Nobody's here. A project for living and working spaces in Venice, Cannaregio

Venice faces, with a constant pace, a continuous depopulation which lead the 174.000 residents registered in 1951 to be 53.000 in 2018. If the bad physical living conditions of the city could be a first cause of this phenomenon, a second factor then proved to be the main responsible: the city being turned into a museum. This fact has socio- economic implications on one side and formal ones on the other. From a socio-economic point of view, the fact Venice relies almost exclusively on tourism means that local shops are replaced by services for tourists and that turning a house into a tourist accommodation is much more profitable. From a formal point of view, instead, this means that nothing in the city can be modified, as it would negatively impact the image the touristic flow is attracted by. But after all, Venice is still a city, where people live and work, with spaces waiting for projects, where the issues of a clearly extraordinary city are the same a “normal” city faces. Against all odds, the city holds a strong position in the cultural field, especially in academic and artistic sectors, and gain and loses new—often temporary— residents every six months. Hence the proposed project for a longtime abandoned site nearby the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, in Cannaregio. The project proposes the adaptation of the traditional Palazzo typology, either from a formal— structural point of view and from a functional one, hosting living and working spaces in the same building. It simulates, by proposing different dwelling typologies, the silent transformations the majority of Venetian buildings underwent in the last years to maximise their touristic accommodation capability. It aims at fulfilling the needs of this new Venetian population which, even though temporary, is growing, has a positive impact on the social fabric and can represent a possible way out for a city which is demographically demonstrating its destruction.