When the latest annual tourism statistics were issued by the city of Venice in November 2014, there was an outcry in the local media: Venice had welcomed an unprecedented amount of 25 million annual visitors in 2012, and not all commentators deemed this a reason to celebrate.1 Venice’s alarmingly high tourist pressure has, in recent years, attracted a great amount of public attention, but the interest in Venice as an object of analysis for tourism studies is older. The city’s unique spatial, historical and environmental features have inspired researchers for decades and Venice has served as a case study for addressing various issues central to tourism studies, ranging from the ‘disneyfication’ of heritage (Cosgrove 1982) to the application of the concept of ‘tourism carrying capacity’ (Canestrelli and Costa 1991) and the sustainability of tourism in heritage cities (van der Borg et al. 1992) as well as broader concerns with tourism management (van der Borg 1998).
Nevertheless, despite being a central feature in the city’s economy, tourism was not quite as central in local public and political debates on planning and urban policies until the 1990s. A comparative study on planning and tourism in Venice and Florence by Lombardi (1992) shows that the municipal government of Venice from the 1950s to the early 1990s largely refrained from discussing, let alone setting, specific long-term objectives to control or direct tourism flows. Instead, tourism regulation was rather limited. Even the oppositional political forces in Venice – for the most part of its recent modern history an industrial city – only marginally addressed tourism. Social and political controversies revolved primarily around labour conditions and collective consumption issues, e.g. the shortage of affordable housing (Lombardi 1992), and it was only in recent years that tourism, in particular cruise ship tourism, emerged as an issue in local political discourses and struggles.
This chapter focuses on the formation and activities of the Comitato No Grandi Navi – Laguna Bene Comune (No Big Ships – Lagoon as a Common Committee), a local social movement that has challenged the city government’s and harbour authorities’ approach to cruise ship tourism and has campaigned to ban giant cruise liners from the entire Venetian Lagoon. The opposition to this type of tourism is not unprecedented (Johnson 2002). The targets of Venetian protests are partially comparable to developments in other contexts, including in particular in Australia and Northern and Central America (London and Lohmann 2014; Dredge 2010; Diedrich 2010; Lester and Weeden 2004). In Venice, a number of locally specific factors have led to the formation of the campaign and more broadly to a growing public opposition against the city’s official tourism policies: the city government’s turn towards urban entrepreneurialism in the 1990s, which included the privatisation of several public assets (involving parts of the harbour activities through Law 84/1994), the growing number of ever-bigger cruise ships mooring in Venice since the mid-2000s (Tattara 2013) and more recently a series of corruption scandals which have marred local politics, as will be explained in the first part of this chapter.
The chapter will then show how social mobilizations questioning the impact of cruise tourism on Venice have started to emerge, before analysing the composition of the No Grandi Navi protests as a social movement.2 We focus here on the two types of groups which have taken a central role in the Committee: social centres and associations, and argue that the modes of organization and action of the movement match the features of a new generation of (urban) social movements identified by Italian scholars such as Daher (2012). Particular attention is then paid to how the movement has used legal windows of opportunities to pursue its objectives, and how the movement’s agenda has adopted the concept of the ‘Commons’ to broaden its claims. Finally, the conclusion will discuss how the movement has influenced local politics in recent years and what role the movement might have in future developments.
The shift to entrepreneurial urban governance, tourism policy and the rise of cruise ship tourism in Venice
The number of tourists in Venice has been increasing steadily over recent decades. While official statistics refer to around 9.7 million overnight guests in official accommodation in 2013 (Comune di Venezia 2013), the methodology devised to calculate the number of ‘city users for leisure activities’ (COSES 2009) estimated 21.6 million visitors in 2007, based on the number of people accessing the city’s main transport hubs on a daily basis such as the airport, stations, bus terminals and ship terminals. At the same time, the population of the Old City (the central municipality of Venice, excluding Murano and Burano), has seen a major decrease from about 175,000 inhabitants in 1951 (COSES 2009) to about 56,000 in 2015 (Comune di Venezia 2015). This decrease has been mostly connected to structural factors, such as deindustrialization and the increase in real-estate values (Gasparoli and Trovò 2014), which were never countered by effective policies for the retention of resident population (e.g. by intervening through the taxation of holiday/second homes or providing incentives for resident first buyers). Touristic uses, both formal (e.g. hotels) and informal (e.g. unregistered bed and breakfasts), have today taken over a large part of the Old City’s built environment and social fabric (Settis 2014).
