The impulse to save everything no longer makes sense. It’s time to leave the city as a monument to the dangers of global warming—and rethink our relationship to heritage.
Tlačítko Přehrát / Pozastavit
Video: WIRED Staff; Getty Images
Uložte tento příběh
Uložte tento příběh
“My own solution for the problem of Venice is to let her sink,” wrote British author and onetime Venice resident Jan Morris with casual mercilessness in a 1971 essay for Architektonická recenze . She reiterated the point in The New York Times four years later, hammering home her point with conviction and relish: “Let her sink.”
And yet Morris predicted that this would never be Venice’s fate, because “the world would not allow it.” That may be true. What she wasn’t right about was the time frame of the impending tragedy. She thought it would be a long time coming—“One cannot hang around for the apocalypse”—but likely didn’t envisage that only 50 years later, scientists would be able to predict that, in a worst-case scenario, Venice could be underwater by 2100. Prepare the horses; the apocalypse is here. You don’t prepare for the end of the world by battening down the hatches and staying put— you need to adapt.
This is part of Next Normal, WIRED’s series on the future of morality and how our ethical beliefs may change in the years to come.
“One thing we’re trying to explore in heritage practice is going beyond the impulse to save everything all the time,” says UK-based cultural geography professor Caitlin DeSilvey. In her 2017 book Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving, DeSilvey wrote about letting landscapes and landmarks transform, buffeted by the wind or eroded by waves, rather than forcing them to remain in the state in which we inherited them. “The heritage sector has a bit of a block, because when you talk about managing that kind of change, and you talk about ruination, that’s perceived to be a failure,” she adds.
But as loss and destruction of global heritage sites due to climate change becomes more commonplace, we need to change the way we think about that loss and redefine our notion of failure. Our values must shift along with our changing climate. As researchers Erin Seekamp and Eugene Jo put it in a 2020 paper, we need a “transition of values from what has been known to what can become, overcoming the tendency for continual maintenance and last-ditch efforts to prolong the inevitable.”
The situation has changed since Morris wrote about Venice, looking out from her perch on the Punta della Dogana. If Morris described the city as a problem in the ’70s, it is now a disaster, swallowed whole by both the rise of water and the rise of tourism.
Though it is well documented that Venice is sinking, its new MOSE flood barriers do an excellent job of protecting it. In November 2022, they saved Venice from its biggest tide in 50 years, which would have devastated the city. But the system was built after years of delays, a corruption scandal, and a price tag of €6.2 billion ($6.9 billion). It is set to cost a further €200,000 each time the barriers are raised, and it will need to be raised ever more frequently. Seekamp and Jo argue that preserving all World Heritage sites and their current values “in perpetuity” is “fiscally impossible.” In Venice’s case, that money could be used instead to relocate the city’s residents, and if its urban heritage is going to be lost or irrevocably changed, we could switch our focus to the protection of its natural heritage, as the lagoon is one of the most important coastal ecosystems in the whole Mediterranean basin.
Nejoblíbenější
Maska krvavého prasete je jen součástí nového divokého trestního obvinění proti eBay
Lily Hay Newman
Překvapivé věci, které pomohly udělat rok 2023 nejžhavějším rokem všech dob
Matt Simon
49 nejlepších filmů na Netflixu tento týden
Matt Kamen
51 nejlepších pořadů na Netflix právě teď
Matt Kamen
And were we to let the “Bride of the Adriatic,” as Morris calls the city, be “enfolded at last by the waters she espoused,” the angel on top of the St Mark’s bell tower poking out above the lagoon’s sandbanks, would that not be a powerful visual reminder of the ravages of climate change and our role in rising global temperatures? Imagine the scene: Boats of tourists can sail over the area as a guide explains that this is where one of the world’s greatest maritime powers used to be, before it succumbed to a most “Venetian end.”
The affront we may feel at the idea of letting the rich cultural and artistic history of Venice fall under the waves indicates the emotional attachment we have with historical sites. There’s nothing wrong with feeling emotional about old buildings. But losing a built structure does not have to mean severing our connection to the site. “We can stay connected to these places as we watch them undergo change,” DeSilvey says.
