Portuguese explorers started navigating the world in the 1400s, and
the world is now exploring Portugal, most notably the French. French
couples are buying flats in Lisbon to spend time there, while major
exhibitions in Paris have been celebrating Portuguese artists and
architects. The Universalists, 50 Years of Portuguese Architecture at the Cité de l ‘Architecture, housed across the river from the Eiffel Tower, is one show not to miss. But hurry: it runs only until August 29.
Nearly sixty projects are featured, from a vivid 1960s Sagrada
Familia church in then-colonial Mozambique to startling 1970s public
housing—such as Alvaro Siza’s Bouça project in Porto and Gonçalo Byrne’s
Casal das Figuerias outside Lisbon—to Pritzker Prize winners’ projects
at home and abroad. Completed in 2011, the same year as his Pritzker,
Eduardo Souto de Moura’s concrete Kortrijk Crematorium appears so spare
and so humbly rooted in its rural Belgian setting that it almost
disappears. Fellow honoree Siza’s category-defying Building on Water,
completed in 2014 for Shihlien Chemical in China, illustrates principles
of local inspiration, as opposed to modernist formulas, that continue
to mark Portuguese architecture.
Visitors to the show are greeted by a 1976 photo of professors from
Porto on a visit to Greece, all smiling in bell-bottoms and sandals,
including a young Siza and the influential theoretician Fernando Távora.
The exhibition then proceeds as a chronological circuit of renderings
and photographs. Pritzker winners are mixed alongside dozens of
lesser-known talents. Convents, sports arenas, beachfront
amenities—Siza’s 1966 “Piscine Das Marés” is getting lots of attention.
Interspersed throughout are photos and footage of the upheavals
surrounding the 1974 revolution in which dictatorial rule was
overthrown, and subsequently colonial possessions were granted
independence. In these images, writers, architects, and students are
seen denouncing their country’s colonialism, and any subservience to
architectural conformity identified as “globalism.”
Long considered marginal and out of sync with wealthier western countries, Portugal’s architecture is now a source of pride.
During the Enlightenment, every fixed point of knowledge began to wobble. Illustration by Brian Cronin
We
like to think of ourselves as living in an age of unprecedented
disruption. Just look at all the commonplace features of our world that
didn’t exist a century ago—jet travel, television, space flight, the
Internet. If you could transport someone from the year 1916 to the
present, we ask a little proudly, wouldn’t that person be stupefied by
the changes? And, of course, he would be, at least for a few days, until
he figured out how everything worked. But one thing would be very
familiar to such a time traveller: the pride, and the anxiety, we feel
about being so modern. For people in the early twentieth century were as
acutely aware of their modernity as we are of ours, and with just as
good reason. After all, they might have said, imagine someone
transported from 1816 to 1916: what would that person have thought of
railroads, telegraphs, machine guns, and steamships?
Modernity
cannot be identified with any particular technological or social
breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an
intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people
who lived before us. Modern life, which we tend to think of as an
accelerating series of gains in knowledge, wealth, and power over
nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact with the past.
Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a
disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined
by which side you take on this question. But it is always disorienting.
If
we are looking for the real origins of the modern world, then, we have
to look for the moment when that world was literally
disoriented—stripped of its sense of direction. Heliocentrism, the
doctrine that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa,
was announced by Copernicus in 1543 and championed by Galileo in the
early sixteen-hundreds. This revelation was immediately experienced as a
profound dislocation, as John Donne testified in his 1611 poem “An
Anatomy of the World”: “The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s
wit / Can well direct him where to look for it.” More than two hundred
and fifty years later, Nietzsche was reeling from the same cosmic loss
of direction: “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its
sun? . . . Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward,
in all directions? Is there still any up or down?” Modernity is a
vertigo that began in the sixteenth century and shows no sign of letting
up.