In this context, a turn towards urban entrepreneurialism in Venetian local politics happened during the first tenure of Massimo Cacciari, one of Venice’s longest-serving mayors (1993–2000 and 2005–10).3 This turn involved, among other things, the privatization of parts of major public assets such as the passenger terminal, the Biennale foundation, several historical palaces and the Arsenale compound. It was also characterized by a shift towards property- and event-led development as a means to assert and increase Venice’s role as a tourism destination and support urban economic development. Even during the mandate of a supposedly more ‘progressive’ mayor – Paolo Costa (2000–5) – who, prior to his tenure, had promoted the idea of applying ‘tourism carrying capacity’ assessment techniques to control visitor numbers (Canestrelli and Costa 1991) – the city’s policy orientations remained virtually unchanged. Private initiative was supported unrestrainedly and, as a result, emerged as a central force in the reconfiguration of the city for tourism purposes (Judd and Fainstein 1999).
This reconfiguration received further traction with the growth of cruise ship tourism in the mid-2000s. Cruise line traffic has seen a constant increase in the harbour of Venice, with 650,000 cruise tourists in 2004 and almost 1.8 million in 2011, an increase of over 100,000 visitors per year (Tattara 2013). This growth has to be seen against the backdrop of the rise of the cruise ship industry as a global tourism industry during the same time span (Soriani et al. 2009; Véronneau and Roy 2009). It was also owed to local political decisions which turned the city into an attractive home port for cruise companies, e.g. the conversion of a major shipyard in Marghera, an industrial suburb, into a construction and maintenance site for cruise liners in the mid-1990s, alongside with the organization of a platform for the handling and supply of ships in the Old City, with three new cruise terminals completed between 2003 and 2009.
Policies to regulate tourism flows appeared in the late 1990s and sought to respond to, and reconcile, two contradictory issues: a demand for regulation of the flows and concentrations of visitors accessing the Old City as well as for policies to retain local residents, and a demand for enhanced accessibility to the Old City, in particular for cruise tourists. This contradiction was, however, not explicitly recognized, because the parallel rise of tourism and the decline of the Old City’s social fabric following deindustrialization processes were for the most part kept on separate agendas by the city government. This disconnect in the political agenda was mirrored in local social movements: no relevant protest addressed the issues of urban economic and demographic decline and of tourism simultaneously. With the exception, perhaps, of Italia Nostra, a national conservation organization that was established in 1955 to preserve Italy’s cultural and natural heritage, the handful of protests that attempted to look at these two issues together before the year 2000 did not go beyond some meetings and written exchanges.
The main novelty of the protests against cruise tourism which have arisen in Venice in recent years rests on the successful mobilization of a wide range of citizens and their engagement with issues that had not been addressed by local social movements before. The reasons are to be found in the increased visibility of the impacts of cruise tourism, but also in a growing discontent with the city authorities’ approach to urban and economic development which characterized the turn to urban entrepreneurialism referred to above. Additionally, the protests have to be read within the context of a series of dramatic corruption scandals. The mayor of Venice, Giorgio Orsoni (2010–14), was overthrown in 2014 after a series of corruption allegations related to the highly controversial MOSE project, a system of mobile barrages separating the Venice Lagoon from the open sea in case of exceptional high tides (acqua alta) that has been under construction since 2003. The scandals led to the arrest of the mayor and several city council members and culminated in the dissolution of the city council in June 2014. A central government official, Vittorio Zappalorto, was appointed to oversee the city’s administration, and it was only in June 2015 that municipal elections were held. This scandal – alongside the resulting void in power as Venice was left for a year without a democratically elected decision-making body – helped the Committee No Grandi Navi to take on an important role in shaping public opinion and push for a new agenda linking the issue of tourism to that of the Old City’s decline.
Questioning the impact of cruise tourism
The constant growth in the size and number of cruise ships (in 2012, 48 per cent of cruise liners docking in Venice were above 70,000 gross tonnage – Tattara 2013) had already worried the general public in Venice for several years,4 but it was only in January 2012 that a variety of activists from different social and professional backgrounds and local associations formed the Comitato No Grandi Navi – Laguna Bene Comune (No Big Ships – Lagoon as a Common Committee, henceforth referred to as the Committee). Its foundation coincided with the Costa Concordia disaster near Giglio Island on 13 January 2012. Significantly, however – and contrary to what some commentators have argued – it occurred not after, but prior to the tragic accident off the Italian coast that claimed 32 victims and sparked international debates on the costs and risks of the rapidly growing cruise ship industry (UNESCO 2012). Apart from the risks posed to the vulnerable ecosystem of the Venice Lagoon by a potential accident involving a cruise liner, the Committee from the onset drew attention to a number of other adverse effects of cruise ship tourism, including the solid waste, waste waters and air pollution which cruise ships generate (Caric 2010); the environmental, hydraulic and geological effects of digging canals in the lagoon; as well as the economic and social impacts of cruise ship passengers, such as the very limited duration of their visit to the city or their propensity to spend less and on lower-quality items and services (Tattara 2013).
