Speakers
Description
In recent years, cultural heritage has become a favored resource in real-estate dynamics, particularly in historic cities. Privatization, deeply rooted in processes of financialization of urban policy, has indeed exploited the real-estate value embedded in such assets, not infrequently leading to speculative mechanisms, as well as social exclusion. The interaction of public and private actors is shaped by specific policy and regulatory frameworks that, in different national and local contexts, seek to harness social values from these market interventions.
Reflections on this topic are particularly enriching when considering the city of Venice in North-Eastern Italy, a heritage-rich context subject, in recent years, to selling state-owned properties – such as buildings and even the remote smaller islands of the lagoon – to foster global investments and touristification.
This contribution explores how different actors (public authorities, private developers, transnational architects, and civil society) interact and negotiate, by specifically reflecting on the conversion of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi into a major luxury store. This case is particularly illustrative of the way public and private actors have interacted, in the last years, to foster urban transformations in the lagoon city. Built in the early 1500s and once an important commercial hub between the Republic of Venice and German traders, it was heavily altered during the 1920s and 1930s in successive conservation projects aimed at transforming it into the headquarters of Poste Italiane (mail service). Such a public function was held until 2009, when the Municipality of Venice sold the building to Edizione Srl, a financial and real-estate company of the global fashion brand Benetton. Amidst the uncertainties of the European crisis of 2007 and of the global financial crisis of 2008, Fondaco rapidly became an emblem of the heritage-driven privatization affecting Venice in the past 20 years.
The formal agreements that followed its alienation, the changing from public to private function, and the architectural transformations proposed by Rem Koolhaas’ office (OMA), expose the convergence and contraposition of interests among public and private actors, national and transnational. We portray this process in detail, analyzing the documents related to the approval of OMA’s design, the agreements made between the Municipality and Edizione, as well as the press releases of the period 2010-2016.
In this process, transnational actors such as OMA and the DFS Group (in charge of the commercial management of the Fondaco) stretched the foreseeable limits of such interactions in the interplay of capital, urban planning and heritage – nonetheless with interests of their own. Furthermore, individual actors in charge of such organizations were put at the forefront as they advocated for mutually favorable (but not necessarily well-balanced) public-private partnerships. These partnerships highlight a “regulation through agreements” that increasingly challenges the Venetian urban governance. They aim to find a balance between attracting capital to foster growth in a rapidly depopulating and ageing city, while at the same time maintaining some kind of public access to them.
As dissonant voices grew, the political outcomes were questioned by techno-administrative instances, and the actor network constellation, including non-human agents, generated significant consequences that substantially affected the intervention proposed and finally built between 2014 and 2016. The analysis also considers the recent news announcing the failure of the commercial enterprise after less than 10 years of activity, and the closure of Fondaco scheduled for the first semester of 2025.
Eventually, the case of Fondaco helps understand the mechanisms of property regulation in Venice, at the same time allowing for a more general reflection on similar dynamics within heritage-rich contexts.
References
Bandarin, F. (2024) Changing Heritage: How Internal Tensions and External Pressures are Threatening our Cultural and Natural Legacy. London: Routledge.
Gravari-Barbas, M. and Guinand, S. (2017) (eds) Tourism and Gentrification in Contemperare Metropolises International Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Hammami, F., Jewesbury, D. and Valli, C. (2022) (eds) Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City. New York and London: Berghahn Books.
Peacock, A. and Rizzo, I. (2007) The Heritage Game: Economics, Policy, and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
| Keywords | heritage privatization; public-private partnerships; transnational architecture; Venice |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
