a pick, a small door, an inner staircase, a small opening that becomes a window to better enjoy the Grand Canal view, a bathroom, kitchen facilities, Ikea furniture. If nobody stops them, Venice will take another step, perhaps its final step to turn – from the frail wonderful city that has always been - into a tourist park. A sort of Yellowstone with Palazzo Ducale, the Guggenheim gallery, the Frari and San Zaccaria churches, and very few houses where some stubborn Venetians will resist in confinement. The majority will be hotels and bed and breakfast.
We all knew that every year Venice is besieged by 12 million tourists, who in summer – driven by a sticky south-eastern wind – can even become 100.000 a day, and 120.000 a day for the Carnival. Now is the lagoon city town that changes its essence to end up looking like a Club Méditerranée. They are turning into hotels the 700’s Ruzzini Palace in Campo Santa Maria Formosa, the Barocci Palace, the ancient Palace da Mosto on the Grand Canal (with a I° century porch), Sagredo Palace, Giovannelli Palace and Genovese Palace at the Salute. Sant’Angelo Palace on the Grand Canal has already become a hotel. The luxury Hotel Monaco has incorporated the Ridotto theatre and the San Marco cinema, and, like the Monaco, many other hotels acquire neighbouring buildings and expand. A hotel will be built in the Arsenale, another inside the Molino Stucky and others in the islands of San Clemente, Poveglia and Sacca Sessola.
Nevertheless, not only the highly prestigious buildings are run over by the hotel typhoon (and actually some of them would fall short should they not be financially supported by the tour operators holdings): in addition, hundreds of ordinary flats are restored and fractioned to become holiday apartments to rent out for a week or for a weekend. The phenomenon is concentrated in the last two, three years. Roughly starting with year 2000 Jubilee and the enforcement of a specific plan for the historical city centre that allow easy change of usage destination for a building (also for shops and stores). According to the Provincial Tourist Board, holiday apartments and bed & breakfast are now 455. Three years ago, they were 59. An impressive number, behind which there is an enormous amount of hidden structures that easily double the number of the accommodation available.
Lots of rumours can be heard along the calli. Every Venetian knows one. The story of the butcher of Cannaregio, for instance, who has closed down his shop and has bought three small buildings, has made out 10 small apartments, promoted them on an Internet site and now earns between 1000 and 1200 euro per week for each studio-flat.
Anyway, what’s the problem? One of the problems is pointed out by Mario Piana, professor of restoration at the University of Venice Iuav. Venetian building is not like that in the other towns in the world, says Piana. «In Venice they used to build with wood until the end of the XII century. Starting from that moment masonry appeared, but a firm principle remained: house-building was done seeking the utmost lightness in order to load as little as possible the lagoon soil ». In particular, explains Piana, the walls have always been made very thin, between 25 and 40 centimetres, maximum 60 for house building. The storeys, designed to absorb every kind of deformation, ensured the building stability. The floors, thus called “Venetian floors” were laid on the storeys as a single block, without junctions.
Piana claims: «Altering these structures is extremely dangerous ». What do you mean? «Every hotel room and each studio flat need a bathroom. Do you realise what does it mean to lay new further piping inside such thin walls and inside such structured floors? In the long run, the static balance of the buildings will be seriously affected ». It looks like a real nightmare scenario. Piana concludes: «At least the hotels that extend to the neighbouring buildings work in the daylight, under the vigilance of the “Sopraintendenza” (the Cultural Heritage Superintendence body). Nevertheless, only high quality restorations respect the typical traditional Venetian housing structure, with the central hall that goes from the back to the rear of the flat and opens on all the rooms. But what I wonder is: who controls those home owners that make three studio flats out a single one? »
The transformation of Venice is subtle and does not provoke the polemic discussions that follow the MoSE (works to build the movable, underwater gates at the opening mouths of the Venetian lagoon will start next may) and the underwater subway projects. Everybody in Venice looks at the cranes overwhelming the new bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava and the new La Fenice theatre, by Aldo Rossi, while works are just about to start for a new Terminal designed by Frank O. Gehry and new spaces for the GuggenheimMuseum designed by Vittorio Gregotti at the Punta della Dogana. However, in the meantime, the fate of Venice seems to sign in a constellation where the only shining star is tourism.