This idea of “transformative continuity” means that places that have been damaged by climate change can serve as a “memory” and even a deterrent, to prevent the same thing happening in the future. It also allows us to discover new heritage values in a site as it evolves. Seekamp and Jo use the example of the Gardens of Ninfa in southern Italy, where a beautiful garden was cultivated in the ruins of an abandoned medieval city, giving the site a “renewed living heritage” that both celebrates its history and endows it with new values of biodiversity and a flourishing ecosystem. Other studies have shown how abandoned man-made structures like harbors have proven ecologically productive, becoming unintended habitats for marine wildlife. While that it isn’t a reason to let a structure fall into ruin, it does show that there may be ancillary environmental advantages to decay.
That doesn’t mean giving up and abandoning cultural sites to climate change as soon as they are threatened. Going back to that cost argument: This isn’t the free option. It would require physical management of the site to make sure it doesn’t become dangerous, and a process of digital documentation and archiving and profound consultation with the public and other stakeholders. Technologies like augmented reality and drone imaging can create immersive experiences for visitors and provide another way of seeing heritage sites. It may not be the same experience, but heritage is capable of interpreting absence, maybe more so than other sectors. “There are a lot of people who find ruins more interesting than stable structures!” DeSilvey laughs. “And yet we shy away from the idea of creating a new ruin, because no one wants to be responsible for making the decision to let something transition.”
We also have to detach our sense of national or regional identity from our heritage sites and think outside the modern, Western framework of permanence. Seekamp, who works with the US National Parks Service, explains that the Indigenous communities she speaks to sometimes see impermanence as an integral part of their cultural sites and the landscape in general—some places are znamenalo to alter with the seasons and climatic changes. This is why a people-centered approach is vital: It opens us up to different heritage ideologies that are better adapted to our changing world.
Deep underwater, at the four mouths where the lagoon meets the sea, 78 giant walls fastened to the seafloor with hinges emptied themselves of water, filled with air and rose to the surface, where they held back the swelling sea.
Over the long November night, the city’s high-water forecasters drank coffee in an office by the Rialto Bridge, watching live feeds of 20-foot waves crashing on the other side of the walls. Eventually, the sea level outside the walls reached more than 5½ feet – the third highest in more than a century of records, a level that would normally risk lives, strand Venetians and tourists, and drown the economy.
Not this time. The city was drenched with rain but hardly a drop of seawater. MOSE, an Italian acronym for Experimental Electromechanical Module, evoking the biblical Moses, had parted the waters and saved the city.
“Without the walls, it would be a disaster,” said Alvise Papa, the director of the tide forecast center, who grew up rescuing merchandise from his father’s hat shop when high water shot up like fountains through cracks in the floor. “Instead, it’s normal life. Let’s thank the god of MOSE.”
Now, though celebrated as the city’s sentinel, MOSE may yet stand as a monument to the inexorable nature of climate change and the futility of man’s efforts to stop it. MOSE’s walls, costing 5 billion euros, about $5.3 billion, took so long to come together that the pace of climate change is outstripping the projections they were built to withstand.
After all of the effort to get the barriers up, the future challenge will be finding ways to keep them down. Venice is already using MOSE more than expected and faces the prospect of needing it much more than it had imagined against rising seas – so often that it would threaten to seal the city from the waters that are its lifeblood.
Its incessant deployment, experts warn, could render Venice’s lagoon a fetid swamp choked by noxious algae, turning the city’s charming canals into stinking open sewers.
Yet if the waters are not held at bay, there is little doubt that Venice will eventually be submerged and uninhabitable.
Today, Venice is safe, but it is staring at a future of excruciating trade-offs, with the sea level so high so often that the city will require constant protection.
“At that point, I must decide,” Papa said. “Do I save the city, or do I save the lagoon?”
Potápějící se město
Venice exists because of and despite the sea. Since its founding, water has both protected and threatened it. Venetians have always struggled to keep a balance between the two.
When refugees from the Italian mainland first settled on the mud flats and islets here in the fifth century, they built foundations with wooden piles in the sediment. They erected sea walls in white Istrian stone, impermeable to salt. They manipulated the lagoon to fit their needs. Their ingenuity built the Republic of Venice into a rich and strong maritime power.
In 1897, Venice began taking the measure of its enemy, establishing a reference mark for high water at the Punta della Salute entrance of the Grand Canal. In the first two decades of the 20th century, Venice had high tides above 110 centimeters, about 3 feet and 7 inches, only six times.
