Versione Italiana – Translation by Paul Rosenberg
If, ten years after the “big raid” of 2014, Venice finds itself in a swamp that recalls the memory of the previous one, a reflection about the city is necessary. It is true that one difference stands out: back then the control room was in Rome, along with a good number of protagonists, although not all of them emerged from the news, while today the direction is entirely local. It’s as if the example had generated proselytes.
Back then, MOSE imposed a large infrastructure project on the city regardless of the methods, costs and testing procedures. Today, the object is the city itself, with strictly local protagonists – in effect, the city administration itself.
Palude Venezia, published in record time by Nordest Libri, offers the reader a structured narrative of the 2014 investigation, in a narrative that connects it to the repeated emergences of malfeasance that have occurred over the following years. Stories of corruption that have featured in the news in a city that has been forced to witness progressive developments, starting with real estate, the true raw material of the administrative arbitrariness that has enveloped the city.
The “originality” of the concept of investment “facilitators” introduced by the Brugnaro Council in 2015 has resulted in informing the urban administration about the methods of private enterprise, where the organizational model and key men coincide with LB Holding S.p.A. The mayor’s company! An example of modernity, or is it rather one of a business owner’s submission of a public administration? Not to mention the addition of the constant seduction of sports that has infiltrated administrative practice to stimulate sympathy.
But is this what a city in economic and demographic decline needed? We can safely say that the cure sought was worse than the disease to be corrected.
Reality took it upon itself to reveal how the proprietary imprint has inspired the entire mandate: to impose on Venice the definitive transformation into a tourist resource, starting from the desertification of the residual residential fabric in favor of a dual exploitation. On the one hand, the historical cultural heritage as a mass attraction, on the other, the assets of the city’s buildings redirected to purely hospitality purposes. Always mass. Hotels and short-term rentals have placed the city among the world capitals of contemporary overtourism.
It is apotheosis of urban planning, negotiated according to the interlocutor on duty.
Linking the strategy for the urban economy to real estate development, rather than to the diversification of the economic base of the city, has the precise meaning of favoring what already exists rather than pursuing change.
This entrenchment of exploitation of the existing, induced by tourism and real estate speculation, has led Venice to take a far different trajectory from other cities in Veneto, which are instead pressured by the changes of the modern economy.
However, this same tourism actually feeds a significant component of the regional economy as well. In Venice, the added value of an entire sector is pursued, even at the cost of degrading a precious urban resource into a pure mass attraction. In this component we must recognize a continuing distortion of the idea of Venice by the Veneto Region: a UNESCO heritage site with an international airport and cruise port. The ideal mix of overtourism, national and international.
Hence the introduction of a narrative that proposes urban tourism as a generator of new “entrepreneurial talents”. A resource that in Venice, as elsewhere, loves to represent itself in the concept of a sort of tourist autarchy as the main character of a “nation”, exalting its own values.
Hence the easy propensity to pursue a lasting political entrenchment, induced by the apparent ease of gathering support thanks to the welding of ideologies and interests, without paying attention to the growing degradation of the city, which has been reduced to a free resource to be exploited.
What emerges from this story is therefore the question of how to insert the city into a dynamic that is different and alternative to the perpetuation of corruption and degradation, which still finds plenty of interested participants.
And at this point a singular parallel cannot be avoided. Just as the investigation conducted by the public prosecutor Carlo Nordio in 2014 led to the result of a radical political change in the city, today the same protagonist, having become Minister of Justice, is fighting to introduce into the legal system precisely those rules, wiretaps, which have allowed the development of today’s investigation. A sign of the times?
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