Venice has a problem: everyone wants to visit. The islands making up the city are frequented by 60,000 visitors a day on average, with up to 120,000 visitors a day on peak. Given the relative small size of the island, this has posed obvious quality of life issues for residents, including but not limited to gentrification. Venice residents have responded in kind: in the last 50 years, the population of just the main island of Venice has dropped from 175,000 permanent residents to 50,000. What is to be done?
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The ideal tourist experience is one that has both as few other tourists as possible, and also the least amount of friction. Locals should speak English (and be eager to test their knowledge of it with you), they should be in awe of the spending power of the United States Dollar as you tap your credit card (though Apple Pay is accepted too) and serve you fresh local cuisine, food that will make you curse the likes of Sysco and U.S. Foods forever. At the same time, the tourist should be, aside from their family, the only foreigner there, immersed in a culture seemingly unaware of Americanism/Britishism, a place perhaps from before the cell phone, before the motor vehicle, even. Life moves at a slower pace, and everything feels different and new and inexpensive.
This, seemingly, is not the experience one gets when visiting Venice. Don't get me wrong, there is insanely cool and beautiful architecture there, you can explore it forever, there is good Italian food you can have on the edge of a canal, you can take a gondola ride--there are reasons people go--but it is so famously and egregiously a tourist trap that it is actually, among the 'cool' Italy-knowers online, to brag about never having visited, or to have hated visiting, at least.
What's the deal, then? Should you go or not go? What do the locals want? I don't know. However, it's hard not to argue that too many people are visiting Venice. If you've ever read the news, for some reason the crowd control measures this city in particular has taken have become worldwide news. The first policy that became famous was that banning cruise ships. Seemingly, this has not stemmed the tide of visitors. The second is the new user fee for tourists--some 5 Euros for most travelers. There is also a separate tax on hotels/AirBnBs within the city that is separate from the fee. This much most people know.
At 5 Euros, the entrance fee is mostly nominal, and tourists treat it that way. However, since a city like Venice requires a large amount of maintenance (including the fact that it is apparently sinking into the ocean) it is a great way to raise some needed funds. I would have predicted this would be popular with Venetians, but it turns out that it is quite unpopular. Charging a fee to travel into a city, they argue, has the effect of turning it into an amusement park rather than somewhere business is conducted and people live.
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Let me put it this way: say there is an old tower in Bologna that you can climb to the top of. It is visible from the street and looks like it shold have a good view. However, it costs something like 40 Euros for the privilege of climbing those windy stairs. Yet, it is often sold out the day of. I see the price, I scoff, and I say, who would pay for something like that? And I do something else. Yet those who really want to go will pay the fee. You could argue, I guess, that everyone deserves the chance to climb this tower, but it's a tower. It's not food or water. I'll live without it.
There is, in all cases, a limit to how much people will pay. The same logic applies most often to the busiest toll roads in the United States, those leading into Manhattan. For decades only a nominal fee has been charged. People don't really even consult the price when going through a toll. With the advent of congestion pricing (even the nerfed version that has been implemented) the small group of people that drive their cars into Lower Manhattan has, to some extent, eased their grip on the city. Okay, so what if tourists were charged 50 Euros each to visit Venice? This, I think, would prevent me from having visited. But, those who did go would be treated to a better experience.
People naturally do not want money to be the determining factor of access to everything in life. However, as demand for tourism grows, it will be. There will be no form of 'rent control' for AirBnBs or for the price of food in Venice--those prices will go up as more people try to fit into what little land there is there. Flight prices will go up as more planes squeeze into that small airport and more people try to travel at once. The result is that everyone is spending more money to be less happy.
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Why is Venice in particular such an issue? Tourists visit other cities in similar amounts. The issue is because there is so little of it. There is no built environment exactly like it--a modern functioning city that has no roads within it. You do actually have to walk or take a boat to go anywhere. That is coupled with the medieval street layout, where it is legitimately possible without the aid of a map to get lost. Practically every street is the width of an alleyway. And, since it is an old European city, there are a ton of palaces and other buildings that are really masterpieces of architecture and an actual joy to be around.
