The Aquaformation of Modern Venice: Powers of Nature and Water Worlding

The Alps, the sea and the people are three powers ruling over the Lagoon of Venice. They act as forces of terraformation through rivers transporting sediments, marine currents shaping the coastal lines, and societal processes of intentional and unintentional landscape modelling. The geological and historical composition of these forces created and reassembled the plains and the coastal lines of Veneto. They are made of layers of sediments and sands that the rivers have carried from the mountains. The sea exerts a complementary action on the coast with waves and alternate motions, which vary depending on different climatic regimes. Changing conditions determine its level, which are now rising as a consequence of the anthropic impact on the atmosphere in an epoch in which human society and technology have become the major geological factors of the Earth system. The distribution of sediments in the hydrological basin of the lagoon of Venice also depends on human interventions such as engineering, channeling and diversion of rivers as well as countless social and economic practices which impact on waters, their flows, the soil and the subsoil. One can derive models of environmental policies from past practices that were aimed to protect, maintain and reproduce the material conditions of life, in order to develop new forms of knowledge in the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humankind and technology have become the main drivers of geological processes. Venice and its lagoon are a paradigm of anthropic-ecological coevolution that thrived for many centuries in a site that is marked by very instable geomorphological conditions and has witnessed to indefatigable human efforts to construct on the least stable of all grounds. How did the Venetians negotiate their relationship with maritime and riverine powers? And who were the forces of stewardship of the local waterscape? How did they interact with elemental forces, in particular, the water cycle as a natural-cultural factor of terraformation?