Not really. Venice is sinking faster today due to seas rising, but the city has been sinking into the mud since day one. In the past buildings were regularly demolished and new ones built atop the rubble. At some point in recent history we decided to stop doing that, to lock all the buildings in place and "protect" them. This phenomena is not unique to Venice. Whether it is sea level rise in Venice, height limits in Paris, or widespread "heritage" status for anything over a few decades old, all over the world we protect buildings and architecture. This means sacrificing the needs of greater cities and the people who live in those cities.
Let's protect all the Venices of the world, but treat them as what they are: museums or theme parks, not places people actually live and work. Venice already has the boat rides and is talking about a gate price (a tourist day fee). Next will come the wrist bands. Then the mascots and cotton candy.
How many of the tourists on those giant cruise ships actually get off the boat? Do many of them that just look at Venice from their cabins? That might make Venice the world's largest public art exhibition.
The city that I live in faces similar issues, even though it is young by international standards, and those issues exhibit themselves in very peculiar ways.
If we were talking about a building that is actively maintained and played a significant role in events, I can understand the desire to preserve it. Yet, more often than not, the buildings are decayed due to neglect and very few people actually care about the building until it is about to be torn down. Worse yet, the structure has frequently been altered to the point where it is no longer of architectural interest. So yes, this is a concern from the perspective of the greater needs of cities. Which is why I was puzzled by the opposition due to the environmental impact.
On the other hand, I suspect that these attitudes stem from something other than a desire for preservation. It may sound noble to talk about the greater needs of cities, yet some mighty nasty projects have been undertaken in the name of redevelopment. For some people this brings up extreme cases of forced removal, serving the needs of special interests, or simply creating inhumane environments.
Sounds like Australia. Lots of 100 year old buildings of no cultural or architectural significance get protected status.
Meanwhile the government has no issue allowing the destruction of Aboriginal heritage and archeological sites (as well as old growth native forests) to make way for roads and mines.
I doubt there are "lots" of buildings over 100 years old remaining in the Melbourne CBD. Those that do remain gain significance merely because they have survived.
It's less the CBD, and more in the surrounding suburbs. There are old cottages scattered around that weren't good houses when they were built, and aren't any better today. The land they're on is worth a fortune, but they have heritage status so they can't be redeveloped, yet they're also not worth renovating because they're so far gone.
There is a Slate Star Codex article[1] talking about how people die in hospitals. A common trend is that families that lived close to their elderly relatives are the most ready to accept when there is nothing more to do, while families that "fly in" to visit their sick elderly relatives often refuse to give up and try to do anything to keep them alive a bit more.
One interpretation is that guilt plays a factor here.
In my opinion something vaguely similar happens here, in globalized times everyone is citizen of bigger and bigger places and feel progressively weaker connections to local culture. To this you can add that this local culture is under constant pressure from new external actors (I imagine that more than a few people tried to build new hotels in the middle of Venice).
None of what you say actually refutes the argument: yes, rebuilding Venice would obviously cost a lot. And it would cost even more in lost revenue, considering it is unlikely anything new would continue to attract them.
And while it's true that few ("normal") people still live in Venice, it doesn't follow that what remains is as worthless as Disneyland. Nobody lives in the Louvre, and it's still a culturally significant place!
The idea that buildings in Venice are layered, with newer ones built on top of older ones when they succumbed to the water seems to be mythological.
Venice isn't going to do cotton candy. Picnicking on the streets will get you fined, and in some cases tourists have been thrown off the island for such uncultured behaviour.
Why is disneyland worthless? It employs lots of people. It makes kids happy. It is also old enough, by north american standards, that its iconic buildings could probably qualify for some sort of heritage status.
>> tourists have been thrown off the island for such uncultured behaviour.
I suspect that given a longer historical perspective, Disneyland will be seen as something other than "culturally vacuous". Much of our evaluation of "high" vs "low" culture is due to cultural snobbery. Low culture becomes more valued as time passes and the distinctions fade.
We nearly lost centuries of folk music because it wasn't considered worth preserving and only the efforts of a few weirdos like Bartok, Vaughan Williams and Alan Lomax who acted at just the the right moment saved some knowledge of it for future generations.