Residents in the historical centre are now down to 64.000, (the whole Municipality counts 300.000 inhabitants, including mainland) and in ten years time could fall to a mere 55.000. The population drop does not seem to stop in a town that becomes increasingly older (one Venetian on four is more than 65 years old): 700 people less only in 2001, 600 in 2002, 140 between December 2002 and January 2003.
City centre inhabitants used to be 164.000 in 1951. Perhaps they were very many, but now they are too few, and many fear that the drop is so significant that hospitals and schools will be cut too. In order to stay alive (as architects and city planners all over the world prescribe) a city historical centre must have many different functions (residential houses, offices, services, employment, culture and leisure time activities): Venice is losing all of them. Not only the residents leave the town, but also banks, insurance companies and public offices leave the city centre. To find out a food shop, a chemist or a tailor, a Venetian must step aside hundreds of pizzerias, souvenir shops of fake Murano glass, small fans and masks and Taiwan-made lace - all with robbery-like prices. Tourism now represents the mainstream Venice lifestyle: 40% of Venetians already work in bars, restaurants, hotels, tour operators. And now it looks like the town does not longer have the strength to defy, leaving even its own houses to the occasional guests.
Giuliano Zanon is the Director of Coses, the most reliable centre of studies on the Venetian society. His figures, elaborated on a Nomisma research, are impressive. Downtown a house, and not one overlooking the Grand Canal, can cost up to 5.500 euro for square meter. In four years, prices have grown up 40%, the fastest growth rate in Italy. A shop can cost between 10 and 14.000 euro per square meter. «Nowadays tourism-related activities have surmounted residential areas and any other activities in the city centre », says Zanon.
The bed & breakfast wave, Zanon confirms, has come about as soon as the Urban Regulatory Plan has been changed, in 1996. Up to that date, there were very strict limitations. In order to change the destination from residential to other use, a house needed to be at least 200 square mt. for floor. That was the rule of the plan made by Edgarda Feletti and Luigi Scano (Councillor to Urban Planning was Edoardo Salzano). Thus, only few buildings were converted into other activities. In '96 that limit was decreased to 120 sq.mt.: the new Councillor Roberto D’Agostino(Mayor Cacciari), and his consultant Leonardo Benevolo said that the rule was too severe. And this was not enough. They also changed the interpretation criteria: the 120 sq. mt. did not have to refer to each floor but could also be calculated on multiple storeys. The outcome was that all Venice flats could be allowed to become rooms for rent.
Now they are trying to contain this trend. The City Council led by Mayor Paolo Costa has prepared a resolution that is now passing over one desk to another without achieving a final say. The Mayor is convinced that what is happening is worrying but he also says: «Against the inhabitants exodus we cannot do much. And this is not the main problem affecting the historical centre ». And what is it then? «There are not enough employment opportunities that can reduce the people migration».
Some says that Venice could even live of its mere upholding and maintenance... «It’s an activity that we do carry out. You only need to go for a stroll in town. We are digging channels to lower the shoals and to allow the channelling of waters against flooding. At the same time we are rising the flooring level still to fight the high tides. We are restoring the embankments and the sewerage system. But it’s not enough to make Venice survive ». What’s missing then? «We have to convince Italian and foreign companies to come and invest in Venice, immaterial goods producers, such as research and media enterprises. This would be the ideal destination for many of our historical buildings, starting from the Arsenale».
In the meantime, Venice gets ready for the Easter big crowd (average price 1000-1500 euro for five days stay in a 40-59 sq. mt studio-flat). In San Stae everything was ready to open a new kindergarten. There is only one now in the area and is overcrowded. «We had the money, we had found a suitable place and the staff. We had detailed a project and started the works. The Education Councillor was backing us up but the Office for Private Buildings did not allow us to change the usage destination of a 180 sq. mt. flat », claims the promoter, Ms Roberta Lazzari, of Macramè cooperative. «If we had asked a permit to open a bed & breakfast we would have had it without problems ».
