To End Up Like Venice

A Tale of Urban Resistance

"We don’t want to end up like Venice!" declares a determined, mustachoied gentleman during a television debate on mass tourism affecting Italian cities. This magic formula is often used to immediately convey the potential catastrophic consequences of continuing to prioritize tourism, which has always been touted as the saviour and driving force for Italy's shaky economy. But what does the end of Venice mean? What has become of Venice? The thought of this resignation irritates me, and I turn off the television.

Venice: museum-city where you have to pay an entrance fee; a beautiful place, where no one would live; a modern Atlantis, legend and warning for other cities that risk meeting the same fate. Both national and local politics struggle to imagine any alternative and seem to surrender to selling their treasures to the highest bidders, inviting residents to kindly move a bit further away to avoid ruining tourists’ photos. In the case of Venice, 'a bit further away' means the mainland - Mestre, Marghera, the metropolitan city - where inhabitants slowly flow, after selling their island properties that became too inconvenient and expensive, and contributing to the gradual breakdown of the social fabric.

Yet this narrative is incomplete, because a part of the city refuses to be reduced to a story of decline, resisting and challenging the freezing of Venice in a glorious but empty past. Instead, they work to transform it according to the needs of those who inhabit it daily, and stubbornly demand to stay. Among these urban fighters is a small but fierce collective called Ocio ("Eye" in Venetian, also meaning "Watch Out"), and among its most dedicated members is Maria Fiano. In an interview, she tells us what is happening in Venice and how the city has chosen to rebel against its postcard destiny:

OCIO is a civic observatory for housing and residency. It analyzes data on living conditions, focusing on how people live on the island of Venice, or "Venice fish," as we call it. It is a collective - an observatory that was born in 2019. Every time we talked about issues in Venice, it inevitably came back to housing problems, so we asked ourselves: what data do we need to understand the problem well? We started with various associations, resident committees, etc., to try to hold self-training meetings and a series of seminars. We asked university students, professors, and researchers to help us. After these meetings, the idea of establishing an observatory emerged. We are all volunteers, we do other things in our lives, and we have very diverse skills. Some have studied urban planning, some have legal training, some are researchers on tourism-related issues, some have statistical skills, and with diverse backgrounds, we manage to make progress . Data analysis is fundamental; then making it transparent and accessible to everyone is another crucial aspect. This allows us to understand the issues, address them, come up with proposals, and organize moments of meeting, training, seminars, and urban walks, to give back what we studied and exchange with the population, to give substance to the data.

What are the current housing issues in Venice?

The situation is quite critical, not only in Venice but, in a sense, Venice reflects issues common to other cities. Perhaps the most evident issue is the subtraction of houses from the residential market, in favor of the tourist market. This is because there is no legislation in Italy that regulates this process, as is the case in other countries. This leads to a decrease in available rental housing for medium/long-term rentals and an increase in prices. Another issue concerns public housing, where a lack of national and local investments results in numerous unassigned units. Despite people applying and being on the waiting list, the available units are insufficient. Many individuals, with the right to public housing, are unable to secure it. As well as this, the situation for university students is challenging too, with a lack of affordable options.

What are the major political mistakes that have contributed to the current situation?

Overall, it results from the absence of long-term political vision and analytical capacity to address the problem effectively. We realize that the reason Ocio is frequently mentioned in the public discourse lately is probably because it has been able to make data transparent. The issue, for example, of public housing waiting lists. Not only ten years had passed since the last call, but also, no one has ever stopped to understand and say, "we issued a call, a certain number of people responded. How many of these people are in what economic situation, in what socio-housing situation? How many people are we providing an answer to? Within what timeframe?". Without starting from this point, it is difficult to address the problem.

Another failure is the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR); in other Italian municipalities, some administrations proposed the renovation and upgrading of accommodations, while the Venetian one did not, resulting in another lost opportunity. Then there is the problem of short-term tourist rentals. At national level, there has been no political will to regulate them, and since 2016 the situation has become exponentially worse. Nothing has been done on the university front, aside from allowing private entities to build student residences, very little has been done for the right to education, to find housing solutions that could cater to those with lower incomes.

Then, many announced affordable housing projects have not been realized or have been transformed into something else. For example, the ex-Calera project. The idea was to build residential units, as a counterbalance to the building of a luxury hotel. The hotel got built, but then the company tasked with constructing the residential units went bankrupt before building them. So, in short, we have another fully operational hotel, but the residential units remained on paper, and nothing has been done since. The lack of both a political vision and political will is evident.

This didn’t happen overnight; data confirms that this city has been depopulating irreversibly for the last 20/30 years. However, we believe that in this continuous exodus, the difficulty of finding affordable rental housing is one of the major causes. There are tools, underrated, underutilized, such as the “3+2”, agreements in rental contracts, that should encourage small property owners to rent to residents, students, or workers. However, on one hand, it is a tool that is not well-promoted, not well-known, and on the other, it is extremely complicated to use. Moreover, for the high-value areas in the city, it is absolutely disadvantageous for the owners, compared to the free market range.

What proposals does OCIO advocate for?