Furthermore, the Committee raised critical questions about a series of large-scale infrastructure projects which public authorities had realized or were planning to realize to accommodate the needs of cruise ship tourism, e.g. an automated tram built to connect the passenger terminal with parking areas and the city’s train station and the proposed redevelopment of industrial land adjacent to the terminal for tourism and leisure purposes (Autorità Portuale di Venezia 2013). Such projects were portrayed by the Committee as indicative of an approach to urban and tourism development that prioritized mass tourism and short-term growth at the expense of more sustainable forms of development and long-term visions.
In order to challenge and ultimately change the city’s approach to cruise ship tourism, the Committee developed a multifaceted campaign within which the legal framework regulating cruise ship traffic would soon take on a particularly important role. With respect to the latter, it is important to understand the political and legal consequences that came out of the above-mentioned Costa Concordia disaster. In response to the strong public pressure over environmental concerns which followed the accident, the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport issued a ministerial decree in March 2012 to limit or ban ships above 500 gross tonnage from sensitive marine areas (Ministero delle Infrastrutture e dei Trasporti 2012a, 2012b), namely Marine National Parks, and introduced a limitation of up to 40,000 gross tonnage for ships entering the San Marco Basin and the Giudecca Canal in Venice. Political commentators (Vitucci 2012; Petricca 2013) interpreted the government’s decision to respond to the disaster with a ministerial decree as an attempt to demonstrate that it understood its ramifications and was determined to act accordingly. At the same time, they also pointed to two controversial aspects of the chosen instrument: the fact that ministerial decrees are not subject to parliamentary debate and approval, and the fact that their statutory power is limited to the amendment of existing legislative provisions.
In addition, a number of inconsistencies, loopholes and lacunas were soon identified. With respect to the Venice Lagoon, the decree only proposed the protection of the San Marco Basin and the Giudecca Canal (a very small area of the Lagoon at the centre of the Old City) from ships of more of 40,000 gross tonnage, for instance, and refrained from regulating the traffic in the wider lagoon area. Moreover, the regulation was from the outset made conditional on the designation of an alternative shipping lane by the local branch of the Maritime Authority (which is under the control of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport) for ships to access the docking area adjacent to the Old City, which effectively postponed its implementation in Venice sine die. As a result, the decree was soon derided as inefficient and criticized for leaving the responsibility for acting upon it to the Maritime Authority. However, by leaving the implementation responsibility to the local level, the 2012 decree also created a significant window of opportunity for action by local social movements – a window of opportunity seized by the Committee.
Moreover, the waterways that are the object of contestation (San Marco’s Basin, Giudecca Canal and the opening towards the sea) fall under the competence of the Port Authority (the public-private organization that manages the port). The policies and objectives for their development and use are not set out in the city’s strategic planning document (discussed below), but in a specific harbour plan that is prepared under the auspices of the Port Authority. Issues concerning cruise ship regulation are currently not addressed in it, as the plan’s latest version was adopted in 1965, way before the cruise ship industry made its mark upon the city. To many activists and observers, it was clear from the start that a new harbour plan was required to effectively deal with the regulation of the industry and settle questions of cruise ship passage and docking, as well as the infrastructure necessary to accommodate such ships.
Analysing the composition of the No Grandi Navi protests in Venice as a social movement
In order to analyse the Committee’s structure and operation, it is important to first contextualize it within the particularities of Italian social movements. A social movement is defined for this purpose as a voluntary unitary mobilization organizing a concerted action in favour of a cause (Neveu 2001; della Porta and Diani 1997; Farro 1998; Daher 2002). The impact of social movements on the Italian political system has been widely researched. Scholars have in particular investigated whether specific legislative changes addressing big national issues which occurred in the 1960s and 1970s in Italy were the direct result of the demands and protests organized by particular social movements of the time, or whether such changes had more complex causes that were only partly catalysed by social movements (Daher 2012: 8). Scholars mostly concentrated on protests connected to class struggles, such as the mobilizations for advancing workers’ rights (enshrined in Law 300/1970) – or to identity struggles (e.g. the feminist movement which led to the introduction of legal abortion with Law 194/1978). In both cases, scholars argued that a strong sense of collective identity and/or a sharing of lifestyles and cultural codes, as well as the use of common slogans, discourses and collective symbols among local groups across the nation, were central to the success of social movements (Beccalli 1994; Bedani 1995).
