Venice: Tourism Graveyard

Venice was dependant on consumerism… A consumerism which polluted the world and changed the global environment… A new city… Born of the objects that brought ruin to the old… Life used to be great… We had power and food and everything we needed. And it was cheap. It was so cheap we could escape to new worlds whenever we wanted. We were decadent and vain. Everyone could have nice things. But then we went too far. We had airplanes and cars and cruise liners. We were consumed in our greed and vanity, each person wanted something bigger and better, and they got it.

But then we started to see that our actions had consequences. The sea levels rose, the ice caps melted, species started disappearing, and our home started to sink. But we kept striving to defeat the problems we had caused without changing our way of life. We kept fighting so everyone could still travel and consume and be happy.  We fought so hard to keep what we had that before we knew it, we ran out of resources. Everything we had was gone. Suddenly there was no oil and no power. There were no planes, no cars, and no boats. Tourists stopped coming, and our city, once magnificent, then transformed by tourism, was left wasted in the end. How could we recover?

We took the objects of tourism and consumption, the planes, the boats, and the cruise liners, once used by the outsiders to make a consumptive object of our home, and we used them to construct a new life for ourselves.

Now the boats support the old Venice, a new floating city, ever-expanding from the mouth of the lagoon, a new economy filling the gap left in the absence of tourism and providing Venice with a new source of food and energy. A graveyard city of dead leisure boats, exiled to the outskirts of our old town, in a troubled new world.

In a world without cheap oil, objects of consumerism form a new city on the water. Floating agriculture and fish farms support a new seaside economy based on islands of decommissioned cruise liners and vessels. As the sea levels rise, so does our new city. As the population grows, so our city sprawls across the water. The old Venice, become an object of consumerism, must be supported by other means or be left to its sad fate in a world without tourism.