The fire of the Mulino Stucky turned into a huge hotel, dramatically brings back the problem of Venice, which Francesco Erbani has well described in its article last Sunday. The town is abandoned to a pirate-like tourism expansion. The conversion of ordinary residential flats into bed & breakfast and rooms for rent – often moonlighting jobs – has a devastating impact on the urban quality. It is false to say that this is determined by the lack of employment opportunities. Over 20.000 people come to Venice daily to work or study and many of them would be more than happy to move in.
The overhanging danger in Venice is not only the high tides, but also this kind of tourism that expels out of town the inhabitants and all other social activities.
And let’s not have the illusion that this is only a Venetian problem. Is Florence doing better? Only few years of this sort of development have already been enough for a significant damage our urban civilization.
Dear Piero, I was very disappointed with the round table in which you presented your book, yesterday evening. I followed it carefully, also because I could dedicate it all my time and attention, having been immobilised by neuritis at my ankle. I have found the presentation full of hurried and misleading statements rather than interesting observations. Your excellent book would have deserved better.
Please, let me express my opinion about a core point of the cultural proposal that emerges from your writings (the “modernity” that we should pursue nowadays), and about two issues that move from this point and are crucial for the future of Venice: the movable barriers at the port mouths and the Venetian transport system (alias, the MoSE and the Sublagunar railway).
This is an issue to investigate from a distance. I will take up again some of the questions I have illustrated last year in a debate about “a lagoon park”.
I will start from an observation. During the capitalistic-bourgeoisie ages, the development of the productive forces has resulted in huge benefits for the human race, but has also provoked enormous damages. Among these, the break of the balanced relationship between production and environment that had marked millenniums of our history. In the last centuries, the environment has been denied in its very personality and reduced to a merely manipulable and marketable object. Technology has cancelled and replaced nature. No longer has technology guided nature, according to its laws and rhythms, nor has it shaped the environment by building human-friendly landscape. And the economy has no longer considered the environment as a set of resources to use parsimoniously. Economy has started to treat the natural environment as a mine to exploit, with no saving and with no care for the future.
Nowadays, the damages of this approach stand out in all their clarity. To carry on with this senseless attitude will mean the disappearance of the humankind and the premature death of our planet. Many agree that we need to invert the current trend. Many are convinced that we need to identify, experiment and carry out a new system of production that does not harm the environment and uses its remaining resources to increase its qualities. I am strongly convinced that this is our mission and the mission of the next generations – if we do not want the sun to go down upon an immense desert.
How can we pursue this tremendous venture? Where should we start? We would be real wasters (and we would have not understood a thing from what you told us in your book “Natura e Storia”) if we would not think to make the most of the resources we have. Under this point of view, it is clear to me that Venice and its lagoon represent a precious resource. An example that can teach us how can human labour and culture wisely relate with the forces of nature.
Here in Venice, the humankind (and your book “Venezia e le acque” says it extremely well) has been able to direct the environment evolution, day after day and season after season, to improve the site resources. In order that both the natural resources and the site could serve, as better and as lastingly as possible, the people’s survival and the society development.
Venetians have developed a great number of different subjects in order to live together with the surrounding nature, by transforming the environment without destroying it and by respecting nature without embalming it. Among them the building technologies and sciences: materials, city planning, architecture; fishery, aquaculture and the conservation of deriving food, ship design and building; world exploration and mapping; government administration and intermediation among people .
I see Venice as an oasis where there is the wisdom that the contemporary world has forgotten. An oasis that can be considered in two ways.
It can be seen as an anachronistic residual of a past that does no longer hold lessons to teach, and thus should be eliminated either, like Marinetti would have done, by replacing it with a new reality made of concrete and steel, or by crystallising it as a sterile museum-city like an “Indian reservation”. These are two complementary ways to homologate Venice to the current models of consumption and production, which rule everywhere, although they are undergoing a deep crisis.
