"Venice can become an acid test, inside the ideological conditions of globalism, of how and if the specificity can return to be an essential element of modernity"; so writes Vittorio Gregotti in ‘Venice. City of the new modernity’, edited by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova (Society New Venice) in l999. It is a consideration, in clearly propositive terms, so that the extraordinary arrangement of the European historical city, of which Venice is the symbol and metaphor to the eyes of the entire world, can become, in Gregotti’s words, "the foundation, and not the hindrance, towards the development of its own modernity". We worked around this thesis, which is correct, important, and widely shared, proposing in the last three years a series, called viverevenezia (living Venice), of cultural initiatives which each time have tackled planning themes linked with Venice’s urban places: appropriate solutions for the preparation of backgrounds or routes; suggestions for a “different” use of public spaces through the view and installations of young artists; finally, this year, for the reading of the Venetian urban design, so rich in precious signs and so invaded by occasional signs, in order to track down old, new and renewed modalities to run through it. The activities proposed by viverevenezia have always assumed the shape of a process involving work groups composed by students and teachers coming from the faculty of Architecture of the University of Venice, but also from the world’s and Europe’s most famous universities. Young people, therefore, who exposed their ideas and draftings to moments of intense confrontation with Venetian citizens, associations and institutions, but also with tourists and occasional visitors. In this city, the Consorzio Venezia Nuova invests the role adequate to its structure and mission, that is to say it realizes the safeguard interventions expected as to its contract with the State. To produce is a cultural act by itself: to face, in planning terms, themes that are crucial for the city, using adequate structures like universities, means wanting to widen the concept of safeguard, to face in critical terms the problem of quality of what is complexively produced for the city, without giving up to the increasing and unaware fortuity of transformations, and without renouncing to plan new things. Complex systems cannot be defended with solutions that semplify their articulation, but on the contrary, they need a multiplicity a points of view, of meditations, of proposals thought and worked out in such a way that they can be widely shared. Yet a general critical evaluation must stimulate and not stop the specific programmes which are prepared after the planning part. The collaboration between different subjects and istitutions, strongly wanted by the Consorzio and by the local University of Architecture, has proposed, on one side, to take into account and to answer to the several needs expressed in such a particular and delicate context like that of the urban morphology of Venice; on the other side, the collaboration proposed to give, together with the ideas, also the working tools necessary to a concrete and quick realization of the projects. This year has been important for the direct presence of the City Coucil Administration and the involvement of the Councillor for Culture, Tourism and Communication, who introduced the problem and the password “to reorder the signs”, in order to generate a different readability of the city and of its routes. To lose and to find in the Venetian maze, a maze made of logical and physical routes, will maybe return to be a choice instead of an accident.