Beyond Historic Urban Cores: Conservation and Regeneration Practices in the Garden City Area of Marghera (Venice, Italy)

ABSTRACT

Within the Italian context for urban heritage management, this paper aims to discuss conservation and regeneration as a (potentially) combined practice, through the case of the ‘garden city’ of Marghera. Planned in the Venice mainland in the early XXth century, the district underwent a significant planning experiment in the 1990s, but was listed only recently. After examining the reasoning, features and outcomes of such processes, we assess how citizens’ sense of place was taken into consideration, and how it was affected by them.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage
• conservation
• urban regeneration
• sense of place
• Venice-Marghera

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The last report on 'Economic and Social Well-Being’ available from the National Institute for Statistics (ISTAT) indicated that public expenditure in conservation reached a record in 2017 with €1,42bln, corresponding in fact to 0,24% of Italy’s public primary expenditure. Instead, municipalities spent an average of €18,7 per capita in 2016, 14% less than in 2010.

2. Commissione Regionale per il Patrimonio Culturale del Veneo, Dichiarazione di notevole interesse pubblico dell’area denominata “Quartiere giardino” di Marghera, 23 luglio 2019, retrieved from http://www.veneto.beniculturali.it/sites/default/files/venezia_quartiere_giardino_marghera_dich.pdf. Accessed 5 May 2022.

3. This paper draws principally on data gathered in (Fontanari & Wacogne, 2017) and (Wacogne, 2019).