Opinion | We are doing everything we can to keep Venice above water. But should we want that?

Since it was completed two years ago, the huge network of dams protecting the city of Venice has operated forty-nine times. The Electromechanical Experimental Module (MOSE) has finally brought relief to the city from the ongoing flooding. But even though the cobblestones of Piazza San Marco are now drier, the MOSE is not a permanent solution: the water is still rising. Venice didn’t save itself – just bought some time.

What should we do with that time? Instead of coming up with new technical solutions to hold back the water, we should be having an honest conversation about whether that city in there is still worth saving—and whether Venice is even a city anymore. If Venice can find no purpose other than the ‘flash tourism’ that has drowned it from within, the best way to save the city may be to sink it.

Not to detract from Venice’s inspiring battle against the waves. Conceived more than fifty years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MOSE has emerged as a masterpiece after years of mismanagement and delays. During a storm surge, the city raises the steel gates by filling them with compressed air; they float to the surface and block the incoming water. But in fifty or a hundred years, when sea levels have risen further and floods become more frequent, this towering invention will be conquered.

Venice has lost its civitas; collapsed around its own tourist revenues

There are other solutions, such as lifting the entire city by pumping salt water under it. On an ecological scale, a Dutch model would work, but in order to achieve a real reduction in the flood risk, the Venice lagoon would have to be completely closed off. Finally, we could build a hybrid structure of concrete-and-coral reefs, similar to what was envisioned in New York after Hurricane Sandy.

These are all promising ideas, until another, more uncomfortable question emerges from the water: What exactly are we trying to save? Which Venice are we so eager to protect?

City without people

Venice has been a painful symbol of the costs of world tourism for decades. In Coriolanus Shakespeare asks: “Is the city different from the people?” Nowadays Venice has virtually no population to speak of. There are millions of tourists, but fewer than 50,000 residents – 25 percent of the historic peak. The ancient Romans divided cities into the city (the physical body, buildings, walls) and civitas (the social body or the community). The former cannot exist without the latter. And Venice is his civitas lost; the city has collapsed around its own tourist revenues. Every day it becomes less of a city and more of an amusement park.

In the 1970s, many ideas were put forward for the Venetian civitas to breathe new life into. One of the most interesting: transforming Venice into a first-class university and reviving the City of Bridges as an Italian ‘Oxbridge’. But that proposal is buried under two meters of solid gold: the lucrative tourist revenues. Unfortunately, Venice has never been able to say no to the cruise ships with their loads of money or the transition from permanent residence to short-term Airbnb. The city is governed by commercial landlords and absentee administrators who mainly live in the city of Mestre on the mainland.

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A fallen statue of a saint in the church of HH Nicholas and Barbara after the flooding of the Geul in 2021.” class=”dmt-article-suggestion__image” src=”https://images.nrc.nl/Ge7rnOe7TeXWWpMFC0wf7Lysa7o=/160×96/smart/filters:no_upscale()/s3/static.nrc.nl/bvhw/files/2023/09/data105850186-4d176b.jpg”/>

What does it really mean to save a city with canals from rising water? Amsterdam offers an educational example with its canals. I have personally had the pleasure of working with Ger Baron, the city’s visionary Chief Technology Officer, who wants to turn Amsterdam into a ‘living lab’ of smart city technologies. Baron worked with my lab at MIT to redesign the canals—not with seawalls, but with self-propelled boats that can serve as bridges, taxis, and waste collectors. That collaboration was less expensive and far-reaching than the MOSE, but that is how cities always develop best: not through mighty walls or monolithic industries, but through thousands of small experiments, refined by continuous feedback from citizens.

Underwater amusement park

Such a spirit is difficult to find in Venice, a city that will ultimately be nothing but a collection of buildings. If we use the civitas cannot rebuild, we must then city don’t let it sink? And focus our time and energy on something else, on living cities?

Even if we let it sink beneath the waves, I can already hear the business community declaring the underwater amusement park the ultimate destination of world tourism, where you can book an expensive dive to the foundations of a lost Atlantis. Landlords can even exploit their flooded property by offering it as a backdrop for future Hollywood blockbusters – underwater thrillers, hero and disaster films – happily surfing the tsunami of climate change.

Perhaps drowning is the best thing Venice can do for the world – the hollowed-out city could say one more thing. The city would become a powerful symbol of the ecological and social challenges that we can no longer deny. One last time, the beacon of the Renaissance could serve as a warning to us all: climate change and inequality have engulfed our history, and without intervention they will do the same to our future.

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