In line with the international evolution of social movements discussed in the introduction of this book, many Italian social movements began from the 1980s onwards to broaden their composition and turn from confrontation with the government towards negotiation and compromise to achieve their objectives (Diani 1999; della Porta and Diani 2004). Italian researchers have analysed how the nature of social movements has changed (Daher 2012), inter alia through the deployment of more fluid and complex sets of practices that are not simply rooted in an identifiable form of collective identity, but rely on more flexible forms of identification and participation (Diani 2008: 58), as well as new strategies. Daher (2012) suggests that contemporary Italian social movements have relied upon a combination of three types of strategies – of institution, association and lobby (2012: 56–70). The notion of institution entails that movements assume characteristics of predictability and stability similar to those of formal institutions (e.g. in terms of functioning, organization, aims and long-term objectives), and that they can – from the very beginning – mobilize within formal arenas, alongside or as a substitute for other more traditional forms of protests such as demonstrations. The concept of association is used to indicate the fact that pre-existing associative forms take a prominent role within movements: members of existing associations whose objectives are in line with those of a social movement have an increasingly strong motivation to take part in such collective mobilization. As will be discussed below, the concept also refers to the fact that social movements can take on strategies that connect and create networks between very different associations. Finally the concept of the lobby (or pressure group) understands new social movements as interest groups focused on a specific issue (which can be part of a wider demand for change), which they seek to advance by influencing policies through pressures on institutions based both on threats (e.g. street protests, blockages, strikes) or on rewards (e.g. contributing to electoral success). Traditional forms of protests are thus used as tools for lobbying initiatives.
The No Grandi Navi Committee is composed of at least three types of active participants: activists connected to so-called centri sociali (social centres); associations, i.e. registered non-profit advocacy organizations and their members; and private individuals of different social and political backgrounds. Furthermore, representatives from formal institutions, such as some councillors of the municipality of Venice Old City-Murano-Burano, or the city council of the neighbouring town of Mira, gravitate around the Committee and take part in its work. The structure of the Committee takes the form of a loose association of otherwise autonomous groups and individuals. It uses a group mailing list as an organizing device which is open to all, the acceptance to which is scrutinized by active members. This instrument is used to convene bi-monthly assemblies in which the Committee’s activities and positions are discussed, decided upon and planned. Significantly, the Committee is organized non-hierarchically. There are no leaders and hierarchical positions. Instead, it only has one spokesperson who deals with the press and issues public announcements that are approved by the assembly through a deliberative democracy approach.
The Committee thus relies upon fluid, Internet-based bonds among individuals: all participants have equal rights to propose ideas and actions for discussion, and cooperate with other committee members by elaborating shared concepts and motions before meetings. The importance of sharing lifestyles, cultural codes and collective symbols within the social movement – which were central to the movements of the 1960–70s – are not erased but are confined to smaller units/groups within the movement which seek to work together for common goals. This enhances the ability of participants to deploy their differences and make them coexist productively, marking the novelty of this form of organization. This is illustrated by the two types of groups which have taken a central role in the Committee, which both display a strong mobilizing capacity, while being very different in their structure, goals and the characteristics of their members: the centri sociali and the associations.
We now turn to look at the different roles and modes of action of two representative components of the Committee: the centro sociale Laboratorio Morion, located in Venice’s Old City, heir to a radical approach to contestation typical of the 1970s and thus exemplifying the historical continuity and evolution of protests in terms of discourses and actions; and the association Ambiente Venezia, representative of the role of more formal groups in attracting and activating new forms of loose engagement around common objectives, thus widening the impact of the protests.
Centri sociali can be described as collectively self-managed community spaces used for cultural, social and political purposes in a non-commercial setting. Most of them are located in squats or former squats, and are still run according to principles aligned with the squatting traditions of the 1970s when the first centri sociali were set up – collectivism, autonomy and self-reliance. Unlike political parties or classic voluntary associations, they do not require formal affiliation – instead membership to them is built on direct participation. There is a comprehensive body of research on centri sociali and their multifaceted nature in different cities in Italy (Consorzio Aaster et al. 1996; Caniglia 2002; Bugliari Goggia 2007; Branzaglia et al. 1992). Several studies (e.g. Becucci 2003; Veltri 2003) have focused on their democratic forms of deliberation and the strong role of informal leadership within structures which are in theory marked by an absence of hierarchy. In Venice, the centro sociale Laboratorio Morion (founded as a local group at the end of the 1980s and permanently squatting a venue since the early 1990s) has around 20 core active members working in the squat, and over 40 in wider circles of sympathizers who regularly take part in its initiatives. Its members have all played a vital role in the protests against cruise ships and are mostly young people in precarious employment situations, between 20 and 40 years of age, with no formal engagement in political parties, but with individual stories of involvement in anti-globalization movements, world social forums, environmental local mobilizations, etc. The centro sociale has no formal statute: members belong to it by the mere act of attending meetings, taking part in the organization of political and cultural activities, and contributing to the collective management of the space.
