Paraphrasing Simmel, […] the connection between all elements constituting a modern city has to be based on the project of an urban landscape that should not be originated by the chance redevelopment of existing landscapes; these situations, indeed, are regulated by technical rules that are often inadequate and therefore transformed/bent to property developers’ will.
The urban landscape of dry land developed through successive stratifications during the twentieth century, with a more intense pace after the Second World War, by raising the height of some urban areas and/or pre-existing buildings. The will to transform this landscape can interrupt the temporal and spatial continuity, and create fragments without any connection which break the balance deleting the existing links between people and inhabited places and therefore it cannot change into a coherent urban landscape nor ameliorate the existing city.
Yesterday, metropolisation of the region. Today, towards the urban metropolis
Until recently, Mestre has been represented, in antithesis with Venice, as a city without its own history and its own identity, only as a dormitory-parking for immigrants and Venetian people expelled from the insular city. Until 1926Venice and Mestre were two distinct Cities belonging to different dioceses; two urban identities, forcedly unified by a decree, and defined - not by chance - “Venice, historic city”, “Mestre, modern city” as if neither of them could become a “complete” city.
However, Mestre has recovered its historic centre and has clogged up the suburbs with residential and shopping centres, and now it tries to look like a “big city” by putting side by side or replacing the buildings built in the fifties and the sixties with higher and higher buildings, tending to the urban gigantism. The fad for skyscrapers seems to permeate the capacity of property developers and local representatives to imagine a new design. What is the best skyscraper? The highest one, maybe a designer one by an arch-star. Who are the main supporters of skyscrapers? The politicians. Indeed, according to them, raising the height of Mestre is the only way to get rid of the shadow that Venice throws on the dry land city, the city that represented the paradigm of all the transformations during the twentieth century, from the industrialisation to the urbanisation, from the territorial changes to the urban ones, from the demographic evolution to the social one. In the last twenty years of the past century, these territorial and economic changes brought to a widespread industrial and residential growth extended to include all the central area of Venice’s provinces and the neighbour cities in the provinces of Treviso and Padua. This phenomenon started a metropolisation process in this area even regardless of the indications given by the territorial and economic plans. The unification of the area Mestre-Padua-Treviso, determined by a continuous edification (defined “loved cement”), did not change into a new territorial order, but did change into a way through which the stakeholders achieved their goals. The stakeholders acted irrespective of the general interests of society and people who would have lived and worked in the millions of square meters that produced an area exceptionally provided with private services and very badly provided with public services and space.
Since the nineties, in order to correct this kind of organisation of the public space on the dry land, the focus has been the construction of the Metropolitan City of Venice. The aim has been recovering two dimensions: a political-management one and a planning one, in order to be able to re-systematize what already realised and to plan a balanced reorganisation of future needs. Twenty years have not been enough to get results at the administrative level, despite the studies, the local inter-provinces agreements, etc. Moreover, no correction to the territorial plan has been identified, the roles have not been defined nor the rules for the transformation and the integration of new functions to come out of the recession phase (which has affected first of all Marghera). According to the hierarchy, the Venice local administration should act as leader in the Venetian metropolitan area, but it has continued to propose a development merely based on the construction, following the American metropolis model characterised by skyscrapers. There are skyscrapers in Marghera (via Fratelli Bandiera, Via Ulloa, etc.) and there will be skyscrapers in Mestre (three are under construction near to the hospital Umberto I; their heights are respectively: 115, 110 and 80 meters; in all 55.000 square meters). The reason is that who promotes the idea of the metropolis loves the vertical city, even if the new architectural buildings could be located indifferently in Mestre as well as in Detroit, in Padua or in San Francisco.
Then in any political assembly, especially at the provincial or regional level, but also at the local level, the party for the metropolis is opposed to the party for the municipalities and for the exaltation of the “culture of Veneto for people of Veneto”. The result is that, in looking for good residential conditions, the residential zones are spread across the region; they are often disadvantageous to the community, ecologically unsustainable (because of the large use of private transports) and economically unsustainable (because of the higher costs even for residents).
Now a coherent territorial plan should propose to change over from the self-organisation of the cities (small centres, sad suburbs managed by local administrations without resources) to the organisation of the Northeastern metropolis; it is clear that this process cannot happen without the transformation of the city Mestre-Marghera.
This alternative plan to the dominant fad of skyscrapers and to the Los Angeles complex cannot be based on ideological choices or technocratic recipes. On the contrary, it should be based on tools to face the complexity of these choices. (The tools provided by the PTRC [in Italian: Regional Territorial Plan of Coordination], by the PTCP [in Italian: Territorial Plan of Provincial Coordination] or by the local PAT [in Italian: Plan of Territorial System] – still under elaboration – do not seem adequate).
Even the metropolitan city of Venice, prefigured through the town-and-country planning, risks to remain a ghost if it is not put into strategic actions linked to the environmental compatibility of choices (until now based more on the ongoing dynamics than on a project for the future).
In other words, the projects (from the skyscraper to the parking) and the new (residential or industrial) settlements cannot be justified individually anymore, even if they are established in the plan and in the zoning in force. On the contrary, they have to be evaluated considering a larger local and environmental context and, first of all, taking into account the benefits they can bring.
A new cultural approach to the planning at the metropolitan level should aim to:
The improvement of the territorial biocapacity limiting the use of land
The ecological regeneration with relation to the cities and to the land on large scale.
An infrastructural system compatible with the environment (mobility/technological networks/ energy system).
It is to say: only the integral environmental planning, linked to the issues of climate changes and of energy saving, could lead to reconsider the choices related, for example, to Veneto City (two million square meters on the Riviera of Brenta which is an area at high hydraulic risk, with 150 meters towers and with a daily attendance of an estimated 40.000 people); or Marco Polo City/Tessera City (1.7 million square meters), skyscrapers everywhere, or some tertiary infrastructures in Marghera (where the most recent urban requalification, with functional restructuring, was called Venezia Lifestyle Center alluding to a “new urban lifestyle”), etc. What is the sense of the “cementification” of further rural areas given that millions of square meters of infrastructures and a waterfront in Marghera are already available, obviously after the lands reclamation?
In 2010 the Mayor Orsoni issued the challenge-slogan of the 3 M: Mestre-Mobility-Modernity after that the Foundation of Venice had planned to locate the Museum of the twentieth century, called M9, in Mestre to deal with issues such as: Mestre-Marghera-Metropolis/ Modernity-Museum-Mall-Mediatheque... That clearly shows the mainstay chosen for the territorial reorganisation.
However, this is not enough.
In the challenge of sustainability, the dry land should not vie with the insular city of Venice and the other European metropolis in quantitative terms (volumes-heights-cubature defined by a city planning inadequate to respect the real nature of the interactions between human beings and their physical and social environment). Rather it is necessary to reconsider the urban quality and to create an urban landscape.
Finally, together with the urban quality, it is also necessary to consider the mechanisms of political representation and the consensus-building process, which still do not recognise that also improving the citizens’ living conditions, from an environmental and territorial point of view, would constitute a condition for the competitiveness of the metropolitan city of Venice in the future.
