Worldwide any reading of the city of Venice is, almost by definition, confined to the perimeter of the historic city: the palaces, bridges, bell towers, public areas and private spaces are noted and praised, the more than forty wonderful museums are visited and the world knows about the cultural events which unfold against the lagoon setting each year; every stone of Venice, from Ruskin onwards, is noted, assessed, celebrated. Instead surrounding these valuable sites is nothing, as if the 400sq.km and more which remains of the fifteenth largest Italian municipal district contains nothing but wasteland. This is not the case, in fact the area hosts the population of the seventeenth largest Italian city in terms of number of inhabitants. And indeed it is here that the most important economic transformations in terms of economy and infrastructure are happening in North East Italy. It is precisely Mestre, the mainland part of the municipality of Venice – an exemplary case and a model for the important changes of the twentieth century, from urbanization to industrialization, from demographic and social evolution to changes in the landscape and in the territory – that is confirming itself as the centre of gravity of the metropolitan area. An area whose network structure innervates the provinces of Venice, Padua and Treviso, amongst the most productive in the country’s entire system. New capital of a Euroregion which, extending beyond the limits of the Triveneto, pushes beyond national borders, the land areas of Venice also include sites historically constructed on water to structure themselves as unavoidable crossroads in the geography of European traffic.

With a regrettable delay, in February 2009 a simple widened motorway was opened and a new territorial reality unfolded: the localization in the city of Venice’s mainland territory of the most congested European flow of east-west traffic in the twenty-first century ceased and the territory once again became practicable. A new urban face was presented: more open circulation, more easy penetration into the area, the widening of the city due to a substantial flow of financial public-private interventions directed towards the new hospital in the north, the creation of a modern office district, commercial and university district in the south-east and an intervention of urban regeneration of a hectare in the very centre of the mainland city. Now the port and airport (both of massive dimensions, and essential to Italy) bring the mainland city immediately in contact with the economic world, coupling its quality as high-tech service industry both to its function as administrative capital and international terminal of cultural activity of the historic city, and also to its demonstration of efficiency as a prototype, expressed by the realization of the Mose project at the frontier of the protection of the land from the water.

With these considerations the focus of the past on the recent history of the city of Venice is closed. Instead opens the new chapter on Venice metropolis: the great nebulous urban-rural area of the Veneto is discovering a point of union, that identifying centre which brings together a territorial spread of houses, factories and small cultivated areas, where the format set out by the preindustrial settlements has been consumed by the development which lead individuals to believe common space to be flexible for their own functional requirements for economic development.

The new point of aggregation is defined in the central area which connects Padua, Treviso and Mestre hosting around two million inhabitants, and which it is now possible to cross as if passing from one district to another of any other large city: it is an area long divided by feelings of inexistent urban competition, which are now being spatially unified by the opening of the motorway system and the metropolitan train network designed by the regional government. This reality was given form by the new Piano Territoriale Regionale di Coordinamento of the Regione del Veneto which has now taken a position individualizing in the Padua-Venice press the principle engine centre for the contemporary Veneto reality.

In fact there is a very strong transformation underway in the area, a transformation which happens around and next to ancient Venice: and which allows an incoherent unitary arrangement at least in the process of finding composition to emerge from an uneven andcomplicated residential, industrial and agricultural web. With growing evidence a large

area of the territory is innervated with infrastructure of metropolitan dimensions, an area whose external limits, given by administrative limits, is not interesting and is in fact misleading and irrelevant: as in every legible experience on an international scale it is not the administrative sheath which is the creating moment of the spatial structure but rather it is this which sooner or later gives origins to that. The existence of a metropolitan mayor for this area under formation is not in sight, or at least not in the near future, but certainly local government methods and structures will undoubtedly move towards this scale, above all in the supply of those services of public utility in the territory.

A geographic expression instead can be identified in a simple geometric figure which traces a hexagon over the territory, whose sides are short between the urban nuclei of Chioggia, Padua, Castelfranco, Treviso, San Donà, Mestre. For this area Venice is both the matrix and a complement: it appears as an element of a complex city, just as the historic city of Amsterdam is for the Randstad in Holland. Exactly in this way the Veneto “ring-city” has no centre, but rather diverse places of evolution from the ancient Venetian civilization which produce strong classifications along the ring: an industrial port area, an intercontinental airport, a government and administrative area, an important international cultural area, a place of design and fashion and a significant university system and an agricultural heart again of importance; soon there will also be a sort of Afsluitdijk, a global system of sea defence here however equipped with various operative possibilities whereas that of Holland is static forever.