And it's not "folk" vs "commercial" either Commercial Art from the turn of the century (and before and after) is immensely interesting and of great aesthetic value to my eyes.
> Low culture becomes more valued as time passes and the distinctions fade.
On the other hand, things that are worth preserving tend to survive longer thanks to the effort put in preserving them. In other words, while age and cultural value correlate well, it might be cultural value to cause longer survival times and not the other way around.
It's also a good thing to make a distinction between cultural value in an anthropological sense (any relic is an historically important testimony of the past, but that doesn't make it good: a milk carton from today could be invaluable to a historian from 2000 years in the future) and actual craftsmanship and beauty.
> On the other hand, things that are worth preserving tend to survive longer thanks to the effort put in preserving them
I wonder if this is presupposing the point I'm trying to argue against. I'm arguing that contemporary tastes are often not a good measure of quality due to the biases introduced by being too close. I'm not sure where you've engaged with that point other than by merely stating a contrary position?
Not really. One of the aims of Main Street USA was to preserve the ambiance of a small town Main Street, which was already disappearing even before the 1950s. If the Haunted Mansion is so culturally vacuous, why did Cory Doctorow set a book there? I doubt it was just for the whuffie. Pop culture is culture.
> The idea that buildings in Venice are layered, with newer ones built on top of older ones when they succumbed to the water seems to be mythological.
It is pure invention. (Source: architect living near Venice).
Probably originated from Hollywood movies, where Venice features underground tombs, sewers and tunnels; and palaces can be sunk like ships hit by a torpedo.
> but treat them as what they are: museums or theme parks, not places people actually live and work
I know a lot of people born and raised in Venice who still live and work there. So labelling Venice as a theme park or similar is really not adequate.
Proof of that is the post Covid-19 lockdown situation. Venice without all the international tourist has proven to be a lively and nice city to live in, based on what I've been told by people from there.
Also, if we were to label Venice as a museum, then we would need to label half of Italy's old town centers as such.
However having been in Venice a couple of times, and coming from a Portuguese region where tourism is one of the main commercial activities of the city, I can relate with the theme park description, we even call ourselves Portugal's Venice!
It gets pretty annoying that when you go to places in the city center where you aren't known to the business owners, everyone assumes you are a tourist.
You guys do realize that Venice brings in half of that in tourism dollars per year, right?
And I suspect the overall impact on the Italian tourist economy of having Venice around is even higher.
So even setting aside any relocation costs, just the tourist economy (and there is more to the Venetian economy) will pay for the entire project in 2 years.
One example of crazy protection I've seen recently is this piece in Paris: https://danielfeau.com/fr/archive/annonce/3495936 it's has no archtectural value, has no history, has been abandonned for 30 years, is really in bad shape, in the most central part of the city, and doesn't even have the same style as surrounding streets... but the rules are for the new buyer to restore it as it is: can't build anything new, can't change shape or size, ...
I mean, sure it wouldn't be
nice to have a pink/green ultra-strange new building there, but there are ways to make something nicer than what is currently there
I'm not sure even letting the sea reclaim it would be cheaper, the environmental impact alone might well require either a costly dismantle operation or just walling it in where the waste can't get out.
While I completely agree you cant go knocking down building there, those building are built with parts from older ones. Eg the Horses of Saint Mark-Lysippos in St Marks basilica.
Letting Venice go is also an option. Going to happen to a lot of low lying geographies as sea levels rise and mitigation becomes unaffordable. Hard decisions ahead about what’s worth saving.
The EU's budget is only a tiny part of public spending of the EU's member states, though, as they each handle their own military, welfare, etc. spending individually. It's more like DC's budget than the US Federal budget in magnitude/importance.
That’s a fair point. Looking at the EU as a whole, I would argue it doesn’t have the resources to spend on enormous climate mitigation capital projects consistently with most of its countries dependent on a handful of economic engines (primarily France and Germany with the UK leaving), compounded by a rapidly aging workforce turning into pensioners who will be competing against those capital projects for fiscal support.
Alarming media stories that twist the facts about rising sea levels are dangerous because they scare people unnecessarily and push policymakers toward excessively expensive measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The real solution is to lift the world’s poorest out of poverty and protect them with simple infrastructure."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project#Projections