Otherwise, Venice can be considered and governed as a school of modernity: like a place that allows the experimentation of an innovative system of production, compared to what we would like to leave behind our shoulders, for the benefit of the whole world,. A truly “sustainable” system of production that does not destroy the natural resources and that draws from what the Serenissima Republic left us two centuries ago, a production model that is able to utilise the scientific innovations not only in an “industrial” prospective.
Was not this the inspiration behind the cultural – before than political – project that made Massimo Cacciari become Mayor of Venice for the first time, in 1992?
Let’s now talk about the two specific issues I mentioned before: Mose and Sublagunar. If I am worried about the Mose is not because it is a “big work”. It does not worry me for the opposite reasons why Mr De Michelis likes it. I am not ideologically opposite in principle to big works. Even the Laterza Publishing House has printed one of my books in the “Big Works” series and I was not at all displeased. Venice has seen other important “big works” worth its survival: the massive river diversion, on which Sabbadino and Cornaro quarrelled furiously, the Istria stone Murazzi designed by Zendrini the mathematician and made in the 700s.
However, this “big work”, the MoSE project, has three worrying specificities:
(a) it implies the permanent artificialization of the only three connections left between the sea and the lagoon (in fact, it is not only made, as Francesco Indovina claims, by a series of underwater large cases, but also and irreversibly, by three huge concrete offshore bars that connect the two shores of each mouth, permanently interrupting the natural continuity between the lagoon and the sea bed);
(b) unlike the operations made centuries ago, this is designed with technologies and materials that have nothing to do with those old “natural” ones previously used. I don’t want to say that this is a crucial reason, but it should lead to more caution;
(c) I believe that its benefits are not proportionate to its – really extraordinary – costs. If the MoSE’s incredibly high costs represent an atout for Indovina (who sees in this some great job opportunities) and for De Michelis (who gets excited envisaging fervid enterprise activities), I think, having understood here in the Lagoon the importance of a parsimonious exploitation of the resources, that this is an issue that deserves a second thought.
To make myself clearer, if the Mose is really necessary to save the lagoon and Venice, Chioggia, Murano, Burano and the other historical pearls, then pas de problèmes! Even if the expenditure is high. But the point is that I don’t think it has been demonstrated at all that this operation is really needed. This is, in my opinion, the critical reason why not to join the crowded group of the project supporters in the name of the safeguard of Venice, and, most of all, in the name of the ideological excitement for the “magnificent and progressive destinies” of modernity and late-industrial technology.
As you know, the studies that support the Mose project (the environmental impact study edited by Consorzio Venezia Nuova) outline three scenarios, correspondent to three correspondent hypothesises of the water level raising. In relation with each scenario, the study calculates how many times the movable barriers will close in one year, in order to avoid that the high waters invade Venice (and other centres).
The third scenario, which corresponds to the most probable assumption, is the one that Enzo Tiezzi has suggested when, to cut it short with the doubtful questions, he arrogantly asserted: “It’s no longer time to get the water with the buckets and the sponges; it’s time to make a move and close the taps”. In this scenario, for the joint effect of the current phenomena and the increase of the ocean level due to the raise of the terrestrial temperature, the barriers will need to shut almost 400 times per year (according to the forecast of the Tides Council Office that has been studying the phenomenon for many years)!
In short, the lagoon would always be shut down. The water exchange will be hindered, as well as all port activities. If we have to believe this scenario is reliable, and is not only a dialectic truncheon to threaten during the polemic debates and in the lobby activity, there will be only two operational possibilities left. We either close the lagoon for good, by shutting the three mouths down with solid concrete dams, thus reducing the lagoon to a pond that could only be purified artificially, and which natural environment will be radically modified; or we place the “Tiezzi taps” on the Otranto channel (or at the Gibraltar Strait). In fact, if the level of the Adriatic Sea (and perhaps of the whole Mediterranean) will raise so much to exceed more than one meter the average sea level for 400 times a year, then we should ask ourselves what measures should be taken in Split, Ancona, Brindisi, and in all the many others small and large towns on the Adriatic Sea (and perhaps on the Mediterranean).