The significance of Laboratorio Morion in the No Grandi Navi struggle can be attributed to different factors: on the one hand, it has kept a strong and constant spatial presence in the city and a visibility among local people, conducting several struggles for many years – e.g. for housing rights, immigrants’ rights and insurgent cultural practices – through forms of activism that left a tangible mark in the city, such as building occupations. On the other hand, it has maintained the capacity to mobilize a consistent number of people and gather financial support through volunteers’ subscriptions, in part by adopting a more open attitude departing from the at times inward-looking behaviour often associated with this type of activism, e.g. by organizing concerts and public events. Laboratorio Morion has also been instrumental in providing ‘manpower’ for the staging of spectacular protest actions by the Committee, such as the collective dives and canal blockages reported in the media. This is due to the fact that the Laboratorio Morion’s activists are young and well versed in staging such kind of protest activities. While Laboratorio Morion lacks many of the characteristics of elastic and discontinuous forms of mobilization attributed to contemporary social movements, it has a very strong inertia and capacity of providing continuity to the struggle.
The formal associations taking part in the Committee are, by contrast, indicative of a new form of resistance, one that coalesces around the catchword of the ‘Commons’ (Beni Comuni), as will be explained further below. The most prominent of them, Ambiente Venezia – officially registered as a non-profit organization – counted at the time of research (September 2014) an active core of about 20 people and circa 40 additional members. Its members have played a vital role in the protest against cruise ships. They are all above 50, mostly retired from formal jobs, and with a history of political engagement either in left-wing political parties or in social movements of the 1970s (e.g. the feminist movement). The association focuses mainly on the environmental deterioration of the Lagoon of Venice and its consequences. It employs a number of strategies, among which monitoring, research and advocacy activities around a wide spectrum of environmental, legal and policy issues. These activities and the skills that the association’s members possess to carry them out have proven to be instrumental to the Committee’s work. The association’s expertise and insight significantly informed the Committee’s positions and proposals and greatly enhanced its ability to challenge official narratives and governmental power. In addition, Ambiente Venezia has enabled the Committee to build numerous contacts with important civil society actors and the academic community. The association’s members are significantly older and more socially established than the activists of Laboratorio Morion and have on several occasions used their connections to advance the Committee’s cause.
The activities of Ambiente Venezia thus contributed to one of the distinctive features of the protest movement: the collective production of knowledge to advance the Committee’s agenda. The collection and dissemination of data, the production of reports and studies on the effects of cruise line tourism on the Lagoon of Venice, and the drafting of alternative projects for cruise ship docking were carried out as a constitutive part of opposition to cruise tourism, with the help of academics. This effort was a political statement in itself, advocating a strong role for social movements in data-informed and evidence-based planning processes. This was a novelty in the Venice context, which matches a global trend towards alternative scientific knowledge production on the part of social movements as a way to support their cause. This shift was accompanied by a reconsideration of the role of ‘scientific information’ as an important basis for supporting the movement’s demands, in opposition to the vision often held by older social movements of scientific knowledge as inherently connected to ‘oppressive state-centric politics’ (Wyly 2011). This brings back to the fore an often neglected aspect of the Lefebvrian concept of the right to the city: the use of (non-technocratic) scientific knowledge production as a keystone to support emancipatory political projects, alongside insurgence and informality (Lefebvre 1996).
The differences between Laboratorio Morion and Ambiente Venezia thus form one of the defining characteristics of the Committee: the heterogeneity of its members. It was formed as a deliberately broad and flexible alliance between diverse sets of actors, who would harness their respective energy, creativity, skills and knowledge. Protests staged in public spaces were colourful and spectacular events, such as the physical blockage of big ships in the Giudecca Canal carried out on 16 September 2012 by protesters who swam and used dinghies and small boats (Figure 9.1). Such actions served two purposes: making rallies visually attractive, open to broad public participation and raising support for the cause, while enhancing the media exposure of the Committee to support its other activities, i.e. lobbying. The Committee can thus be described as an alliance that combines long-tested forms of social struggles with the newer tactics described by Daher (2012) to gather support and consensus, produce scientific and thematic knowledge and widen the participation to protests. This alliance is not a merger of different entities into one body, but rather a strategic form of cooperation that enables each member to maintain its specificity.
Figure 9.1 Protest event organized by the No Grandi Navi campaign: blockage of the Giudecca Canal, 16 September 2012.
Source: Comitato No Grandi Navi – Laguna Bene Comune, photographer: Stefano Fiorin.