Nietzsche is usually
classified as a philosopher, Donne as a poet, and Galileo as a
scientist. But one of the premises of Anthony Gottlieb’s new book, “The
Dream of Enlightenment” (Liveright)—the second installment of his lucid,
accessible history of Western philosophy—is that thought cannot be
divided according to disciplines in this way. For philosophy, in
particular, such a division is misleading. Today, we tend to think of
philosophy as a specialized academic pursuit: a philosopher is a
professor of philosophy. But none of the founders of modern philosophy
whom Gottlieb discusses fit that description. Some were mathematicians:
René Descartes invented the Cartesian coördinate system with its x- and
y-axes, and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus (around the same time
as, but independently of, Isaac Newton). Some were professionals: Baruch
Spinoza ground lenses for optical equipment; John Locke was a doctor
and a diplomat. And some were literary writers, like David Hume, who was
better known in his lifetime for his “History of England” than for his
philosophical works. Usually, they overlapped several categories.
One
of Gottlieb’s central insights is that, as he wrote in his previous
volume, “The Dream of Reason,” which covered thought from the Greeks to
the Renaissance, “the history of philosophy is more the history of a
sharply inquisitive cast of mind than the history of a sharply defined
discipline.” You might say that philosophy is what we call thought in
its first, molten state, before it has had a chance to solidify into a
scientific discipline, like psychology or cosmology. When scientists ask
how people think or how the universe was created, they are addressing
the same questions posed by philosophy hundreds or even thousands of
years earlier. This is why, Gottlieb observes, people complain that
philosophy never seems to be making progress: “Any corner of it that
comes generally to be regarded as useful soon ceases to be called
philosophy.”
Therefore, philosophy
shouldn’t be considered a kind of centuries-long chess match, with
thinkers taking turns in an abstract intellectual game. For instance, in
treating the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it
is conventional to cast it as a struggle between “rationalists” and
“empiricists.” In this account, everyone from Descartes to Hume is
engaged in one long battle over whether truth is to be found “in here,”
through strictly logical reasoning on the model of mathematics, or “out
there,” through observation of the world. This debate, in turn, was
finally resolved by Immanuel Kant, in the late eighteenth century, when
he figured out a way to show that both sides were correct, since all
perception is necessarily filtered through the categories imposed by our
minds.
There
is some truth to this account—the origin of knowledge was certainly a
concern for all these thinkers. But Gottlieb, who is not an academic and
spent much of his career as a journalist—he is a former executive
editor of The Economist—sees that they were situated in a much
wider world. Their thought was informed not just by previous philosophy
but by politics, religion, and science—the whole intellectual and
spiritual life of their times. And it was because these times were so
tumultuous that they were able to think in such a radical way. Eras in
which everything is up for grabs are very rare, and they seem to be
highly productive for philosophy. As Gottlieb points out, much of the
Western philosophy that still matters to us is the product of just two
such eras: Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and Western
Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A.D.
It
is hard for us to comprehend how totally Western consciousness was
transformed during the second of these two periods, precisely because we
live in its aftermath. In just a few generations preceding it, every
fixed point that had oriented the world for thousands of years began to
wobble. The discovery of America destroyed established geography, the
Reformation destroyed the established Church, and astronomy destroyed
the established cosmos. Everything that educated people believed about
reality turned out to be an error or, worse, a lie. It’s impossible to
imagine what, if anything, could produce a comparable effect on us
today. Even the discovery of alien life in the universe wouldn’t do it,
since we have long learned to expect such a discovery, whereas medieval
Europeans could never have anticipated the existence of America, or of
electricity.
Perhaps if it were
somehow confirmed that, as some thinkers speculate, our universe is
actually a simulation run on a computer by an unfathomably advanced
intelligent civilization, we would feel an analogous sense of confusion
and possibility. That would raise the questions that were at the heart
of philosophy in both of Gottlieb’s magical periods in a new way. What
does it mean for something to be? Why does anything exist in the first
place? Such metaphysical questions are what, from the very beginning,
gave philosophy a bad name, because to practical-minded people they
appear useless. That is why the comic playwright Aristophanes, in his
play “The Clouds,” portrayed Socrates as discussing questions such as
whether a gnat buzzes through its nose or its anus. No one knows, sure,
but also no one cares.
Not caring
about things like being and meaning, however, is impossible, because
they are the fundamental concepts that structure our very experience of
the world. People who say they don’t care about metaphysics really mean
that their received ideas on such matters are so fixed that they have
disappeared from consciousness, in the same way that you don’t usually
notice your heartbeat. Philosophers are people who, for some
reason—Plato called it the sense of wonder—feel compelled to make the
obvious strange. When they try to communicate that basic, pervasive
strangeness or wonder to other people, they usually find that the other
people don’t like it. Sometimes, as with Socrates, they like it so
little that they put the philosopher to death. More often, however, they
just ignore him.
