How do you envision Venice in the future? Gianpaolo Scarante, Ateneo Veneto

“I like to imagine the future of my city linked to creativity and the intangible, to all those productive worlds that will travel on new communication networks.” Gianpaolo Scarante, President of Ateneo Veneto, for #RewritingtheFuture of Venice.

How do you envision Venice in the future?

The pandemic created by COVID-19 is an event of historic magnitude that fully transports us into the reality of the 21st century. A reality under construction, which will be different from what we knew in the last century and whose pillars we know well: economic globalization, which has made the world a great marketplace, and the equally important revolutions in transportation and communications, which have allowed humanity to move from place to place and to connect from individual to individual in an immense network as never before in its history.

From this great transformation underway we must begin to define the possible future of our beloved and extraordinary city, Venice. We must abandon past schemes and concepts, even recent ones, forget for a moment the sectoral and specific problems and set out along a difficult but necessary path: that of defining a comprehensive vision of Venice that is coherent with the epochal changes taking place in the world around us.

This is the time for courage and new, unprecedented ideas: to those who observe that today we need facts and not ideas, I note that there are no facts without ideas. And ideas can only come from a strong and aware civic community that knows how to use culture well, understood in a broad sense, to look to its own future.

I do not know the future of my city. I like to imagine it linked to creativity and the intangible, to all those productive worlds that will travel on new communication networks: I also think of a new residential presence, genuine and not fictitious, intelligently stimulated by institutions as has always happened in the past history of Venetian epidemics, and of tourism development methods consistent with the city’s fragility and shaped by new types of transportation, especially in the aviation sector, which will necessarily emerge from the current crisis. And finally I dream of a rediscovered relationship between residents and the water, a return to the daily use of rowing boats and a universe of experiments in the lagoon with non-polluting motorboats that produce no wave motion.

What can politics and citizens do for a rebirth of Venice?

There is no imaginable future for Venice that does not pass through the awareness and commitment of the community of citizens who live there. But only a community aware of its role, which manages to break free from empty and resentful polemics and looks at the present while imagining the future, can succeed in meeting the enormous challenge posed to us by the COVID-19 emergency.

All Venetians should envision the future structure of their city through the eyes of culture, sciences, letters and the arts in all their vast expressions: this has always been the most effective way to grasp the profound meaning of the reality that surrounds us. I am convinced that the Venetian community and the institutions that govern it would find great support in using this indispensable means of knowledge, which can also transform into a formidable instrument of political, economic and social planning. Venice in this regard has tremendous resources to utilize, its Universities, cultural Bodies and Institutions, La Fenice, Ateneo Veneto and many others.

Propose a specific idea in at least one of these areas: environment, residential living, work, culture, safety, tourism.

Environment, residential living, work, culture, safety, tourism are fundamental pieces that must compose the overall design of a city integrated into the propulsive flows of this century.

It is the general and comprehensive framework, precisely the design of future Venice, that must determine the specific actions to be taken in addressing individual problems. As long as we do not define this indispensable framework, we will move somewhat in the dark, without a course.

Seneca observed that “there is no favorable wind for the sailor who does not know where to go.” We must know where to go and we will find the wind.

Gianpaolo Scarante, President of Ateneo Veneto of Venice

For the project #RewritingtheFuture of Venice, Venezia da Vivere and Associazione Piazza San Marco interviewed entrepreneurs, curators, directors of cultural institutions, university rectors and professors, hoteliers, event organizers and citizens who live and work in Venice. An open debate with the citizenry to give birth to an idea of a city in balance with the environment, work and its civitas.