Touristification and displacement. The long-standing production of Venice as a tourist attraction

Abstract

Gentrification processes in the Italian context are frequently connected to the rise of the tourist industry, which has led several cities with a rich architectural and cultural tradition (such as Venice, Florence or Rome) to experience rapid demographic change and displacement. The combined effects of modern industrialization and suburbanization processes and a conservationist approach to urban heritage have left the physical fabric of some historical cities mostly intact, but have deeply transformed their social fabric, progressively dismantling their traditional mixture of social classes.

Through the emblematic case of Venice, this paper aims to retrace the choices that have contributed to the rise of the city-as-an-attraction, starting from Venice’s early economic specialization in the tourist industry at the end of the eighteenth century and following its development through the last two hundred years. From the construction of the mainland new towns of Mestre and Marghera to the ongoing touristic saturation of the historical city, Venetian gentrification and touristification processes can be interpreted as a peculiar expression of an implosion/explosion urban dynamic, which laid the ground for the rise of the current tourist monoculture.

Keywords:

• touristification
• gentrification
• tourist gentrification
• heritage
• displacement
• overtourism

Acknowledgements

For starting all of this and taking care of it until the end, heartfelt thanks go to Tim Verlaan and Cody Hochstenbach. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and City editors for their commitment to the realization of the SF.

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 mention of the red books refers to the first modern-style tourist guides of Venice, which, in Cosgrove’s view (1982, 155), ‘exemplify the appropriation of Venice for safe, predigested consumption’, and are the ‘practical counterparts’ of the romantics ‘literary treatment’ exemplified before.

2 Where it was, as it was. This attitude, visible in recent times with the Fenice fire, has been described by Davis and Marvin as follows: ‘com’era e dov’era would become both Venice’s defining credo and its eventual prison, setting it on the road to becoming the museum city it is today’ (2004, 218)

3 Literally ‘the human reclamation’, as in the reclamation of wetlands; the English translation might fail to express the violent class nuance it has in Italian, where it appears clear the semantic shift by which it was intended that it was not the city fabric that had to be recovered to host its residents, but the people to be moved out in order to sanitize the urban environment (Zanardi 2020). The term was expressly used in 1935 by Vittorio Cini, senator of the Kingdom of Italy (1934-1943) and key member of the ‘Venetian group’ of Giuseppe Volpi.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR), PRIN 2017EWXN2F [grant number PRIN 2017EWXN2F].

Notes on contributors

Giacomo-Maria Salerno

Giacomo-Maria Salerno is Research Fellow at the Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering (DICEA) at Sapienza University of Rome. Email: [email protected]