Venice: from Gated Lagoon to Bioregion: Observatory: Design Observer

Absolutely fascinating piece.  Not just on the amazing city that Venice is, and its problems (it's sinking!) but also on why it's having such a difficult time taking the imaginative leap: lack of creative democratic governance process.

"Humans, water, and nature are profoundly interrelated in the Venice lagoon — but they are profoundly dis-connected in its governance.  While the Italian state deploys hard infrastructure to create a gated lagoon, Corila’s researchers work separately on a new morphological plan. While myriad heritage groups campaign to protect the built city from floods and tourists, artists and scientists dream up radical scenarios of their own. Native Venetian citizens, for their part, work in tourism, and dislike doing so — but hear little about these alternative projects and visions. The cruise ship industry, proclaiming that there is no alternative source of jobs and prosperity, is left to do its own, ecocidal, thing.

What’s missing is a shared vision around which all the stakeholders who are now separated from each other — municipalities, citizens, artists, mussel farmers, research institutes — could collaborate.
Bringing the lagoon as a bioregion back to life could surely be that issue."