Sinking city: how Venice is managing Europe's worst tourism
crisis
Venice’s booming tourism industry is threatening the city’s
very survival. But grassroots initiatives are making a difference – and may
even help other cities
Paula Hardy
Tue 30 Apr 2019 06.00 BST
It is estimated that 25 million tourists currently visit
Venice each year – a figure expected to rise to 38 million by 2025.
Friday 15 March was a rare day in Venice: on the concourse
in front of the Santa Lucia train station, Venetians outnumbered tourists.
Young Venetians had skipped school to join the global youth
climate strike, holding placards with statements such as “If climate was a
bank, you’d save it.” The movement is especially relevant in Venice, since a
50cm rise in sea levels could see the city vanish beneath the waves.
Critical as the climate crisis is, the city faces a more
immediate risk: the rising tide of tourists, presently estimated at 25 million
a year and projected to reach 38 million by 2025.
Nowadays you can go
to a place and virtually never meet a local
Europe, already the world’s largest tourism market, received
713 million international visitors in 2018, an 8% increase on the previous
year, according to the UN World Tourism Organization. But, in European cities,
the increase is far greater: since 2008, overnight stays have jumped 57%. While
tourism provides significant economic benefit – contributing €2bn annually in
gross revenue to Venice alone – overtourism is causing cities like Barcelona,
Amsterdam, Dubrovnik and others to make international headlines on issues
ranging from housing affordability, environmental degradation and the
destruction of local life.
In 2016 in Dubrovnik, residents were outraged when the mayor
asked them to stay home to avoid the dangerous levels of crowds disembarking
from multiple cruise ships. The new mayor, Mato Frankovic, has since capped the
number of cruise ships that can dock in the city at two per day, cut souvenir
stalls by 80% and cut restaurant seating in public spaces by 30%. But similar
issues of overcrowding in Palma de Mallorca, San Sebastián, Prague and Salzburg
have brought locals out into the streets in increasingly impassioned protests.
One of the most dramatic was Venice’s 2016 No Grandi Navi
(“No Big Ships”) protest, when locals took to the Giudecca Canal in small
fishing boats to block the passage of six colossal cruise ships. And, although
plans have been announced this year to reroute the largest ships to a new dock
in Marghera (still to be built), campaigners still argue for a dock outside the
lagoon at the Lido, where heavy cargo ships historically unloaded.
This is just one of the ways the Venetian Republic
safeguarded the equilibrium of the lagoon and the complex system of commerce
around it. In fact, the act of sustaining the lagoon for over a millennium is a
singular human achievement, because a lagoon by definition is a temporary
natural phenomenon. Venice’s lagoon would have silted in 500 years ago if it
hadn’t been for careful environmental protection, sensitive technical
intervention and strict commercial regulation – a historic blueprint that
provides useful lessons for tourism.
In 2016 Venetians
took to the Giudecca Canal in small fishing boats to block the passage of six
colossal cruise ships.
A new generation of concerned citizens and entrepreneurs is
taking up that challenge, combining grassroots activism with socially
sensitive, sustainable initiatives to save their island home. Consider waste.
What comes into Venice must be removed again via a complex collection and
recycling system. Every day an army of sanitation workers knocks on every door
in the city, collecting waste to be ferried away on barges. The same rules and
fines, however, do not apply to tourists – despite the fact that during high
season the bins around Piazza San Marco have to be emptied every half an hour.
We don’t pretend to
be [Leonardo] DiCaprio, but through these small actions we hope to do something
positive
Troubled by the plastic waste generated by their two
boutique hotels – the Novecento and Hotel Flora – the Romanelli family have
taken action, eliminating plastic bottles from their properties, and
encouraging guests to use steel flasks at Venice’s historic water fountains,
for which they supply a map. “We don’t pretend to be [Leonardo] DiCaprio, but
through these small actions we hope to do something positive,” says the owner,
Gioele Romanelli.
With just 50 rooms and 40 members of staff, they calculate
they save 36,000 plastic bottles a year. Multiply that by the estimated 40,000
guest beds in Venice – to say nothing of restaurants or the waste unloaded from
cruise ships – and you could save hundreds of millions of plastic bottles a
year. “Our children learn about these issues at school and all of them carry
their own water flasks, so why not us?” concludes Romanelli’s wife, Heiby.