But the average sea level in Venice has risen nearly 1 foot since 1900. In the past 20 years, tides have exceeded 110 centimeters more than 150 times.
But it is not just that the seas are rising. Venice is sinking. The tectonic plates under the city are naturally settling, a process accelerated in the 20th century by the pumping of groundwater for use in the industrial port of neighboring Marghera.
From 1950 to 1970, Venice sank nearly 5 inches. The pumping has long stopped, but Venice still sinks about 2 millimeters a year.
In November 1966, a fatal flood of more than 6 feet hit, the worst measured. Water paralyzed Venice, destroying buildings and the already fragile sense of the city as a secure place.
Italy was confronted with a terrible question: Could Venice be saved?
An elegant solution
Acknowledging “general sea level rise,” Italy’s National Research Council held a competition in 1970 for companies to come up with proposals on how to rescue the city.
Ideally, it wanted walls that could open and close to stop high water while also allowing ships to pass and maintaining the natural exchange of waters between the sea and the lagoon.
Riva Calzoni, the Milan firm behind the winning idea, sketched sea walls that filled with air and floated up to meet the high tides and then filled back with water to lower again, a secure but nearly invisible defense that would cost less to maintain than a fixed, exposed structure.
But if the idea of MOSE was elegant in its simplicity, the reality was more complicated. The project would accompany Italy through the next half-century.
In 1984, the government subcontracted the building of MOSE to a consortium of major Italian companies and estimated that the walls would be put in place by 1995. It was not until 2003 that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a proponent of big public works, laid the first stone. The estimate then was that the project would be finished by 2011.
MOSE became a constant source of controversy and doubt. Over the years, a culture of secrecy, shady business practices and government corruption seeped into the project. In 2014, Venice prosecutors revealed a scheme to overbill the government and bribe politicians to keep the project and public money flowing. They arrested 35 people.
Afterward, from 2014 to 2018, public financing dried up as the state, loath to enable more graft, examined expenditures with extreme caution. Many businesses involved in the scandal folded.
Disaster foretold
On the night of Nov. 12, 2019, a sharp drop in temperature caused what Papa, the head forecaster, described as a never-before-seen “anomalous tropical cyclone.”
At its height, the tide hit more than 6 feet and flooded more than 85% of the city, killing two people and causing untold damage.
This was it, the big one that MOSE had been designed to stop. Engineers at the time said it was ready. But it stood down.
The failure to stop the great floods brought political pressure, international scrutiny and uncomfortable introspection to Venice and all of Italy. A change had to be made.
In the days after the flood, Mirco Angiolin, the site manager at the sea wall’s command center, lamented that the walls were ready but that no one was in charge to activate MOSE when it was needed.
“We need a chief,” he said.
Rome accelerated the appointment of Elisabetta Spitz, a top public-sector manager, as MOSE’s overseer.
She said she “made the decision” Oct. 3, 2020, to lift the walls – not to answer a crisis but as a simple test. With relatively little fanfare, the walls went up.
Since then, Venice has been protected from high-water events, but the parts of the city that flood at lower levels remain precariously exposed.
The experts who had conceived MOSE estimated that the sea walls would need to be raised an average of five times a year to stop tides of about 3 feet, 7 inches. Since MOSE began functioning about two years ago, the walls have been raised 49 times.
On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authoritative body of experts convened by the United Nations, said the Earth was likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade. According to their best estimate, the sea level in Venice could rise by nearly 2 feet by the end of the century.
At that rate, experts say the walls would need to be up more often than they were down. Combine that with the increasingly common violent winds and record rainfalls that push more water into the lagoon, and the walls may need to be raised nearly constantly.
Defenders of the sea walls expressed frustration with doomsday predictions about their effect in a century’s time, especially since MOSE has left Venice better defended than many other coastal cities.
Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice, has asked the government for another 1.5 billion euros over 10 years to help protect the city.
The mluvčí-recenze noviny
Místní žurnalistika je nezbytná.
Poskytněte přímo sérii komunitních fór Northwest Passages The Spokesman-Review – která pomáhá kompenzovat náklady na několik pozic reportérů a redaktorů v novinách – pomocí jednoduchých možností níže. Dary zpracované v tomto systému nejsou daňově odečitatelné, ale používají se převážně k tomu, aby pomohly splnit místní finanční požadavky potřebné k získání národních grantových fondů.