However, one thing is for sure: if the scenario envisaged in relation with the “greenhouse effect” will really come true to the forecasted extend, the MoSE applied at the lagoon doors will not work at all.
The other two scenarios are less dramatic. They will mean the need to close the barriers 10 to 70 times per year. But here it’s worthwhile to stop and think about the well-known question of the “wide-spread measures” (re-opening of the occluded parts of the lagoon, restructuring of the lagoon beds and restoration of the natural channel, cautious raising of the street pavements where the level is lower than 120 cm on the average sea level, cleaning of the city channels, etc.). The Environmental Impact Study made by Consorzio Venezia Nuova provides figures and simulations that show that these measures could only have a very marginal effect. The Committee made of the five “worldwide famous” experts takes the Consorzio’s figures for good, and thus accepts the Consorzio’s conclusions. But the CNR (National Research Council) Laboratory for Large Masses shows that the reduction in the “peaks” would cause significant reductions to the high waters, to the extend of 20-25 cm. This would
mean that, should those measures be implemented, the frequency of high waters would reduce to few days per year: as it has always been, since Venice is Venice.
The daily cohabitation with the waters and the systematic need for upholding and small adjustments are part of the city culture, more than the extraordinary “big works”, aren’t they? You will surely agree with this, dear Piero, won’t you?
It is not by chance, in fact, that those who support the absolute necessity of the MoSE are the same whose words clearly express one remote thought: Venice should become like any other city in the world.
My hypothesis is the opposite: all the other cities of the world should become like Venice, and learn how people here have lived for centuries with the natural events, by governing them without eliminating them and, on the contrary, using them to enrich their life experience.
Finally, let’s look at things under the point of view of the working class employment. Sure, the amazing investments for the MoSE (according to the current Consorzio’s estimations they will amount in 4.440 billion liras) will generate a strong flow of enterprises, materials and products, and workers, mostly from outside the Venetian area. This is certainly not bad. But I don’t believe that we have given enough thought to the great and long-lasting contribution that a wide-spread action of “ordinary and extraordinary upholding” measures in the city and its lagoon could give to the local firms and the local work force.
The same upholding that you, Piero, mentioned, in your conclusive speech at the round table, as the great lesson provided by the SerenissimaRepublic that we should recuperate today. The same upholding that today, due to the fact that no daily maintenance of the city has been regularly carried out during the last two centuries, would require (if considered as the crucial point for a new development) the start of a huge recovery of the lagoon environment, through the reshaping of its beds and restoration of its shores, the reconstruction of its defences and ecosystem, restoration and upholding of the urban pavement and decorations and the extraordinary maintenance of the channels.
As far as regards the chitchat about the amazing “Great, Modern and Progressive DOING”, about the Mose and about the Sublagunar railway, does not this chitchat distract the attention of the intellectual energies and resources, as well as of the public opinion, and the trade unions, from the huge amount of measures spread on the entire lagoon area that are already planned and partially designed?
I was astonished by the fact that the former national Minister for the Public Works, Mr Paolo Costa, recuperated the project for “a sublagunar metropolitan line”, and that this has been positively welcomed by the new Venice Trade Union Secretary. That project to me has always looked as an enormous nonsense.
First, I am one of the many that are convinced that Venice is slaughtered by “cash&carry” tourism. As a metropolitan railway is justified only with mass people flows, the Sublagunar will only have the effect of conveying further streams of visitors in S. Mark’s Square and the other sites, places already made impossible to live by the current amount of tourists. When we used to think in-depth about things, and we did not allow ourselves to be seduced by the progress ideology, we were persuaded that tourism had to be “governed”, and to this scope it was useful and necessary to stop the people flows at terminals in the mainland (Fusina and Tronchetto), and to make them arrive in Venice with waterbuses.
If we want to facilitate the access to the Venice Office Centers, then the solution has been pointed out from many years, right from the Venice Trade Unions. It would be enough to reorganise the current railway network in the mainland and utilise the massive railway line of Ponte della Libertà to take commuters to Santa Lucia and Marittima: places from, as we all know, everybody can easily and pleasantly reach any part of the city, either walking or using very civil waterbuses.