But the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were one of those rare periods when
a lot of people cared, because their sense of the world was decomposing
so dramatically. Literate people—and, thanks to the printing press,
there were more of these than ever before—were eager to hear from
philosophers who could give new answers to the ancient questions. If
everything you thought you knew was wrong, how could you ever be
confident that your knowledge was correct? Where does knowledge come
from? What is matter made of? Is there a God, and, if so, what kind of
being is he?
These were the
questions that animated the philosophers discussed by Gottlieb, starting
with Descartes. Born in 1596, Descartes was what at the time would have
been called a “natural philosopher,” or what we would call a scientist.
His areas of expertise, in addition to mathematics, included optics,
physiology, and meteorology. He “was so fascinated by machines and all
kinds of mechanical contraptions,” Gottlieb writes, “that, according to a
piece of widespread gossip, he was often accompanied by a life-size
working doll that was practically indistinguishable from his
illegitimate daughter, Francine.”
This
rumor was a fitting one, since Descartes argued for a thoroughly
mechanistic view of nature. For centuries, Aristotelian science had
taught that the fundamental units of being were substances, in which
qualities or “accidents” were lodged: thus, a cow is a substance, the
redness of the cow an accident. Descartes abolished this distinction,
holding, instead, that everything physical that exists is simply matter
in space. The primary facts of nature are things like “heaviness and
hardness,” which are descriptions of the physical arrangement of matter.
Secondary qualities, such as “light and colors, sounds, smells,
tastes,” and so on, are subjective. They appear to human beings because
of the way our sensory apparatus is constructed, but they are not
inherent in the things themselves.
Another
way of putting this is that Descartes described reality in terms of
qualities that can be measured mathematically. Descartes himself was a
towering mathematician, but he was far from the first philosopher to
regard mathematics as the gold standard of truth: Pythagoras and Plato
had done so two thousand years before. In the dialogue known as the
Meno, Plato depicts Socrates teaching a slave boy the Pythagorean
theorem—or, rather, leading the boy to figure it out for himself. The
dialogue shows what is so seductive about mathematics, that each step
follows inevitably from the previous step, in a way that makes it
absolutely beyond doubt or error. You can get math wrong, but when
you’re right you know you’re right.
“Sometimes it seems there just aren’t enough hours in the day.”
To
Plato, this could be explained by the fact that the soul had a life
before birth in which it learned mathematical truths, so that learning
is really a form of remembering. Descartes had no use for such a tale,
which raised far more questions than it answered. But he, too, was drawn
to the kind of certainty that mathematics offered, and in his
“Meditations” he claimed to have achieved it. Begin, Descartes wrote, by
doubting absolutely everything you know, think, and perceive; assume
that it is all delusive, as in a dream. Does anything remain absolutely
certain, even after this purge? One thing does, he argued: the fact of
my consciousness. If I did not exist as a mind, there would be no “I” to
be deceived by appearances. If I think, I must exist—Cogito ergo sum.
From
this fixed basis, Descartes believed that he could infallibly deduce
another crucial principle: the existence of a good God, who guarantees
the truth of my perceptions and so underwrites the existence of the
world. But here most people believe that Descartes went astray. “God’s
guarantee is not worth the paper Descartes wrote it on,” Gottlieb quips.
And, if God doesn’t exist, then all Descartes has done is leave the
individual trapped “in a prison of his own ideas,” unable to prove that
what he experiences has any basis in external reality. Indeed, Descartes
never found a satisfying solution to the problem of how mind and matter
interact. He famously identified the pineal gland as the point of
connection, though how a gland could have access to an immaterial mind
is far from clear.
Gottlieb
observes that Descartes would have been disappointed to know that he
gave rise to a whole new era of philosophy. He thought that there would
not have to be any philosophy after him, since he had solved all the
problems; only experimental research would remain. But while science
achieved amazing things in the years after Descartes—this was the age of
Newton’s discovery of gravity and Boyle’s invention of modern
chemistry—philosophy did not fall mute. The more that the new science
seemed to confirm Descartes’s mechanical picture of the universe, the
more necessary it became to ask what matter and mind really were and how
they fit together.
