I see a lot of results: https://www.google.it/search?q=sollevare+venezia
People have been talking about this for decades, but it doesn't seem to be very popular now, especially since MOSE appears to be working at the moment.
There's even reportage by Le Iene https://www.iene.mediaset.it/2019/news/mose-alziamo-venezia-...
Genuinely curious about what life is like living there, and what the draw would be to move there.
There's other places in Venice though - quieter parts, less touristy streets. You see fewer selfie sticks and more people with grocery bags, you see lawyers' offices and dentists, you see cafés selling coffees for more reasonable prices, etc. I would imagine that there would be beautiful charm to living off the beaten path in Venice, strolling along the canals every time you want to go for walk. If you're someone who greatly values beauty, paying Venice's cost of living premium in exchange for that privilege might feel like a good deal.
Actually, lots of extremely local communities gather around social hubs, typically squares featuring bars where people routinely visit for breakfast, brunch, and aperitifs. It doesn't take long to gain recognition and differentiate yourself from a tourist; alcohol often facilitates conversation, too :).
If you want to see this in action, there are a fair number of sagre (these are summer festivals typical of small towns and villages throughout Italy, but not so much in the cities) that unfold right in the heart of Venice each year! (Try searching for Festa de san piero de casteo or Sagra di san giacomo dall'orio and look at some pictures)
Moreover, as Venice doesn't have cars (and boats just work in a different way), you're likely to follow the same few paths to and from work. This familiarity aids in establishing recognition on the street.
Being young can be beneficial when integrating with locals, thanks to the significant student population residing in the city (relative to the number of permanent residents). However, it's hardly an impediment; it's common to see people of all ages enjoying drinks during aperitivo. YMMV depending on your level of introversion or extroversion.
Nightlife after midnight is concentrated in a few places, and again it won't take long to recognize the same faces, nor to be recognized too.
Overall, as a single data-point, during my seven years there, I found Venice's social dynamics to touch a sweet spot in its unique blending of small-town camaraderie and large-scale artistic events.
Perhaps, but if we're being practical we should account for a similar increase in costs to any future solution. It's not like corruption will go away by the time the procurements for the next project go on...
This meek fetal-position defeatism is why infrastructure costs spiral up and up and up forever.
Raise costs on project A
Baseline the expected costs for project B based on project A
Raise costs further on project B
Repeat endlessly
It doesn’t have to be this way. Italy itself halved its rail construction costs by cracking down on corruption in the 90s. We always have a choice.
Really? I thought the reason was corruption! Perhaps if we all think positively it goes away!
If we figured out how we can make combating climate change rife with corruption 30 years ago, we'd be in much better place right now.
Elections kinda do that up to a point, called elections. Corruption is longer term mechanism.
How is complaining and pessimism working out for you?
This misunderstands the relationship between corruption and state capacity.
The key insight is that corruption does not require a project to actually deliver the promised benefits, or even to be completed at all.
> If we figured out how we can make combating climate change rife with corruption 30 years ago, we'd be in much better place right now.
Fortunately there’s a great test case for this theory: California High Speed Rail. It was justified in climate terms but actually got underway so that numerous local/regional special interests and parasitic consultants and contractors could extract profit from it. And the result is a fatally flawed project that is decades late, has swallowed money that could’ve paid for numerous other rail projects, may not be completed at all, and will never deliver the originally promised benefits in any case (too slow because of sweetheart deals for numerous Very Special cities).
Meanwhile, lower-corruption countries that haven’t gutted their state capacity can and do build immense amounts of beneficial infrastructure.
No, but another key insight is that it helps corruption very much if it's completed and delivers the promised benefits, since it means less chances for people to complain, and for later investigations (e.g. by political opponents) to deduce wrongdoing...
As for the California example, this is in a place with supposedly less or no corruption (and no "mafia ties" level corruption).
So, "Local/regional special interests and parasitic consultants and contractors" messing up the project is more about a huge bureaucracy and a too disjointed process, with baroque procurement laws, and decision makers who have to satisfy and yield to all kinds of interested parties along the way.
Plus of course the totally hand-tieing legal framework, and ligitation heavy environment leading to paralysis. Sure there would also be some corruption, but in the California case I'd venture to guess that you don't need much of it, and it's all both systemic and legal. It's just regular interested parties and middlemen getting their say and their legal share (but too many of them, and with high multipliers), and costly elaborate and unneeded procedures having to be followed.