A final remark on this. The time and the routes of the city pathways are an inherent part of the Venice quality and of its terribly contemporary lesson. Venice is beautiful also because it allows you to live the time of its pathways, walking or on a waterbus, as spaces in which you can relax and feel enriched by enjoying looking at city, its houses, its places, its people. The time of Venice pathways is not, like in other contemporary metropolis, a pain which duration must be reduced, but a pleasure during the day, experienced as a natural and joyful break. Do we want to eliminate this too?
Yours
Edoardo Salzano
Thanks for your long and beautiful letter: it’s almost an essay! Yesterday night, back home quite tired, I took from my bag the usual pile of paper, ( letters, faxes, files to read, etc.) and I was just about to put them aside to look at them in better times... But then I recalled that there must have been your letter there, I looked for it and I found it. I started reading it and, as if by magic, concentration and lucidity came back. After a couple of pages I found myself smiling, for a curious and weird sensation that I had never felt before: my agreement with what I was reading was so complete that I had the impression that I had written that letter myself.
Thus, I totally agree with you, on all the issues you have treated and there is no point for me to recap what you have already said so well. I too would have liked that some issues of my book would have been treated more in-depth. But, you know, I am now prepared to accept that a presentation is to make publicity: and nowadays is already enough to have a public debate, even broadcasted on the radio.
On the modernity of Venice, on the very right things you say, I only want to add a further observation. Also many of our intellectual friends, people often generously dedicated in keeping alive the feeble flame of the social commitment, are often trapped in the spell of “progressism”. They have not yet realised what is the deep trend of our times, which drags everything towards the abyss of the functional exemplification. Yet, they would only need to open their eyes and see the world as it is, to understand the unequivocal signs that it sends us. But it is this very understanding that should warmly recommend us to see in Venice a treasure of differences to preserve for its everlasting “otherness”. We don’t yet understand that the inestimable richness of our times is just everything that runs away to the logical mechanisms of our times... all the exceptions, everything that cannot be industrially produced and does not obey to rigid rational criteria: I was on the point to say all that “does not work”. The silence in the campi and calli, going walking (or in waterbus as you say) with the slow rhythm of an ancient and now lost relation between citizens and the city space. This should not represent a trouble of living in Venice, but one of the matchless privileges the city provides in this contemporary world. Sure, there is the problem of letting Venice live. We need a great and original political project to make the town alive in a different way from the other cities. But first there is a huge cultural problem: the revaluation of the Venice modernity, inherent in its being stranger to the mass capitalistic society, which is now dying anyway.
And I go on shortly on the MOSE. I feel somehow uncomfortable to talk about this issue, because I don’t have on it the knowledge that allows me to comment on previous events. I am very sensitive to all your reasonable objections. However, my main concern is very briefly the following. I fear that the increasingly more frequent high waters – beside the impending threat of extreme events like the 1966 flood- could make living in Venice progressively more difficult, so much to determine its final decline. Not to mention the fact that a city frequently flooded, eventually hostile to its people daily life, would constitute an unquestionable argument against our theory of a modernity of Venice based on its rebuffing the capitalistic “comforts”. We would end up shouting in a desert.
You add, among your other considerations, that a general increase of the sea level due to the global phenomena would make the MOSE useless. It’s what I have already written in my book. However, I believe that we need to be more flexible and accept many possibilities when we aim our sight towards the future. Are we really sure that when the signs of the ocean raising will become alarming, the planet population will continue to accept the current senseless system of production? Don’t you think that we underestimate the possibility of a change due to the pressures made by intellectual groups, environmentalists, citizens, etc.
Sure, it’s not granted it will happen. Let’s leave this progressive sort of optimism to the silly ones and to those who want to continue looking at their business. But we have to believe that it may happen. On what, otherwise, do we base the reasons of our fight?
Warm regards
from your Piero.
P.S. Regarding “big works”: have you heard my telephone message about how beautiful did I found your “big work” about urbanism published by Laterza?