Some of the
answers that the best minds of the period came up with may now appear
bizarre. That is the case with Gottfried Leibniz, born in 1646, whom
Gottlieb calls “the greatest polymath since Aristotle.” When Leibniz
tried to tackle the problem of how mind and matter interact, he came up
with a radical new thesis: they don’t. Everything that exists, he
believed, is made up of units called monads, and these monads have
absolutely no way of impinging on or communicating with one
another—Leibniz referred to them as “windowless.” Each monad has its own
destiny, and it acts and moves entirely of its own accord. If the world
nonetheless appears to be a chain of causes and effects, that is
because the monads are programmed to behave in such a way that they seem
to be interacting. This “pre-established harmony” is guaranteed by a
beneficent God.
If philosophy is
defiance of common sense, then Leibniz’s ideas are very philosophical
indeed—too much so even for most of his fellow-philosophers. (Hegel
called them “a metaphysical romance.”) But he was driven to the apparent
absurdity of denying causality by his desperation to solve the problem
that Descartes couldn’t: How can immaterial mind affect material bodies,
and vice versa? Even today, cognitive scientists struggle to understand
how consciousness arises from matter, though few doubt that it does.
Likewise, the idea that, as Gottlieb writes, “physical bodies are . . .
not quite what they seem, but are only appearances somehow thrown up by
monads” seems less extravagant in the light of contemporary string
theory, which holds that everything that exists is the product of
vibrating one-dimensional objects. And both of these ideas can be seen
as refinements of the very first idea in Western philosophy, Thales’s
enigmatic statement that everything is water. In each case, theory
denies that the world as it appears is the fundamental reality, and
looks to something more original to explain it. To answer the questions
that philosophy asks, a long detour through science is necessary; but at
the beginning and the end of the journey we find the same sense of
wonder.
One of the most popular
names for the unexplainable is God: God is how we answer questions about
creation and purpose that we can’t answer in any other way. Certainly,
both Descartes and Leibniz relied on God to balance the equation of the
universe. Without him, they believed, the world did not make sense. The
philosophers’ God was not necessarily identical to the God of
Christianity, but he had some reassuringly familiar attributes, such as
beneficence and providential oversight of the world. But Baruch Spinoza,
another revolutionary thinker of the seventeenth century, went furthest
in reconceiving the idea of God, in ways so radical that his name
became a byword for dangerous atheism. Spinoza’s trouble with organized
religion started early: at the age of twenty-three, he was
excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for his heretical
views.
His heresy, as developed
later in his magnum opus, “Ethics,” was not to deny the existence of
God. Instead, Spinoza made God so crucial to the world that the
distinction between the two collapsed. There could not be two substances
in the universe, Spinoza argued, one physical and the other divine,
since this involved a logical contradiction. If God and Nature were
distinct, then it must be the case that Nature had some qualities that
God lacked, and the idea of a supreme being lacking anything was
incoherent. It follows that God and Nature are just two names for the
same thing, the Being that comprises everything that ever existed or
ever will exist.
This
radical idea, known as pantheism, has strange and paradoxical results.
On the one hand, it divinizes the universe, meaning that it brings God
very close to us—indeed, it says that we ourselves are part of God. On
the other hand, an immanent God is not the kind of God who watches over
the world, hears prayers, and punishes sinners. It is in this sense that
Spinoza’s contemporaries called him an atheist: he made God
unrecognizable. He was also much bolder than other philosophers in
stating what many of them surely believed, that the Bible was a human
document that contained no privileged information about historical
events or the nature of divinity. It should therefore be read and
studied like any other book, with due attention to the motives of its
authors and the errors that had crept in throughout years of
transmission. This secular, rational approach to Scripture made Spinoza
arguably the father of Biblical criticism.
A
more unexpected corollary of Spinoza’s pantheism is that it eliminates
the possibility of free will, or of contingency of any kind. After all,
if everything is God, and God is absolute, then there is no way that
anything could happen differently from the way it does. If we knew
enough about how the world works, we “would find all things just as
necessary as are all those treated in mathematics.” Once again, at a
time when so much of human knowledge had been cast into doubt, the idea
of mathematical certainty was seductive. Spinoza longed for “the kind of
knowledge of God that we have of the triangle,” and he wrote his
“Ethics” in the form of a numbered list of axioms and deductions—a form
that he adopted from Euclid’s treatise on geometry. Spinoza’s definition
of “blessedness” was “the intellectual love of God,” in which the mind
sees the necessity of everything in the world as simply and indubitably
as Plato’s slave perceived the necessity of the Pythagorean theorem.
