Missing in the article is the cost of the MOSE system which projected to cost 5.5 Billion Euros!
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.
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.
Do you have any sense of what culture is?
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-...
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...
https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/indicators/global-sea-le...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...