The Committee’s modes of action: using legal windows of opportunity
The Committee, in the course of its existence, has sought to influence and change policies and regulations related to cruise tourism, its infrastructure and its impacts on the Venetian Lagoon at least at three overlapping levels: planning regulations at the municipal level, in particular the structural plan of Venice (PAT: Piano di Assetto del Territorio); harbour-related regulations coordinated by central state bodies through the harbour plan (PRP: Piano Regolatore Portuale); and national legislation on the preservation and management of the Lagoon of Venice (i.e. the ‘Special Laws for Venice’ 366/1963, 171/1973, 798/1984, 360/1991, 139/1992 and 206/1995).5
The following section analyses what is new in the modes of action of the movement compared to previous generations of Italian social movements. The purposefully and collectively established open structure of the Committee included very different groups of protesters which had different approaches, experiences and feelings about political confrontation. Its actions have thus taken different forms and typically involved a combination of associative, lobbying and institutional tactics of protest, to use Daher’s (2012) concepts. This combination became particularly evident in one particular case: the public participation process accompanying the preparation of the Piano di Assetto del Territorio (PAT), Venice’s development plan which sets the general objectives of the city’s spatial management and transformation and forms the basis for the city’s regulatory zoning plan (Piano Interventi). In the course of 2012 the Venice City Council debated, through a complex process of deliberation, the approval of a new PAT (Comune di Venezia 2012a). This process became the occasion for the Committee to deploy a mix of tactics including the organization of street demonstrations to exert pressure on the work of the City Council, as well as the use of association (i.e. of coordinated action among the different groups belonging to the Committee), institutionalized participation and lobbying techniques.
The Committee gathered the most relevant knowledge produced by the associations belonging to the network and submitted extensive observations and objections on the draft version of the PAT during the official public consultation process, but their observations were dismissed as irrelevant and rejected in the official report on the submitted public observations. In parallel, through a steady stream of public protests during the days of the final approval of the amendments to the plan (20 and 21 December 2012), the Committee members convened with two city councillors of a local political group named In Comune (In Common) to propose an amendment (known as 35 bis) to the proposed plan that subsequently received the support of the majority of the Council. The amendment involved the inclusion of a new article in the written regulations (Norme Tecniche) of the PAT. It contains an official commitment to banning ‘incompatible’ cruise liners from the Lagoon, in the context of the future task of better coordinating city planning (the PAT and PI) with harbour planning (the PRP). This commitment does not specify the terms of the ban on cruise liners, nor a time frame, but binds the municipality to carry out several studies on the environmental, health, socio-economic, employment and morphological impacts of cruise tourism and port activities within 18 months to inform the future preparation of effective regulations. These studies have not been carried out to date.
The achievement of this modification of the PAT forced the municipal government to take a stance on the issue of harbour planning and thus encouraged further protests. Over the following year and a half, new protest events were staged in public space, such as another blockage of the Giudecca Canal on 9 June 2013 and of the Cruise Terminal on 7 June 2014 (in which many protesters dressed up as beach-goers), or the ‘Lagoon Festival’ on 21 September 2014, a collective boat trip organized by the Committee in order to raise awareness of the impact of cruise tourism on the lagoon environment. In parallel, additional expertise and knowledge was developed, e.g. the Committee’s Libro Bianco (White Book) which provided a comprehensive account of the environmental deterioration of the Lagoon and put forward suggestions for moving cruise activities outside the Lagoon (Fabbri 2015).
However, as mentioned earlier, the regulation of the waterways which are the object of contestation fall under the competence of the Port Authority and thus are subject to a specific harbour plan that is prepared under its auspices, not to the city’s strategic plan – PAT. This is why the amendment of the PAT referred to the need for a new harbour plan, on which a definitive solution to the problem of cruise ship regulation is pending. The drafting of a new harbour plan has not started yet. The Port Authority had two options to put forward a vision for the harbour and its future infrastructural projects: either by preparing a new harbour plan, in cooperation with the government and citizens of Venice and surrounding municipalities, or by essentially bypassing local democratic procedures with the help of the ‘Special Laws for Venice’ and the controversial use of a national law on infrastructural development (Law 443/2001).6 This enables the Port Authority to nominate infrastructure projects for funding and fast-forward approval by the national government, skipping important parts of the local planning procedures. In the summer of 2014 the Venice Port Authority chose the second option and presented a project to dig a new gigantic canal in the Lagoon, the Contorta Canal, to the Italian Ministry of the Environment for environmental impact assessment.
The proposed canal would enable cruise liners to approach, and dock in, the Old City without passing through the San Marco Basin and the Giudecca Canal. It represents a very ambitious undertaking involving the construction of several kilometres of underwater barriers and dykes, pushing further the transformation of the Lagoon into a highly artificial, engineered water body. By adopting a purely technical approach to solve the problem posed by the increase in large ships, rather than pursuing a deliberative, participatory process as demanded by the protesters – the Venice Port Authority not only ignored established international principles of environmental decision-making (such as those articulated by the Aarhus convention (UNECE 1998)), but also effectively imposed its vision of the city as a cruise tourism destination. No public discussion on the Contorta Canal was proposed, and the project’s designation as a strategic national project under Law 443/2001 meant that its environmental impact assessment was fast-tracked. Significantly, this did not prevent members of the public from making use of the few opportunities available to air their views: 281 observations were submitted to the Ministry, of which a significant amount accused the Port Authority of failing to comply with the long-term objective to ban incompatible cruise liners from the lagoon expressed in the above-mentioned article 35 bis of the PAT. In spite of this, the digging of the new canal was approved by an inter-ministerial committee through the procedure envisaged by Law 443/2001, although a complaint to the Administrative Tribunal of the Veneto Region filed by Ambiente Venezia and the city government managed to delay its realization. The tribunal ruled, in July 2015, that no other alternative had been thoroughly considered and therefore that the Contorta Canal could not be realized before other options were evaluated. The Port Authority appealed to the Italian Council of State (the highest administrative court) against this ruling. In November 2015 the Port Authority, in agreement with the new government of the City of Venice, proposed a slightly different project for another canal (named Tresse Nuovo) aiming at getting it approved through Law 443/2001 while the Contorta project was still blocked in court.
