Following our 2019 publication How Was It For You?, We are here Venice is publishing Whose City Is It Anyway? – a comprehensive summary of Venice’s relationship with tourism, along with specific policy recommendations for how this relationship might be improved.
Following lockdown and consequent reduction in tourist flows, Venice has a unique opportunity to implement adaptive and innovative measures which properly address the city’s challenges. Whose City Is It Anyway? puts forward solutions to under-regulation and depopulation in a city which has become a by-word for the worst excesses of tourism. The publication of the report coincides with the end of lockdown and intense scrutiny as to how Venice will respond to the global drop in tourism. Rather than return to the unsustainable status quo, the report proposes tax breaks for new businesses, provision of student housing, regulation of tourist rentals and the conversion of disused spaces.
Using the context of Venice’s long and rich history, Whose City Is It Anyway? combines research on both economic and social factors which were previously examined separately. The report calls for urgent change in the management of the excessive tourism which both sustains and destroys the city.
The report was featured in Il Corriere del Veneto on 21/07/2020 and received the Istituto Veneto per Scienze Lettere ed Arti’s Premio Veneto per Venezia in 2021 for writing on Venice “distinguished by the acuteness of analysis of the Venetian situation, in terms of it’s various social, economic, historic and natural aspects”. The jury was composed of the President’s council of IVSLA and by IVSLA members Paolo Baratta, Michele Bugliesi, Ignazio Musu, Anna Somers Cocks and Wolfang Wolters.
Editor’s note: this report was corrected on 03/08/2020 to fix a formatting issue in the introduction and amend the bibliography. You can download the report, or read it below.