If
Spinoza seemed to take away humanity’s metaphysical freedom, however,
he gave it an unprecedented degree of political freedom in exchange. In
his “Theological-Political Treatise,” he praised the tolerant
multicultural society of Amsterdam and held it up as a model for the
world. But he wanted to go even further. Democracy, he argued, was “of
all forms of government the most natural, and the most consonant with
individual liberty.” He insisted on libertas philosophandi,
freedom of thought, and, while he granted that the state had the power
to establish the outward forms of religious worship, he adamantly
opposed any coercion of conscience. Each person had the right to decide
what God was and how best to serve him. Taken together, these beliefs
give Spinoza a claim to be considered the first great philosopher of
liberal democracy.
There is
something unearthly about Spinoza’s thought; similarly, there was
something unworldly about the man himself. Gottlieb writes that “his
kindness and nobility of character were legendary,” and he quotes
Bertrand Russell’s description of Spinoza as “the noblest and most
lovable of the great philosophers.” But this kind of irreproachability
can be hard to take, just as the intellectual love of God can seem
impossible to attain. (Isaac Bashevis Singer’s great story “The Spinoza
of Market Street” concerns a Warsaw intellectual who spends his life
trying to achieve that superhuman serenity, only to fall humiliatingly
in love with his nurse.)
In
“The Dream of Enlightenment,” Gottlieb writes with particular affection
about his fellow-Brits, the philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and
David Hume. Where Descartes and Spinoza tried to come to grips with
reality through purely deductive logic, the conventional story goes,
Locke and Hume valued the evidence of the senses. Their empiricism is
often taken to be a peculiarly British kind of virtue, defining a
difference between British and Continental philosophy that persists to
this day: on the one hand, skepticism of knowledge that has no basis in
experience and experiment; on the other, outlandish theories based on
unrestrained ratiocination.
Gottlieb
does not structure his book around this opposition, but he does show
that it has some basis in fact. Of all the philosophers he discusses,
his favorite seems to be Hume, who went furthest in rejecting the
deductive, geometrical ideal in philosophy. Spinoza wanted a knowledge
of the world that was as certain as the truths of mathematics, but Hume
pointed out that this was a category mistake. All our knowledge of the
world depends on experience, which means that it is contingent, not
absolute. We can, of course, trust that the sun will rise in the east
tomorrow, just as it did yesterday and every day before that. But we
can’t prove that it will rise in the same way we can prove that two plus
two is four. “ ’Tis not, therefore, reason, which is the guide of life,
but custom,” Hume concluded.
In
Hume’s view, Descartes’s program of demolishing the world through doubt
and then rebuilding it through logic is bound to fail. Instead, we have
to accept that our knowledge of the world is not absolute, as much as we
might like it to be. There is no surefire way to breach the gulf
between subjective and objective—what happens in my mind and what
happens out there in the world. This is equally true of the next world:
Hume was comfortably skeptical about religion’s promise of life after
death. Gottlieb tells the story of how James Boswell, the biographer of
Samuel Johnson, visited Hume on his deathbed, hoping to find that at the
last minute the philosopher would abjure his doubts and embrace
Christianity. But Boswell was disappointed to hear Hume affirm “that it
was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever.” Much of
the philosophy of the early modern period might now strike us as another
kind of unreasonable fancy. But we are still living with the problems
that these thinkers formulated and tried to solve. We are never quite as
modern as we think. ♦
Photograph by T. J. Kirkpatrick / Bloomberg via Getty
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President
Barack Obama defended his decision on Wednesday to issue a payment of
five billion dollars to Mexico to compel that nation to retain custody
of Donald J. Trump.
The payment,
which will be delivered to the Mexican government in hard American
currency by Wednesday afternoon, will insure that Trump will remain in
Mexico for the rest of his natural life.
“I
have been assured by the government of Mexico that Mr. Trump will be
well taken care of and, if he proves to be a productive member of their
society, will be provided a pathway to Mexican citizenship,” Obama said.