To this “city-region” – illustrated in a recent study to be published contemporarily with the opening of the exhibition by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) – are dedicated the efforts of the Fondazione di Venezia specifically considering an investigation of the role and the body of this Venice metropolis. Within

this project falls this exhibition which gathers together the first formal expressions of a huge project of urban regeneration which we have called (perhaps only provisionally) M9, as will be described below.

The project clearly expresses an epistemological thought applied to that foundational phenomenon which has characterised the course of the privatisation in Italy of public banks. When the bank foundations were created as private actions of the banks, directed by law for social use and economic development, they were seen as complex legal subjects, of a historic tradition but whose effectiveness was still to be defined. The foundations appeared via a mysterious tool: in a society which was evolving, they maintained a passive role of capitalist without project for some time, infused with an ancient almoners’ local policies. Recently however, helped by the fundamental reading by the Constitutional Court which classified them as amongst the subjects of civil liberty, the self-awareness and the planning abilities of the foundations have taken a decisive step forwards.

In this way the bank foundations are now far from the collective image which we see, or saw, just as mere dispensers of benevolent contributions matured from the earnings of invested capital, new and more responsible initiatives have been undertaken and their administration requires a wide range of skills. The Fondazione di Venezia, in particular, is not a small foundation and exists in a context in which problems are enormous and to which cultural activities and goods are certainly overexposed. For this, in order not to lose its sense of direction in such a fertile and distinct reality, the Fondazione di Venezia has in recent years radically modified its working methods transforming itself into an active partner, a new subject able to guarantee the chain of production: from the planning of the initiative to its operational management. Avoiding any inclination to being a mere patron, it has rigidly taken an entrepreneurial path, consisting in creating unprecedented initiatives, of its own design and of direct management.

From those deliberations, intense in the necessity of renewing the centre of the mainland city, the Fondazione di Venezia created the M9 project, intended to give mainland Venice a suitable, new “factory” of knowledge, whose architectural importance will contribute to re-enforce the identity of Mestre connected to its Venetian source and to contemporary times.

A multifunctional centre in which to represent study and interrogate modernity, M9 will include a museum structure dedicated to the important transformations of the twentieth century, spaces reserved for temporary exhibitions, a media library and an archive which will become places of study and research, an auditorium and spaces dedicated to education.

The images – photographic, video and sound – will be the protagonists of installations and technological and interactive exhibitory solutions. The various visitor targets (be they the age of school students, university students or adults) can choose freely the twentieth century themes proposed in the permanent exhibition and study them more deeply as they wish or allow themselves to be intrigued by the temporary exhibitions dedicated to contemporary themes of design, graphic arts, fashion or scientific research.

The alphanumeric code itself groups together the complexity of the intervention andits principle characteristics: “M” for museum [and exhibition, in Italian mostra], a media library, for multimedia and multisensory, for Mestre, Marghera and metropolis; “9” or nove, which also contains also the VE of Venice, as the reference to the novecento or twentieth century in Italian. And again “M” for mall, because selected commercial high quality units will be an integral part of M9; the rent derived from these spaces will be used as the financial support for the whole project.

Notwithstanding that the Fondazione has foreseen an investment of 100 million Euros, only via the constant locating of new sources of financial support can the economic viability of the cultural schedule be guaranteed in the long term. It is also important to highlight that, in addition to the considerable economic resources invested, the Fondazione has decided to be involved in the first person, outside of any benevolent donation which might ask others to realise the project, structuring itself instead internally to run and coordinate all of the necessary activities for the creation of a new cultural centre, which will be carried out via an instrumental society of the Fondazione itself, named Polymnia Venezia in honour of the multiplicity of the planning themes.

In this journey – active in that just a few months ago that the architectural projects were requested and the results of which will be presented here for the first time – the Fondazione is accompanied by all of the institutes of the territory, in particular the Comune di Venezia, the Regione del Veneto, local Soprintendenze and the Venetian universities, with whom it is in continuous dialogue and which from the now distant start in 2005, have shared the intentions and guaranteed constant support to the project.