Networks and Trust in Venice: the Port as Social Agent

Abstract Globalisation, geo-economic changes, and the privatisation of port organisation have opened a window of fresh opportunities for the commercial sector of the port of Venice since the mid-1990s. These opportunities have been grasped and territorialised thanks to the formation and the consolidation of a new Port Business Community (PBC). Essential to this process was the establishement and consolidation of new cooperative networks both among the most dynamic port actors and between the port community and the Municipality of Venice. Through cooperation new social alliances best able to mobilise new resources were set up and consolidated. Moreover, this process helped to promote and sustain trust and social legitimacy with respect to the potential role of the port of Venice in the evolution of Venice economic and social fabric. For the port sector, cooperation (both within the port environment and with the city as regards planning) was more and more regarded as the basic condition for improving the performance in an increasingly complex market and for favouring acceptability and social legitimacy in the Venice context. For the city, to promote cooperation with the emerging PBC was an essential step both for starting up processes of revitalization at Porto Marghera and for starting the waterfront redevelopment process at abandoned port areas. At the same time what was of basic importance was the elaboration and promotion of a vision which saw, again, in the commercial port a fundamental player for the future development of Venice, in a period of progressive decline of Porto Marghera’s large industries. The Venice case confirms the importance of cooperation and of the establishement of new social networks in sustaining processes of territorial transformation. At the same time, however, the Venice experience shows how cooperation, and therefore the mobilisation of resources, is not necessarily the product of something that already exists in the ‘local’; rather it highlights how cooperation and the mobilisation of resources can be the result of a process of territorial innovation in which the role of external factors and of discontinuity, with respect to the past evolution, is essential. Moreover, the Venice experience confirms the importance of ‘narratives’: by promoting a new ‘vision’ of future development and by recording and communicating, in a consistent framework, facts, material and social results, they can favour the creation of new trust and new social legitimisation.