Shrinking Venice

cities — By Bob Riel on September 29, 2006 at 2:31 pm

Interesting but somewhat sad article in the International Herald Tribune about the changing face of Venice. This story has nothing to do with the encroaching sea, and everything to do with rising real estate prices that are driving away lifelong Venetians. The result is a city with a shrinking population where on many days tourists actually outnumber local residents.

From a peak of 171,000 residents in 1951, the population of the historic center of Venice has fallen to fewer than 62,000.

“We’ve reached the point of collapse, the point where things could fall apart,” said Ezio Micelli, an urban planner. Should the trend continue, newspapers fretted recently, by 2030 authentic Venetians could become extinct and the historic center reduced to a shell subsisting only on tourism. For even as Venetians leave, tourists have been coming. And coming.

According to recent estimates, 15 million to 18 million tourists have come to Venice over the last year. On some days they easily outnumber residents; during the pre-Lenten Carnival there are 150,000 tourists a day.

When the ratio of tourists to residents tips in favor of the former, “it’s not meaningful to talk about Venice as a city anymore,” said Robert Davis, a professor of Italian history at Ohio State University.

Strange fate for a place that, a few centuries ago, was a thriving city-state in control of an empire in southeastern Europe.