From protests against large cruise ships towards the defence of the Commons
The story of the protests organized by the Committee No Grandi Navi in Venice provides a complex example of the restructuring of urban social mobilizations from movements involving identifiable social groups sharing a lifestyle, cultural codes and ideals, into more diverse and flexible coalitions using wider modes of action and including multiple actors characterized by significant differences. In opposition to the deployment of cruise tourism as a main driver for the economic restructuring of the city of Venice, the protests aimed at reframing the problem of cruise tourism in Venice as a collective decision problem regarding long-term social and environmental objectives, specifically the use of the shared resource of the Lagoon water body. This marked a difference from the demands advanced by previous political mobilizations and discourses, which were primarily focused on a fairer social redistribution of the income generated by economic activities and by the existing use of shared resources. This was achieved by resorting to the concept of the Commons (Beni Comuni) as a mobilizing slogan. The concept of the ‘Commons’ (Ostrom 1990) refers to traditional, complex systems of use of resources that set rules of mutual control and cooperation within a community, by designing arrangements capable of reproducing resources and incorporating externalities as part of the process of use and appropriation.
The notion of the Commons was used occasionally and in an uncoordinated way in several Italian local environmental and social struggles since the mid-2000s. It was inspired by an aborted Civil Code reform proposal (Ministero di Grazia e Giustizia 2007) which aimed at introducing the category of ‘Commons’ as a property regime. When the reform failed, the concept began to be used as a political slogan by various associations in different contexts. Their struggles shared characteristics of the ‘new’ forms of protests identified by contemporary social movement theorists (Melucci 1996; Castells 1997; Daher 2012). In 2011, national mobilizations involved hundreds of thousands of people against the planned privatization of water supply services, adopting the term ‘Commons’ as a slogan to call for local collective action and a revision of the legal framework to manage shared resources (Mattei 2011). A number of associations were largely responsible for the success of the two referenda which took place on the issue, by mobilizing citizens around specific interests (e.g. environmental concerns, health and civil rights), establishing new forms of cooperation, and framing a new discourse on the management of collective assets and resources (Bersani 2011).
In Venice, the first recorded use of the term ‘Commons’ in Venetian local protests was in 2007, in a document which proposed the formation of a ‘forum [. . .] for the defence of the Commons’ (Associazione Ambiente Venezia 2014) which were then defined as ‘land, water, air’. That forum was to include environmental associations, later active in the above-mentioned referendum campaign on the privatization of water supplies and forming part of the Committee, with Ambiente Venezia among them. Individual members of Laboratorio Morion also referred to the term ‘Commons’ as part of their political struggle in support of the referendum on water, and some understood the idea of Commons as a parallel to Ocalan’s ideas on ‘Democratic Confederalism’ (Ocalan 2011), i.e. a form of radical grassroots democracy.
It is allegedly through the environmental associations’ initiative that the term Commons was included in the name of the Committee No Grandi Navi. The accent put on privatizations by city officials since the 1990s (Bonomi 1995) as the panacea for solving complex governance issues in Venice pushed the Committee to embrace this multifaceted concept. It was subsequently used in meetings and discussions as a vague but powerful narrative aimed at congealing efforts in favour of a stronger and more democratic control over public institutions in the collective management and control of the Lagoon’s shared space and resources. It helped structure a discourse which did not fall into the trap of a simplistic opposition between ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’. The notion of the Commons has thus been used in Venetian protests in the sense suggested by Marcuse in his idea of ‘Commons planning’ (2011), i.e. as a way to challenge currently prevailing economic and political paradigms and re-think current forms of governance and urban development. The opposition to cruise tourism has been used by the Committee as a vehicle to support a wider objective, that of linking the regulation of tourism to a comprehensive strategy for the conservation of the city’s heritage, the improvement of environmental policies, and the use of comprehensive planning for these purposes (Casson 2014), after decades in which tourism had been surprisingly secondary in planning strategies (Lombardi 1992). This is illustrated by several alternative projects presented by the Committee to propose a viable and up-to-date logistic and docking platform for cruise ships, in harmony with the delicate nature of the city (Fabbri 2015).
