Venice test brings up floodgates for first time
bbc.com
bbc.com
I argue it's not the case. Over-bureaucracy (ironically, to fight "corruption", like the useless "anti-corruption authority") is one of the major reasons things get done at glacial paces (and the same reason sometimes people use "other ways" to speed up things). The replacement of Ponte Morandi in Genova is a prime example of this fact: to rebuild it lots of "rules" had to be suspended.
Data in 2018's report "Tempi di realizzazione delle opere pubbliche" [0] seems to contradict this. The 7th post in this [1] twitter thread summarizes it.
[0] https://www.agenziacoesione.gov.it/news_istituzionali/tempi-... [1] https://twitter.com/CarloStagnaro/status/1280401691997876227
Edit: added post number.
> Seconda domanda: da cosa dipendono allora le lungaggini, se non dall’affidamento? La risposta è esattamente quella che state pensando: dalla burocrazia.
"Second question: what is the cause of slowness, if not when a work is actually given [to whoever got the contract]? The answer is exactly what you're thinking about: bureaucracy."
The next few tweets bring data which supports this.
Do you have any data to support this argument?
https://www.edilportale.com/news/2020/02/normativa/corruzion...
In the past the legendary motorway Salerno-Reggio Calabria took decades to complete and was a major attraction for public investment and mafia suppliers.
These days, the government is thinking about building a bridge between Calabria and Sicily. This project has been talked about for decades, it's completely useless (I won't go in detail here, but the road network in southern Italy is in a really bad state) and with the upcoming European Union injection of money, it will become the next public work that the mafia will put their hands onto. Looking at the history, it's clear why this project became suddenly important.
Looking at the Corruption Perception Index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index), Italy ranks between Saudi Arabia and Rwanda. In Press Freedom, Italy ranks between Botswana and Senegal.
additional source: I'm Italian.
> In recent experience, I remember the World Expo Milan fair in 2015
I don't think the trials have been finished yet.
At this point, there is neither indication (nor a guilt sentence, either).
Every year Italian public administrations award thousands of contracts, only a small fraction of which are actually the result of corruption based on judicial data.
A different problem is the perception of the level of corruption, which in Italy is very high no matter the data. I'm actually not surprised that you are Italian indeed.
A solid belief that everyone else is committing serious crimes is essential to rationalize your own small frauds. I have little doubt that Italians are so eager to point the finger at corruption because it helps them come to terms with their constant disregard of rules.
(I speak as an Italian)
(Note: I'm Greek)
Edit: Actually, I live in the UK. People over here know how to do corruption the right way and our, Mediterrannean, pathetic excuses for corrupt politicians should really study their ways. In the UK, it's not that there is no corruption, it's that everybody who is anybody is buddy-buddies with everyone else who is anybody (say, they went to the same college, i.e. Eton), so they don't call it corruption, just "doing business". For a recent example, look up the recent non-scandal about giving an 840k quid contract to the buddy-buddies of Mike and Domz:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/10/firm-with-l...
So let's not all take too big a dump on us poor, corrupt Southern Europeans, because we may have invented the art (in the ancient times of old) of handing public monies to our cronies but Western Europeans turned it into a science (in modern times and not so modern times).
The "corruption perception index" is based on this sort of thing: people say "Italy is the most corrupt place in the world!" and have no data or knowledge to compare.
>
The business environment is improving, but strengthening Italy’s public administration, justice system and anti-corruption framework remains a challenge. The digitisation of public services is progressing. Further efforts are needed to improve public employment, especially at management level. Weak administrative capacity is diminishing the public administration’s ability to invest and carry out policy or enforcement tasks that affect businesses such as market surveillance. In this regard, a comprehensive strategy to strengthen it is missing. Inefficiencies in public procurement also remain often unaddressed. Despite recent improvements, the length of civil trials remains among the highest in the EU. Recent reforms are starting to bear fruit and an enabling law to streamline the civil procedure is under discussion. However, to reduce trial length, there is still ample room to ensure more efficient management of cases and limit unfounded appeals. The anti-corruption framework was strengthened recently, also through the anti-corruption law of January 2019. However, it needs to be completed. Indeed, no regulation sanctions conflict of interest for elected public officials, embezzlement in the private sector remains only partly criminalised, and provisions against lobbying do not apply to members of government and parliament. Moreover, the low efficiency of criminal justice in appeals continues preventing prosecuting corruption effectively. A reform of the criminal procedure and appeal system is still pending.
Search for corruption or justice in this document: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15845438...
The article contained almost more references about corruption and environmental protests than technical info. I don’t know how other places work, but in Europe, big infrastructure projects are almost always mired with corruption.
The article read like: “wow, these dumb and greasy Italians finally managed to do something impressive. But they are still corrupt. And their project is not eco friendly. Hah, those Italians...” And I’m not even Italian, but I can smell that snobbism from a mile.
Ah, also there was corruption. In Venice.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180703190745.h... (“Rising sea levels could cost the world $14 trillion a year by 2100”)
For comparison, the EU’s budget is around €150B/year.
https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...
https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/indicators/global-sea-le...
Alarming media stories that twist the facts about rising sea levels are dangerous because they scare people unnecessarily and push policymakers toward excessively expensive measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The real solution is to lift the world’s poorest out of poverty and protect them with simple infrastructure."
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rising-sea-leve...