The solution, then, is that Venice should be expanded. In fact, this is what in many ways happened. In terms of population, Venice has a "Venice Region" on the Italian mainland whose population and land area far exceeds the actual city of Venice. But that doesn't solve the tourism problem. The first thing you'll notice when flying out of Venice, and seeing the 'lagoon', as they call it, is that it becomes clear how they built the place. There are numerous mudflats and shallow areas, some with small farms or estates (probably with high homeowner's insurance rates). In a world without cars where short distances between nodes was the highest priority in development, the builders of Venice simply filled in more land on these flats and expanded the city across all the various islands that now make up the city.
The issues with expanding Venice itself have to do with cost and historic preservation. While everything in our lives has been made more efficient and easier, building Venice would take roughly as much skilled labor as it did hundreds of years ago. Because it's not more efficient to fill in land and build medieval buildings out of stone, by hand, in order to convince people to do this work, you have to pay them more than the chunk of bread and 10 cents they were probably paid back in the day to do it, since those people can just as easily do easier labor for more money. The other issue is that changing things about Venice would, in the view of some, desecrate it.
Venice has seen changes--there is now a rail line with a terminal on the island itself (the station of which is a rare example of 'Fascist Architecture' as it is called) and new, larger, docks have been filled in outside the main area of the city. Italy is a country that is often joked to have "already done all it's work" hundreds of years ago. They say the country is in a state of retirement, and it's easy to see why--Italy has an aging population, low and declining birth rates, and is hostile as a culture to outsiders. I don't see them trying anything drastic.
It is of course, the ultimate economic chauvinism to apply the principles of supply and demand to a one of a kind, priceless part of human history such as Venice. So, to cure the issue, I will center my revised proposal around the source of that chauvinism: The United States. The interior of the U.S. is well-suited for tourism--there is land available, airports and highways deeply subsidized by government debt, and a general friendliness towards environmental destruction and entrepreneurship. I will propose the creation of several new Venices, most of which will be in the continental United States.
- The Florida Everglades
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In Florida, nothing is sacred. The expansive swampy national park was already partially drained to create Miami. To build another Venice, we just need 160 measly square miles of this ecosystem to be filled in. The water is already there, and the mosquitos. There are also already extremely hurricane-prone Venice-like suburbs in Florida, but these have the drawback of being surburban SFH-style low-amenity situations. I am proposing something denser and more walkable. Imagine dining on alligator meat while watching unvaccinated gondoliers putter down the canal. I would probably go once a year at least.
- Lake Francis Case, South Dakota
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We have already tamed and destroyed the Great Plains the best we could, so this should be no surprise. It happens that the size of this man-made reservoir is the same as Venice. This development opportunity is as good as any I've ever seen. America is the land of owners of small speedboats--imagine a Venice complete with six-lane boat highways, boat parking lots, boat "car washes", boat gas stations--the people of South Dakota could make this a very beautiful place.
- Lake Sakakawea, North Dakota
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This area is already a thriving resort town. Want to know why? If you guessed that it was the forced displacement of Native Americans, you would be correct. If this lake were to be filled in, ownership of the land could be returned to its rightful inhabitants. What they do with it once we rebuild Venice there, I don't care. But I know the tourism money would go a long way.
- Tulare Lake, California
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Before we knew that wetlands were cool, we turned the entire Central Valley of California into a desert. In the valley was an inland lake that was quite large--larger than Venice. The lake sits at a sort of depression below the mountains where water collects, and it has intermittently refilled itself. There are proposals to restore it permanently, but farmers get dibs on the water, so it's been difficult. If we turned the place into a tourist destination, then we'd really be somewhere.
- Grevelingen, Netherlands
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The Dutch have an appetite for citybuilding and cycling, and I want to give them a fair shot at designing the next Venice. Imagine boats traveling the canal with bike racks, or better yet boats with miniature bike paths built on top of them which, if you timed things right, you could ride over them to get between islands. It would be like Mario Kart. This lake is one of the largest in Europe (the 101st largest) and so it probably is big enough that you could fit Venice right in the middle of it.
Honorable mentions for Venice locations include: Buffalo, New York (on the lake), New York City (below the southern tip of Manhattan), anywhere in Hawaii, and Dubai.
The most annoying way to conclude this article
Let's be real--the attraction of Venice is the urban form it provides. There is no reason we can't build dense/walkable places, we just won't do it. People say they want to visit them, they say they want to live in them, but then they also really want parking spaces and drive thrus. Pick one, guys.
Where am I?
I'm writing! I'm writing the next book. Yes I am. Hopefully there will be more to share soon.