Veneto 2100: Living with water

Veneto 2100: Living with Water is a long visual essay made up of a wide range of maps, video interview extracts, archive and news clippings, diagrams, short stories and critical texts. The book examines the future of one of Italy's richest regions in the light of predicted changes in climate and water patterns and their impact on the territory. Three very different areas of the Veneto region are examined: The Po Delta, an area between water and land, with an ailing economy, facing subsidence, salinisation, sedimentation and the risk of flooding; the hilly area of the Monti Lessini near Verona, carved by a series of streams that periodically become rough and undermine the life of the urbanised areas on the banks; the dry plain of Treviso, where the Piave river, after being repeatedly dammed in the Alps, meets the horizontal urbanisation of Veneto, alternating between droughts and floods. The book examines these three areas in their current situation, taking into account the main human activities, the present and future risks related to water, the local population's perception of them, and the conflicting perspectives and actions taking place in the territory. The observation extends to the infrastructural operations that have marked the relationship between the territory and its waters throughout history: from the territorial engineering devised by the Venetian Republic to make the inland areas productive, to the number of waterworks - such as the vast land reclamation and the grandiose hydroelectric apparatus - carried out under the Fascist impulse. The relationship between water and these three areas is then projected to the year 2100: for each area, potential spatial arrangements are imagined, all of them capable of accommodating and/or resisting the pressures associated with the predicted changes in climate patterns. The extent of the changes required by changing water behaviour is traced in space. How might the hills and valleys of the Monti Lessini, the dry plain of the Piave and the delta of the Po be transformed to live with the projected water pressures? The result is a Veneto with new territorial configurations, production strategies and new ways of living. The book collects the results of research carried out by Latitude Platform, a collective of architects-urbanists and anthropologists, together with engineers and communication designers, as well as students and lecturers from several European graduate and postgraduate masters courses and local institutions. The results were exhibited at the 5th International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam (2012), and later presented and discussed with local communities through the implementation of temporary exhibitions and open talks. By framing the water issue in an open historical perspective, by approaching a technical matter through the eyes of citizens' perception, and by stimulating debate with spatial portraits of the future, Veneto 2100: Living with Water has aroused public and academic interest in Italy, Europe and beyond.