The first thing we request is the regulation of short-term tourist rentals, and we are part of the national campaign called "Alta Tensione Abitativa" (ATA) which calls for national regulation. At the local level, we continue to exert pressure because the municipality of Venice currently would have the tools to regulate them,either regarding the limit of days or from an urban planning perspective. The so-called Pellicani Amendment was voted on more than a year and a half ago, but still has not been implemented at all. On this front, we also continue to denounce the increase in the number of tourist accommodation beds, in all its forms, hotel, non-hotel, and tourist rentals. Last April, we placed a counter on the window of a bookstore to understand how much the number of tourist accommodation beds is increasing, echoing another counter set up 15 years ago, which instead records the inexorable decline of residents. So, in a way, two counters speak to each other – one decreasing, one rising, suggesting the connection between the two, as tourism fills the voids left by residents.

We continue to record and denounce what happens also historically, knowing how many affordable housing projects have been announced and almost never realized.

Why don't the residents get angry in the face of these continuous unfulfilled promises? Why isn't there any political/electoral pressure?

There are many committees and associations working on housing issues, and there are also many residents who are sensitive to the problem and actively participate in initiatives, but to some extent, people tend to forget. At the moment, there is an absolutely deaf municipal government that is not interested.

Why doesn't the government care about these issues, which are among the major problems for their own voters?

This government is focusing heavily on doing business. For example, it is sponsoring the idea of turning Venice into a city-campus for university students, without considering that these students really need housing, and how much they can afford for it. There is an increasing focus on a city exclusively dedicated to tourism, where the interests of real estate and large multinational companies take precedence over the citizens. This is evident from the approved projects.

An interesting point highlighted by one of the associations, "Venezia è il mio futuro" (Venice is my future), is the progressive removal of functional places in the city, like post offices, police stations, that have been outsourced and moved to Mestre, in mainland Venice, while on their place, touristic accommodations are built. So, you have a city being dismantled while large private entrepreneurs profit. Every building sold becomes a hotel or a restaurant. But this is a problem in many places, not just Venice.We are in a historical phase where this is happening in all tourist cities - in Florence, Naples, Bergamo, Rome, even in Padua, there is a kind of expropriation of residents and a substitution with tourists, with temporary and fleeting inhabitants. Touristification is a strong phenomenon, widespread and difficult to curb, and perhaps this is also why we are unheard of by the politicians, who serve very different interests and have surrendered to a completely opposite vision of the future of the city.

In your opinion, can there be healthy, sustainable tourism in Venice?

In my opinion, there is no healthy tourism and bad tourism; there is just too much tourism. Tourism is healthy when it's not excessive. There are no good or bad tourists; the problem is the touristification process of cities that makes every corner a potential attraction, ready to be consumed. The city is hyper-touristified, and that's why tourism is unhealthy; the numbers are excessive, and it's difficult to regulate the flows. On one hand, there's a strong increase due to low-cost airlines and short-term tourist rental apps, creating an incentive to travel and move. I never think of the tourist as bad; each of us travels, moves around, discovers the world in the way we deem appropriate at different stages of life. I can't blame them; in fact, I think it's not even fun for a tourist to come to Venice anymore. I believe cities are dying from tourism, they are not protected from touristification. We need to focus on the city, and at that point, tourism can become just one of the many city's resources, not the only one.

In your opinion, what would it take to save Venice? What would be the ideal future for the city?

We have come a long way, sometimes it seems that economic interests have won, and the most difficult part is to recover the civic sense of the people. What I’m certain of, is that for the city to function, it must be a residential city, there is no alternative to this.

I don't even think that the answer is employment. It's true that the prospects for young people in a tourist city often involve working in hospitality, and not everyone wants to do that. But every morning there is significant commuting from the mainland, of people who work in Venice and return home in the evening because they don't live here. So, the emphasis should be on residents and services. This means the need for supermarkets, nurseries, stores, hardware stores. When you have a city with residents, the jobs to provide them services will follow. And to have residents, you need housing policies that allow residents to stay or make it attractive for new residents, young couples, families, and then encouraging projects for the recovery and renovation of apartments.

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For those who genuinely love Venice, this is a call to be not just visitors but active guardians of this unique city. Only through respect, active participation, and support for the Venetian community can we hope to preserve the intrinsic magic of this lagoon city. Stand against the erosion of its authenticity; support realities like OCIO, engage with its people, patronize local businesses, and embrace the responsibility to ensure that Venice remains a living, breathing testament to its rich history. Anything less risks reducing it to a mere photo backdrop, a hollow shell devoid of the vibrant essence that has captivated the world for centuries.

Useful links:

OCIO Website and social media: https://ocio-venezia.it/ https://www.facebook.com/ocio.venezia

ATA campaign for the regulation of short-term rentals https://www.facebook.com/AltaTensioneAbitativa

VENEZIA SOTTO L'ALBERO · Italian Stories https://maps.app.goo.gl/pPjXc6nBaVPPFp7p7?g_st=i provides the locations of traditional shops affected by the significant flood of 2019, where you can make purchases when you are in the city

Podcast about the issues of residential living in Venice, interviewing OCIO https://news.radioquar.com/podcast/s01e12-la-casa-e-un-diritto-terza-puntata-venezia-2a-parte/