The Resilience of Venice

The overall theme of this essay is the resilience of Venice. It consists of two parts presenting different and complementary aspects of this resilience. The first part, Venice and its lagoon, focuses on the physical and morphological components of this resilience. It provides a historical perspective of how the human interventions made by the Serenissima Republic changed on an unprecedented scale the configuration of the lagoon to insure the survival of the city, its trade and civilization against its numerous enemies. The human interventions of the 20th century were economically driven and were meant to make the city and its region resilient for survival in a modern, industrialized world. The challenge for the future is to undertake further, and major, interventions to insure resilience to global warming and the danger of unprecedented sea level rise. Even the physical survival of the city, its millennial structure and unique way of living are at stake. The second part, Venice and its urban fabrics, focuses on the urban aspects of resilience, how this has evolved from the past to the present and must be reinvented for the future. It provides a perspective of the physical and social fragility of the city but also of its resilient capacity which, if properly managed, can reverse the trend that the city bears.