Addressing the issue of waste is only the most tangible
effort to create a more sustainable tourism in Venice.This June will see the
launch of Fairbnb, a not-for-profit home-sharing site that only permits
resident hosts; mandates one home per host; and contributes half of the 15%
booking fee to social projects.
Their launch is timely. Since 2015, short-term tourist
rentals in Venice have tripled from 2,800 to 9,452, according to Airdna. Of
those, 80% are entire home rentals, many are owned by agencies or foreign
investors and a 2018 report by Centro Studi di Federalberghi Nazionale found
the most prolific host in the city had 135 listings.
We’re not anti-Airbnb
– we just want to show it’s possible to create a tourism model that works for
locals as well as travellers
Other European cities are responding to similar problems.
Barcelona is prosecuting unlicensed apartments and has secured access to
Airbnb’s host data in order to pursue offenders. In Madrid, home sharing is now
only permitted in houses with their own entrances. Palma, meanwhile, has banned
short-term tourist rentals completely.
“Without significant regulation of the rental market [in
Italy], we saw the only way to change things was to provide a market
alternative,” says Emanuele dal Carlo, a Venetian who is one of five
co-founders of Fairbnb, which crowdfunded for its startup cash. “We’re not
anti-Airbnb – we just want to show that it’s possible to create a tourism model
that works for local communities as well as travellers.”
On booking, Fairbnb renters decide which project to support
and are invited to visit or participate: in Venice this could mean joining
volunteers cleaning graffiti or helping turn a centuries-old squero (boat yard)
into an educational centre.
“We want to bring back the connection between tourists and
locals that has been lost,” dal Carlo says. “Nowadays you can go to a place and
virtually never meet a local. But this way you can join them in their real
pursuits or even just share a drink together.”
This loss of connection between locals and tourists is
something that Valeria Duflot and Sebastian Fagarazzi are also concerned with.
Their website Venezia Autentica directs tourists to Venice businesses that
support a sustainable local economy – everything from printmakers to
photographers, mosaicists to rowers. This is because too few of the city’s 25
million tourists frequent shops and restaurants owned by Venetians, they say.
“Quality local businesses definitely need more customers, visitors included,”
Duflot says.
Across Europe, other grassroots groups are also fighting to
preserve local cultures. In 2017, the social movement Mora rem Lisboa, in
conjunction with 30 local associations, wrote an open letter denouncing
Lisbon’s excessive dependency on tourism and real estate speculation. And last
May, 14 cities and islands – 10 of them Spanish, alongside Venice, Lisbon and
Malta – joined forces to form the Network of Southern European Cities against
Touristification, arguing that mass tourism causes high rents, pollution, the
loss of local shops and the proliferation of low-wage jobs.
This is what the European Parliament was referring to when,
in 2015, it declared that “European tourism must make a transition from a model
of quantitative growth to a qualitative model leading to steady and sustainable
development.”
To kick-start new thinking on the matter, they awarded the
inaugural 2019 European Capital of Smart Tourism to Helsinki for the city’s
locally-oriented tourism strategy, which is based on sustainability and the
assumption that what makes a city attractive to residents will appeal to
travellers, too.
It is this focus on the liveability of a city that Venetian
data scientist Fabio Carrera believes is the key to Venice’s future. Because if
a city cannot retain its own populous, no amount of tourist tax will be able to
avert its inevitable decline and death.
As such, Carrera has dedicated 30 years of his academic life
working on the Venice Project Centre, dividing his time between Worcester
Polytechnic Institute, the prestigious Santa Fe Institute and Venice. During
that time, he has supervised over 250 projects examining the city’s challenges:
mapping every bridge, bell tower, well and water bus.
The centre also also tracks tourism flows, and has concluded
that Venice’s maximum carrying capacity is 55,000 tourists per day, or 20 million
per year if European safety standards are to be maintained. It’s not far from
the current number of 25 million, he points out – it just needs to be managed
better.
A new wave of digital tools could offer some solutions. At
the centre’s startup incubator SerenDPT, students are working on projects
including smart transport apps, hybrid mortgage schemes that use tourism income
to assist with repayments, and a Smart Control Room for the city council that
they hope they can export to other cities. He believes these new business
ideas, among others, would create the kind of high quality jobs that could
refloat the local economy.
No other city faces a bigger tourism challenge, says Carrera
– but given Venice’s uniquely contained and complex character, nowhere is
better equipped to meet the challenge of sustainable tourism. “Younger
generations have been out in the world,” he says. “They see other possibilities
and want to bring that back to Venice.”
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