Venice Sustainability Foundation (VSF), has launched the “Target Scenario” project, an activity aimed at guiding the Venetian urban system towards an integrated (socio-cultural-economic-environmental) model of sustainable development. This will be done by defining and monitoring a sustainability indicator to track the evolution of the metropolitan territorial system.
The internal workshop, which took place at the Foundation’s headquarters at the Procuratie Vecchie di San Marco, was attended by representatives of 32 partners and some members of the Technical and Scientific Committee. The project has attracted interest from members, some of whom – for example, Almaviva, North Adriatic Sea Port System Authority – ports of Venice and Chioggia, Venice-Rovigo Chamber of Commerce, CAV, Edison, Ferrovie dello Stato, Iuav, The european house – Ambrosetti, Tim – have already expressed willingness to contribute to the activities.
Synthesizing what was discussed today, it emerges that the target scenario is buildable only after unraveling the two historical knots of the use of the lagoon and the role of historic Venice, now only part of a larger functional Venice involving at least sixteen municipalities.
If the rise of the mid-sea, due to climate change, looms over the lagoon, with all that this entails in terms of physical and natural preservation, the historical Venice has to reckon with the pressure of overtourism, which is in addition to the other real-or “poorly perceived” – factors of the much longer “crisis” that has read through the progressive loss of population: from more than 170 thousand inhabitants in 1951, to the less than 50 thousand today.
The sustainable development of the Venetian territory is played out today, however, at the aforementioned functional dimension of the broader daily urban system. In the historic center, in particular, residency, employment, and transportation are the “components” on which to act to rebalance tourist uses with residential uses, as well as with non-tourist productive uses. These are all phenomena that, through this scenaristics exercise, the Foundation wishes to explore at the scale of both historic Venice and functional Venice.
