Scenarios for Marghera between Challenges and Paradoxes

The Veneto region and metropolitan area of Venice is northeast Italy’s gateway to foreign trade. In the face of major challenges posed by the recent structural transformations of the global economy, it is attempting to define a new functional model that will allow it to relaunch its social dimension and consolidate its cultural capital while at the same time reorienting its spatial organization to guarantee the greater comfort and wellbeing of the inhabitants. The beginning of the twentieth century saw an important discussion around the future of Venice. As industrial modernization overturned traditional priorities, competing ideas emerged of the city and of the role played by the territory in the processes of social and economic development. Today, with the exhaustion of the industrial motor of Porto Marghera, there is a need to define a new economic basis and to reorganize the metropolitan area of Venice so that it is better able to accommodate changing needs and functions, additional activities, flows, and people. In periods of profound transformation, research by design offers an important means of outlining new trajectories of development in production processes, social practices, and spatial relations. In exploring possible future scenarios, our own research started from the specific territorial, environmental, economic, and social structures of metropolitan Venice, remaining rooted in reality and activating all the possibilities that derive from these conditions.