Let's protect all the Venices of the world, but treat them as what they are: museums or theme parks, not places people actually live and work. Venice already has the boat rides and is talking about a gate price (a tourist day fee). Next will come the wrist bands. Then the mascots and cotton candy.
How many of the tourists on those giant cruise ships actually get off the boat? Do many of them that just look at Venice from their cabins? That might make Venice the world's largest public art exhibition.
If we were talking about a building that is actively maintained and played a significant role in events, I can understand the desire to preserve it. Yet, more often than not, the buildings are decayed due to neglect and very few people actually care about the building until it is about to be torn down. Worse yet, the structure has frequently been altered to the point where it is no longer of architectural interest. So yes, this is a concern from the perspective of the greater needs of cities. Which is why I was puzzled by the opposition due to the environmental impact.
On the other hand, I suspect that these attitudes stem from something other than a desire for preservation. It may sound noble to talk about the greater needs of cities, yet some mighty nasty projects have been undertaken in the name of redevelopment. For some people this brings up extreme cases of forced removal, serving the needs of special interests, or simply creating inhumane environments.
Meanwhile the government has no issue allowing the destruction of Aboriginal heritage and archeological sites (as well as old growth native forests) to make way for roads and mines.
You should visit San Francisco haha.
One interpretation is that guilt plays a factor here.
In my opinion something vaguely similar happens here, in globalized times everyone is citizen of bigger and bigger places and feel progressively weaker connections to local culture. To this you can add that this local culture is under constant pressure from new external actors (I imagine that more than a few people tried to build new hotels in the middle of Venice).
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191122042205/https://slatestar...
And while it's true that few ("normal") people still live in Venice, it doesn't follow that what remains is as worthless as Disneyland. Nobody lives in the Louvre, and it's still a culturally significant place!
The idea that buildings in Venice are layered, with newer ones built on top of older ones when they succumbed to the water seems to be mythological.
Venice isn't going to do cotton candy. Picnicking on the streets will get you fined, and in some cases tourists have been thrown off the island for such uncultured behaviour.
Why is disneyland worthless? It employs lots of people. It makes kids happy. It is also old enough, by north american standards, that its iconic buildings could probably qualify for some sort of heritage status.
>> tourists have been thrown off the island for such uncultured behaviour.
Such things happen at Disneyland every day.
I suspect that given a longer historical perspective, Disneyland will be seen as something other than "culturally vacuous". Much of our evaluation of "high" vs "low" culture is due to cultural snobbery. Low culture becomes more valued as time passes and the distinctions fade.
We nearly lost centuries of folk music because it wasn't considered worth preserving and only the efforts of a few weirdos like Bartok, Vaughan Williams and Alan Lomax who acted at just the the right moment saved some knowledge of it for future generations.
And it's not "folk" vs "commercial" either Commercial Art from the turn of the century (and before and after) is immensely interesting and of great aesthetic value to my eyes.
On the other hand, things that are worth preserving tend to survive longer thanks to the effort put in preserving them. In other words, while age and cultural value correlate well, it might be cultural value to cause longer survival times and not the other way around.
It's also a good thing to make a distinction between cultural value in an anthropological sense (any relic is an historically important testimony of the past, but that doesn't make it good: a milk carton from today could be invaluable to a historian from 2000 years in the future) and actual craftsmanship and beauty.
I wonder if this is presupposing the point I'm trying to argue against. I'm arguing that contemporary tastes are often not a good measure of quality due to the biases introduced by being too close. I'm not sure where you've engaged with that point other than by merely stating a contrary position?
It is pure invention. (Source: architect living near Venice).
Probably originated from Hollywood movies, where Venice features underground tombs, sewers and tunnels; and palaces can be sunk like ships hit by a torpedo.
Do you have any sense of what culture is?
I know a lot of people born and raised in Venice who still live and work there. So labelling Venice as a theme park or similar is really not adequate.
Proof of that is the post Covid-19 lockdown situation. Venice without all the international tourist has proven to be a lively and nice city to live in, based on what I've been told by people from there.
Also, if we were to label Venice as a museum, then we would need to label half of Italy's old town centers as such.
It gets pretty annoying that when you go to places in the city center where you aren't known to the business owners, everyone assumes you are a tourist.
You guys do realize that Venice brings in half of that in tourism dollars per year, right?
And I suspect the overall impact on the Italian tourist economy of having Venice around is even higher.
So even setting aside any relocation costs, just the tourist economy (and there is more to the Venetian economy) will pay for the entire project in 2 years.
>Protesters from the No Mose group tried to disrupt the test but police stopped them.
The article doesn't elaborate on their motives at all but does anyone know what they were protesting? The cost? The corrouption? Surely not the function of the system itself...
To me it makes as much sense as protesting against 5G but anyway
The MOSE project was heavily criticized from the beginning for a variety of reasons, ranging from the basic physics principles on which it works, to the engineering details, to the effects on the lagoon's ecosystem. It is generally claimed that there are cheaper "other methods" to achieve the goal of protecting the city from high tides, but it's not clear which they would be, how effective they would be, and what would be their environmental and visual impact.
In any case, a protest from the group opposing the construction of the MOSE on the day of its general test is absolutely ridiculous. These people cannot possibly be asking for anything concrete, they just hope that something will go wrong so they'll be able to say that they've been right all the time, Venice be screwed.
It is said that Venetians swear a lot, but perhaps those who got this impression were simply overhearing conversations about this system.