Venice or Disneyland?

The approach to the Venetian theme, suffer the subjection of the city, no longer seen as such, but as a temporary object on failure. The distance created with its inhabitants is generated by an increase of tourism. The city has now become an open-air museum, an hours city, only populated by hungry visitors and daily users, trapped in her immobility. A place unable to offer new chances or an efficient development.

The Need for new space and services is limited to the creations of new functional appendices, completely unrelated to the city structure. At the same time, in the center, there is no clever rehabilitation of the existing spaces. In addition, no permanent solutions has been found to contrast the rise of the water level so the complete inflexibility of the city will ineluctably transform it into a dead ruin.

Based on these assumptions, our project, will propose a new idea of areas that have flexible features, open to changes.

Venice is not born from a center, but consists of a series of separate islands, like a real micro-cities, which have been connected afterwards.

We think that the answer to the future needs, is a process that goes back to the origins of the city, an island archipelago. We call it Venetian Pangea.

Thanks to a new technology, we will be able to separate each island from the earth, and make it float by substituting the pales foundations with a floating system. In this way we will be able to resist the water level rise and also to increase the distances between the existing islands.

This process will be followed by a parasitic insertion of new urban texture, that will answer all the functions and spaces need of a lively city.

The new islands will also produce energy and food, host the waste recycle systems, in this way they will help and compete, with their level of technology, the existing islands, to improve the future maintenance. The new units will be a functional complement of the old islands and guarantee an efficient level of mixitè (of uses functions people) but also add new urban areas able to change the setting of the old Venice, without compromising it’s own identity.

This strategy will increase the attraction power of Venice, thanks to the new island system there will be the space and the opportunity for new grow of uses and services, that will lead to a new increase of the population, and a clever answer to natural problems.

Future Venice will reach again the guide role it had in the past, instead of dying trying to preserve it.