Again, a nice theory, but one that does not match reality. High-corruption projects rarely get done, or have serious flaws if they do. You can see this all over the world: from Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome (still not fully complete, money all embezzled) to Mexico City’s Metro Line 12 (inferior concrete saved Carlos Slim some money but killed 26 passengers). There is no accountability for the perpetrators of these failures precisely because of the corruption that enabled them in the first place, so they do not need to concern themselves with the benefits of the project. That’s why corruption fundamentally breaks the incentives for good governance. Meanwhile low-corruption countries build lots of great infrastructure.
> As for the California example, this is in a place with supposedly less or no corruption
Surely you can’t be serious
> So, "Local/regional special interests and parasitic consultants and contractors" messing up the project is more about a huge bureaucracy and a too disjointed process, with baroque procurement laws, and decision makers who have to satisfy and yield to all kinds of interested parties along the way.
What huge bureaucracy? The problem is that there is none, that all decision-making has either been passed up to politicians or down to consultants. CA HSR authority barely exists—all there is is a self-serving political board and a bunch of self-serving private consultants with virtually no one in the actual civil service technically competent to check their work. The politicians like Rod Diridon of San Jose use their positions to improperly benefit their cities (corruption) and the design-build consultants use their lack of oversight to improperly enrich themselves by making intentionally expensive design choices (also corruption).
The rest of what you said about the process is correct, and is another way to say “institutionalized and legalized corruption”.
Survivor bias. You only hear about corruption in failed projects. You don't hear all that much about corruption in successful projects because it couldn't have been that bad if the project went well and was a good idea. I can assure you that with every successful project many people got rich on the side too.
Getting rid of corruption is impossible. But it can be done in a better or worse way.
It is trivially true that someone makes money from every project; the land, labor, and materials have to come from somewhere. But it’s only corruption if someone is extracting surplus beyond the actual necessary cost.
Fortunately the Transit Costs Project has a great database of global costs for rail transit projects, making it possible to discern when something is fishy. I highly recommend reading at least their executive summary.
Stating that every large project involves some degree of corruption is less like claiming that there's a teapot in the orbit of Jupiter we can't hope to observe. It's more like claiming that every sufficiently large economy has some gray area even if we didn't directly observed it.
Yes. Corruption only requires for the project to get started. Which is what very few useful projects experience at all. Most never get off the ground. And project getting started raises the probability that the project will be eventually finished at some point.
> And the result is a fatally flawed project that is decades late
But the alternative is not a project done right. It's a project than never got started because no one saw opportunity for personal gain in it. Think of all the places that don't have high speed rail projects, let alone high speed rail.
I know it's easy to lament inefficiencies of corruption and compare effects with other, more successful projects that possibly required less corruption to get going. But the fact is that inefficiencies are not a problem as long as there is money in the pockets. Every corporation operates with huge inefficiencies at every level except for perhaps core revenue centers. And it's fine. The problem is with starting things as an organization with money.
The alternative is absolutely a project done right—that’s why working high speed rail exists all over the world! The US is not the only place that exists.
I can assure you that they weren't built corruption free. The US might have worst corruption because it has the most money to bleed off on the side.
I could have added a few words to my comment to make it clearer:
“This meek fetal-position defeatism in the face of corruption is why infrastructure costs spiral up and up and up forever.”
Corruption can be defeated, or at least minimized, but only if we fight it head-on rather than submissively accepting it and factoring it into our future expectations.
https://www.corriere.it/english/articoli/2005/11_Novembre/21...
Teatini and Gambolati are not "obscure academics", they are well known, see also this:
https://reservoir-prima.org/partners/view/2
but their theoretical models seem to have not been tested much in practice (AFAIK), BTW they even published a book in 2014 "Venice shall rise again":
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780124201446/venice-shal...
First, the €5.5B cost of the MOSE is mostly due to corruption. Several people have been investigated, and some condemned, but it's pretty clear to everyone that as much as 2/3rd of the cost can be attributed in one way to another to corruption.
Second, no one in Venice is talking about raising the city by pumping something in its underground. No one.
This whole article is fabricated by finding a couple of obscure academics willing to imagine a weird, unlikely scenario.
There is no political will nor agreement on what to do to fight sea level rising. At least for the moment.
Despite all of this, I love being here, and I hope I'll be able to enjoy the city for the next few decades. Maybe some fancy and intelligent solution will show up eventually, down the road. I'm not too hopeful.