Conclusion: the influence of the Committee on the local political agenda and the future of the campaign
The concerted action against cruise tourism in Venice has acted as a catalyst for the convergence of different actors and mobilization efforts and as a focal point to address broader issues related to Venice’s decline as a ‘lived city’: depopulation, industrial decline, political corruption, etc. In the Venice context, it is worth reflecting on whether the mobilization against cruise tourism has displayed some of the preconditions described by Lefebvre (1996), Marcuse (2011), Soja (2010) and Wyly (2011) as necessary for the construction of a political front claiming the ‘Right to the City’.
The Committee potentially represents the opinion of a relevant part of the local electorate with over 1,000 people – out of a population of 57,000 in the Old City – attending some of the protests it staged. The use of a decree to establish the agenda for the use of the Lagoon for cruise tourism (a procedure skipping democratic debate), the rejection of observations made on the PAT and the use of a special procedure to fast-forward the Contorta Canal project in the absence of an updated harbour plan – i.e. the absence of a truly democratic and transparent process for deciding on the future of the port and of cruise tourism in Venice – have resulted in rising public distrust of the institutions. This has also led to the suspicion that the local public institutions’ recalcitrance in using standard institutional procedures was due to hidden agendas to favour opaque private interests in the management of cruise harbour activities and infrastructure construction and bring about misconducted privatization policies, a suspicion confirmed by the explosion of corruption scandals in 2014 related to the management of the MOSE project.
In this context, what has been the influence of the Committee on the local political agenda? The mayoral and city council elections of May 2015 were preceded by local primary elections where the mayoral candidate for the left-wing, progressive coalition was chosen through a public consultation process, according to the rules of the main party which led this coalition, the Democratic Party (the party involved in the corruption scandals of 2014). Although the Committee refused to openly support any candidate in the race, the debates in the city created the right preconditions for the candidate who showed more support to the protest movement’s agenda, Felice Casson, to win the primaries. The candidate’s programme displayed complete adherence to the Committee’s demands about cruise tourism, which shows the ability of the movement to gradually push its agenda into the (progressive) local political arena, something that was made possible by the political crisis initiated by the corruption cases of the recent past.
In the mayoral election itself, Casson lost against Luigi Brugnaro, the candidate of the conservative coalition. Casson secured a majority of votes in the Old City-Murano-Burano constituency, where the Committee had been most active, but failed to do so in the other constituencies. Political commentators attributed Casson’s loss to the failure to connect the problems of the Old City with an overall vision for the broader urban area, and to his lack of appeal to voters other than the core electoral base of the parties of the progressive coalition. Brugnaro, on the other hand, presented himself as an outsider, belittling the connection to the conservative coalition supporting him, while making as a main point of his programme the unconditional support to cruise tourism and cruise liners’ docking in the Old City. The Committee’s refusal to directly support the candidate of the progressive coalition was meant to mark a distance from recent corruption scandals. Yet its ability to influence the progressive coalition’s political agenda on the issue of cruise tourism did not translate into an ability to make the coalition win.
At the time of writing (autumn 2015), many of the Committee’s individual groups and members intended to pursue their campaigns and protests, including broadening their focus to oppose new initiatives taken by the newly elected conservative city council (e.g. a ban on children’s books representing homoparental families in the city’s schools or cuts in local welfare policies). As the current ruling coalition – the first openly reactionary coalition in 22 years to rule the city – announced the reinforcement of cruise ship tourism activities in the Old City as one of its first strategic objectives, protests continued but have partly changed. The Committee symbolically protested over the revocation of a public venue for a photo exhibition denouncing the environmental damage done by big ships. Opposition against the Tresse Nuovo and Contorta canals have remained a goal of the Committee, with some successful and well-attended protests, but the new local political conditions seem to rule out some of the tactics described in this chapter in the near future, such as lobbying, which partially frustrates the perspectives of success of the Committee.
As happened in other contexts (e.g. Bruhn 2008), the coming to power of an adverse local government seems to have weakened – at least temporarily – the scope and strengths of the protest, paradoxically making the Committee – whose raison d’être is the coalition against cruise tourism – lose momentum and face the need for some reorganization. The movement might evolve into a more structured and unitary political project, mobilizing its different groups into a comprehensive alternative political proposal for the city, able to run for elections as an independent platform or actively bargaining for political programmes with traditional parties – something along the lines of what happened in the Barcelona municipal elections of 2014, which saw the coming to power of a progressive mayor supported by a platform of citizens and social movements, Barcelona en Comù. This option, which has been discussed by some (marginal) parts of the Committee, would imply a stronger process of formalization and eventually some degree of institutionalization that are at odds with the Committee’s modes of action to date and success in mobilizing very different actors. In the meanwhile, the volume of cruise traffic and cruise tourists and the size of cruise ships are expected to grow steadily in the harbour of Venice – along with their negative externalities.