While
the transfer of funds to Mexico sparked howls of protest from some
Trump supporters, it was hailed by congressional Democrats, as well as
by over a hundred Republicans currently running for reëlection,
including Arizona Senator John McCain.
ADVERTISEMENT
The
President bristled at the suggestion that paying Mexico to keep Trump
was “reverse ransom” and an extravagant use of taxpayer money. “There is
only one accurate word for this payment: a bargain,” he said.
Uncontrolled tourism is killing the city. Wolfgang Moroder/lusenberg.com
Unesco’s World
Heritage Site Committee meeting in Istanbul this July voted not to put
Venice on its list of World Heritage in Danger sites, but instead to
postpone the decision until the 2017 meeting. This was despite the highly critical conclusions of Unesco’s own recent State of Conservation report on Venice, and appeals by the lobby group Europa Nostra and other civil society organisations.
Venice’s addition to this list (currently 55 sites, with only three in
the West) would not only be embarrassing for the Italian government,
which regularly uses its cultural assets and conservation know-how as an
instrument of foreign policy, but would also lead to close and
potentially unwelcome monitoring of Venice by Unesco officials.
Italy was put on warning at the 2014 Unesco meeting in Doha that it had
until 2016 to act, or plan effective action on, a list of problems.
These included: the vast cruise ships sailing through Venice;
infrastructure, navigation and construction projects in the lagoon that
would damage both lagoon and city; the impact on buildings and the
lagoon ecology of waves caused by motorised vessels; the absence of a
sustainable tourism strategy, of a buffer zone around the city and its
lagoon; and of a co-ordinated approach to the protection of everything
that makes Venice of “outstanding universal value”, the Unesco criterion
for being called a World Heritage Site.
A damning report
In October 2015, the International Council on Monuments and Sites
(Icomos), sent a mission to Venice on behalf of Unesco to investigate
the situation, and its report concluded that no significant progress
had been made towards resolving any of the specified problems. The city
council tried to prevent the mission from meeting representatives of
civil society, who have been increasingly active in recent years drawing
attention to the cruise ships, uncontrolled tourism and declining
resident numbers, but the mission insisted on receiving them.
The Icomos report was sent on 9 June 2016 to the Italian government for
any factual corrections to be made so that it could be included among
the action papers supplied to members of the World Heritage Sites
Committee before it convened on 10 July. The report was delayed,
however, so it was not attached to the main papers, but buried among
attached documents, making it less likely that its very critical
comments would be read by members, who might then have objected to
Unesco’s recommendation that Italy submit yet another report by 1
February 2017—in other words, be spared listing for another year.
Lebanon a lone voice
Members had a further disincentive to read the report because Venice
was not even included among the sites to be discussed. This ploy was,
however, foiled by Jad Tabet, the member for Lebanon, despite pressure
to withdraw his request from the Lebanese ambassador to Unesco, who had
been lent on by the director of the World Heritage Centre, Mechtild
Rössler, and from the Lebanese minister of foreign affairs, who had been
contacted by the Italian ambassador.
In his speech, Tabet said that Venice and the Egyptian temples of Abu
Simbel had been the foundation stones of Unesco’s first campaigns and
had led to the World Heritage Convention of 1970. He continued, “The
reaction of our committee comes very late. We should act at once and
launch a new campaign for Venice, yet we are delaying again.”
Only a handful of the committee members chose to respond, all
reassuring the Italian government of their faith in its capacity to
protect Venice. Some seemed to confuse Italy’s visible support of world
heritage (for example, the 60 carabinieri now in training to protect
monuments in war zones) with the capacity of decentralised government to
deal with the complex, long-term problems presented by Venice and its
lagoon.
Unesco caved in before
The member for Kuwait said: “We thank Italy for the aid it gives to
countries present, therefore we trust the Italian authorities.” The
member for Azerbaijan said that he believed Italy “has competence in
conservation and that it will work closely with Icomos to implement all
the recommendations”.
This is not the first time that Unesco has given in to pressure from
the Italian government. In November 2011, an important international
conference on all aspects of Venice, social and ecological, was
cancelled at less than two weeks notice after pressure was applied on
Unesco’s head office by Renato Brunetta, then a member of Silvio
Berlusconi’s government. The reason: scientists were invited who were
critical of aspects of the mobile barriers being built between the
Adriatic and Venice lagoon by a consortium of businesses, the Consorzio
Venezia Nuova. This was still at the height of its political influence,
which was revealed in 2013 to be due to widespread corruption, both
local and national.
