How do you envision Venice in the future? Claudio Iannelli, E-Concept

Venice as a Carbon Neutral, Zero Waste and Plastic Free city to #RewriteTheFuture of Venice, an inclusive future in which we can all participate. The vision of Claudio Iannelli, E-Concept.

The #RewriteTheFuture of Venice project curated by Venezia da Vivere and Associazione Piazza San Marco is an opportunity to discover the ideas and proposals of people who love Venice.

We interviewed Claudio Iannelli, founder of an innovative start-up in the green economy sector called E-Concept.

How do you envision Venice in the future?

Venice is a think tank. A place dedicated to encounters and exchange. Once primarily of goods, today of ideas and projects that give continuity to its most evident characteristic: immanent beauty. In such a context, human transcendence triumphs and the realm of ideas, if well supported by favorable policies, can allow this city to experience a magnificent renaissance.

All the elements are present to transform Venice into a place where the combination of tradition and innovation can find its highest expression. A permanent laboratory of research and human experimentation in which to create alchemies between knowledge and wisdom, art and performance, nature and technology.

I believe in the necessity of nurturing and fostering a sensitive and attentive citizenry, endowed with sufficient economic means and poetic capacities to protect this city but above all to enhance its prerogatives. Certainly, every prospect must be founded on the concept of environmental sustainability, in balance with the delicate ecosystem in which it is situated, already ravaged by various forms of devastation.

It is precisely to redeem it that it becomes necessary for Venice to become a place of attraction for those who want to live in an intelligent, entertaining, stimulating and ecologically healthy way.

Today Venice is at the center of the world, its beauty is seriously threatened by ongoing climate change and by the burden imposed by excessive hit-and-run tourism in recent years.

The lockdown has seriously undermined the foundations upon which, especially recently, the local economy has been based, offering a clear signal of the need to revise the reference model. But it has also highlighted how the surrounding environment, if not violated, is capable of exalting its wonder, its enchantment. Only by interpreting the virtuous role that befits it will it be able to re-imagine itself in a future of splendor, where sciences and arts can come alive in a magical place in which to create the illusion of making visible what belongs to the invisible world.

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

Citizens must reclaim an active and participatory role and politics must courageously encourage this momentum. From cultural associations to trade associations, it is from free initiative that proposals must arise to nourish the pride and desire to live of the city.

Open spaces as stages, as places where opportunities for encounter and exchange can be created. Palaces granted with very long-term leases to patrons and companies that wish to contribute to creating a new humanism in Venice, where digital enchantment exalts artistic and architectural magnificence.

Restoring strength to the system of workshops that has responded so admirably to this latest Covid-19 disaster: proximity, consumption control, family management, have allowed simple adaptation to the situation. And the unity of citizens in pursuing a common design is necessary.

Venice must become a Carbon Neutral, Zero Waste and Plastic Free city to use now redundant but rarely applied slogans. Decarbonization and electrification policies for public and private transport. Building efficiency, renewable energy production, 3D fabrication laboratories, indoor and outdoor urban gardens, enhancement of glass as an ecological material par excellence (if reused!), public water.

Around these aspects new enterprises can arise, activities that foster employment of young people who can thus find opportunities to build their future without necessarily inheriting their parents’ past and without being forced to leave, indeed, attracting them from outside because they are fascinated and stimulated by the opportunities that would be created.

VDV: Would you like to propose a specific idea in one of these areas: environment, residential, work, culture, safety, tourism?

Fortunately ideas are not lacking and I believe that every valid idea must contemplate and foster all the proposed areas. They are the fruit of what I mentioned earlier.

Exchange, relationship with urbanity, especially of Venetian girls and boys who love their city and who wish to create a place where one can live well, to the point of becoming attractive even to outsiders who thus decide to move there. This is an essential point of the reasoning: not only temporary tourists but people who want to come and live in Venice.

Ideas to be translated into projects must involve young people because only they have the energy to implement them and the prospects to make them grow. But also because they are more predisposed than we “adults” believe to new forms of community, extended family, digital relationships.

Not pure speculation, therefore, but shared visions to nourish the soul of every place: its inhabitants. Our initiative aims to pursue precisely this direction.

The creation of the infrastructure for recharging electric boats is a fundamental prerequisite for the process of change towards an evolved and conscious society. Without it, nautical transport will never experience the paradigm shift that is already inevitably involving every area of public and private transport. The creation of networks, whether of information, energy or people, are essential to defining the ongoing evolutionary process.

Today initiatives are possible only through the collaboration and sharing that interconnections allow. It is an epochal transition that requires the physiological abandonment of particular speculative logic in favor of initiatives that see social benefit as the primary objective.

System electrification is functional to energy generation from distributed renewable sources, triggering a virtuous process that will enable a very important social advantage.

Beyond the reduction of air pollution with the consequent improvement of general health conditions, every citizen who wishes to acquire or simply use an electric vehicle will accomplish a further upgrade in being and feeling a fundamental piece of the system upon which each of us depends. This is the great awareness that will allow us to evolve towards greater social justice.

Smart-working has highlighted the need to create co-working spaces in which to share experiences and professional skills. The logic of proximity, the workshop system has allowed us to reclaim the convenience “close to home” and how these realities allow greater attention to the quality and quantity of goods, drastically reducing waste. By fostering accessibility to sports, leisure and cultural entertainment, free time conceived as a moment of personal growth, will allow Venice to become one of the most beautiful but above all most livable cities in the world.

Without its inhabitants, every city is nothing but a cemetery of stones.

Claudio Iannelli, founding partner of E-concept Srl.