If we ask Venetians “what is the city you want?” Many people report issues regarding the residence/liveableness/possibility of living in Venice. If this one is the most sensible issue for who wants to live in Venice, an issue raising high social tensions and linked to other issues such as job and mobility, we need to think/suggest/act in order to change route. The city is not only a number of houses, of residences and of residence, but it is also the place of social and cultural relationships, the place of economies, the place for entertainment and learning. In other words, the city is the place where a community lives. The issue of the profit and of the costs for rent strongly influences the problem of residentiality, makes unsustainable the permanence of people in the historic centre and creates the conditions for the depopulation, which leads to the death of the community. The real estate market overview by Confedilizia (Italian Real Estate Confederation) and the main market researches, carried out at the national (and international) level, show that Venice is the city where the cost of houses is the most expensive. The average cost per square metre is about 9,570 Euro compared with 8,000 Euro in Rome and with 7,570 Euro in Milan.

Venice changed a lot since when Lord Byron used to swim the Big Channel or since when the European aristocrats (including all Eastern countries) used to come to winter in Venice renting palaces and apartments on the main floors of palaces, where sometimes they took up residence (as the census of 1911 demonstrates). In the past, if the Venetian (economically) faded aristocrats could survive and save their real estate after the Austrian occupations, it was certainly due to a wise rents policy that allowed an immediate profit and an economic advantage for future generations. That was a far-seeing choice compared with that made in the last ten years by many Venetian public institutions – including the Municipality – which could have found different roads in order to avoid penalising citizens especially medium-income people which first have been obliged to leave the historic centre. The aim of these administrations was overcoming the housing emergency and achieving the demographic goal of 100,000 residents in order to repopulate Venice. An operative and strategic plan would have needed in order to come to an agreement between public and private sector not only on the promotion of the permanency of “old” habitants, but also on the integration of young people willing to live in a special place with special characteristics, creative people oriented to a post-industrial economy, etc.

Rather, these administrations succeeded in breaching the jungle of the shady real estate market; only touristic operators without many qualms in the service of a more and more fast and consumerist tourist. For 30 years, university students have represented a piece of market to exploit, indeed, they substituted the quotas of Venetians who had left the most degraded houses for “modern” houses. For this reason, students have been obliged to retreat in good order and to become touch-and-go students who come back home daily, leaving those “slums” for touristic conversion. Looking at the students’ experience, we can have a clear idea of difficulties in contradiction with their wishes (See the blog Abitare a Venezia).

On the contrary, we need to help these potential future Venetian young because they are the only people convinced that “living in Venice is nicer and creative”. During centuries, this concept has been clear to artists, poets and dancers who decided to stay for log periods and often to move in Venice. Especially people like Felicita Bevilacqua La Masa who donated her family’s palace, Cà Pesaro, to the city and, at the same time, gave life to a foundation which prefigured that the city would have been able to attract (and to keep as new citizens) new young artists encouraged by studies and housing offer (Carminati Palace, S.Stae). Among “her” authors, at the beginning of the 20th century, we remember Boccioni, Casorati, Semeghini and Arturo Martini.

Nowadays the Bevilacqua’s concept still holds. If we do not teach young people to love this city, it will become – it is already becoming – a different thing than the idea of an innovative scenario. If the idea of the city as city of culture, of knowledge, of uplifting of the conscience and of the spirit is not planted in a fertile environment, where fostering the soul rather than the wallet, it will be only a meaningless concept.

Venice changed since when people like the Russian scientist Aleksandr Wolkov-Muromcev, after long sojourns in Venice, in 1980, decided to convert his “residence card for foreigners” into residence for him and all his family (his sons learnt to row on the sandolo and to swim in the Big Channel). Indeed, he passed the rest of his life painting (signing as Alexandre Roussof). Venice changed also from what D’annunzio, during his long sojourns, called the “imaginative Venice” and the unique living of/in the city, “the city of the most loving among your Venetians”. A city loved by poets from Byron to Ezra Pound “Oh God what great goodness have we made and forgot in the past to receive such a wonder?” (It is maybe rhetorical but effective in representing the afflatus of the neo-Venetian).

Notwithstanding the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation has promoted some pioneer experiences like that of residences for young artists. The Foundation enlarged its spaces for exhibitions and ateliers at the Tito Palace and at the SS.Cosma and Damiano cloister (Giudecca). Likewise, the Emily Harvey Foundation has promoted the residences for the young creative people of the Spiazzi in Residence (spaces granted to young artists, from one to six months, to live or to create works of art and artistic events) or the private artists’ houses of the Private Gallery (where artists live and work, opening to the public three times a week). Would it not be better to exhibit in special, quiet and cosy places, like houses, works of art inspired/created in Venice, rather than to appeal to crowds of “cultural” tourists to visit collections prestigious only for the supporting or sponsoring brand?

In the last analysis, from Forte Marghera or the Artist Atelier (promoted by the Italian-Slovenian Gallery A+A) to the S.Servolo island/Art Lab or to the Rialto market zones (residential and Gallery seats as the Emily Harvey Foundation demanded) thousands of artists and scholars can emerge ready to live rather than to consume the city, as symptom-free carriers of the counter-disneyzation.

Venice is not only for the millionaires who can buy palaces and main floors for 10-15,000 Euro per square metre, Venice should not be a carpet of “top-end properties” (defined by the Herald Tribune, 15-04-2011) nor “The city’s luxury market”, but the showcase of creativity where pursuing all ideas of living city, symbol of freedom of expression and of thought. (It is not a case that in Venice, Incroci di Civiltà – the meetings of international writers promoted by the Cà Foscari University and the Municipality of Venice – takes place every year).

We should try to re-build the relationship of people with its territory, to discover together the resources that effectively and rationally make they feel part of it, starting from the idea that living in Venice is a value.

After outdated slogans and rhetorical and unheeded calls for a public policy for the residence, would it not be more appropriate thinking to act through a mix of public (directions) and private (a truly committed patronage) actors planning a young future for the city?