The 9 reasons why Unesco's own specialists think Venice is in danger
1. THE 2014 WORLD HERITAGE COMMITTEE KEY RECOMMENDATIONS HAVE BEEN IGNORED
■ Still no heritage impact assessments of the effects of the proposed
deep-dredging of the lagoon to allow the passage of cruise ships.
■ No enforcement of speed limits on motor boats to prevent wave erosion.
■ No prohibition on the largest ships and tankers entering the lagoon.
■ No buffer zone around the city and the lagoon.
2. HIGHLY DAMAGING PROJECTS ARE BEING PUSHED
If the proposed projects (excavation of a new shipping channel,
extension of the existing channels, the extension of the airport), as
outlined in governmental reports and during the mission, are
implemented, in addition to the already constructed buildings, new port
terminal and ongoing transformation of buildings for tourism purposes,
Venice and its lagoon will be irreversibly damaged. This damage would
include serious deterioration of the lagoon system and the architectural
and urban coherence of the historic city, resulting in a serious loss
of its authenticity.
3. THERE IS NO PLAN FOR VENICE AND ITS LAGOON
There is no shared vision for Venice among the many different
stakeholders at national, regional and local levels, which prevents a
coherent response to [the many] negative factors. The principal
stakeholders, being the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of
Culture, the Port Authority and the City of Venice, should reconvene and
come up with a new scheme that includes the observations put forward in
this report, as well as a strategy for all ongoing and planned
developments within the boundaries of the World Heritage property,
taking into account its outstanding universal value.
4. LOCAL MANAGEMENT IS FEEBLE
There are no established procedures for co-ordination and
decision-making between the 21 official bodies involved in the
management of Venice and its lagoon. The meetings of the Steering
Committee (co-ordinated by the City of Venice), which has no real power
and can only make recommendations, are limited to an exchange of
information and points of view, without any mandatory results. The city
council’s 2012 management plan for Venice is not a practical instrument
for management and Icomos’s previous comments on it have been ignored.
5. CIVIL SOCIETY IS EXCLUDED
Formal participation of non-governmental and civil society
organisations in governance is lacking and they often feel excluded from
official decisions. This is a serious management issue that needs to be
addressed.
6. STATE FUNDING FLUCTUATES AND IS INADEQUATE
The city council must receive exceptional financial help [from the
state] for restoration, including the acquisition and the conservative
restoration of buildings, in particular if privately owned. The amounts
awarded to the city council by the Special Law for Venice have varied
from €268.9m in 1997 to zero in 2008. Between 1992 and 2004, the average
amount was €143.2m; between 2005 and 2014, it was €19.9m. At least the
average for the first period should be granted and paid regularly.
7. THE MOBILE BARRIERS (MOSE) ARE ONLY A TEMPORARY SOLUTION
These should be considered a large-scale experiment. It is likely that
they will need to be adapted or changed after becoming operational.
Continuous monitoring and action in light of environmental developments
arising from changes in climate, sea level, water and sediment flows are
necessary. With changes probably occurring as a consequence of sea
level rise and intensified land-use (sediment reduction, bottom erosion,
water quality deterioration), additional solutions to the mobile
barriers will almost certainly be required to prevent further flood
damage to the cultural heritage of Venice.
8. TOURIST CROWDING IS OUT OF CONTROL…
The relationship between the number of Venice’s inhabitants and the
number of tourists is out of balance and is causing significant damage.
The loss of population from Venice is alarming. It has several causes,
the most important being the shortage of affordable apartments. A
further grave problem is the changing use of buildings, converted from
housing into accommodation for visitors. Urgent measures to manage
tourism should be implemented, based on the consultative model of the
Unesco World Heritage and Sustainable Tourism Programme.
9. …BUT THE CITY COUNCIL ISN’T EVEN COUNTING
The authorities admit they do not gather exact tourism figures. It is
important that an efficient and precise management tool for collecting
data on tourism be developed, including analysis of the transport of
visitors to Venice.
Hotel de la mer, Sesimbra, Portugal. © Atelier de Manuel Tainha.
