Water and the Waterfront(s), or the Missing Dimension in the Debate on Metropolitan Venice

The image of Venice as a unique, fragile and endangered city contributes to nurture an evaluation approach to its problems, resources and opportunities for socio-economic development that tends to emphasize diversity, uniqueness, and specificity. However, this approach leads to underestimating the fact that the city in the lagoon is part of a much more complex and large territorial system, both from a spatial and a functional point of view. This system is constituted by three different sub-systems of waterfronts: the historic city and the system of lagoon islands, the “internal lagoon” and the “upper Adriatic coastal” ones. The evolution of this complex coastal region has not governed properly so far: administrative fragmentation, very poor vertical and horizontal coordination and the lacking of a strategic vision regarding its evolution have resulted in an “incremental” approach to planning and management. This in turn has not contributed to address effectively the most important economic, social and environmental problems that affect Venice coastal region as a whole. Against this background, the need for establishing a metropolitan government aimed at improving the governance system has come to the fore since the early Seventies. Various hypothesis of administrative reform were proposed but they never became operational. The Delrio National Law re-proposed the theme in 2014, establishing by law the Metropolitan City of Venice. While it is correct to frame the problem of governing Venice within a metropolitan governance perspective, the first steps taken in the implementation process of the just mentioned metropolitan reform show very relevant weaknesses. In particular, water and the waterfront(s), not only as a problem to be managed but also as an asset for future development, do not receive the attention it deserves. This is a paradox, since what really characterizes Venice compared to other Italian metropolitan cities is the complexity of the relation the territorial system maintains with water and the system of waterfronts. To this perspective, the establishment of Venice Metropolitan City should be first and foremost regarded as a fundamental opportunity to rethink the system of Venetian waterfronts, both from an economic-functional point of view, and from the territorial and environmental ones. It is above all these themes, and the complex nature of their relationships, that should become the heart of the reflection on “metropolitan Venice”. Otherwise, the current debate on “metropolitan Venice” can become nothing but a “metropolitan rhetoric”, very few concerned with the distinguishing features of Venice coastal region.