The Role of Spatial Networks in the Historic Urban Landscape: Learning from Venice in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe 2011 Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation (HUL) by UNESCO defines cities as dynamic environments subject to cultural processes, tangible/intangible heritage and community values, leaving some key questions open. Is the heritage sector better defining historic places, or because their complexity defies verbal description, it re-iterates simplified concepts? Are existing boundaries between disciplines such as architecture, planning and landscape design enriching or constraining heritage? This paper analyses the urban morphology of Venice and the Piazza San Marco, a key context in which architecture emerges as legitimised vehicle for urban regeneration in early modernity. Looking at the relationship between the Piazza and the urban networks of Venice alongside intangible spatial practices and symbols, the paper makes three contributions to urban conservation: a) it defines the HUL as the interrelationship of the anonymous city with the authored products of design, b) it revisits the foundations of early modern consciousness about architecture, urban conservation and innovation in order to better understand interdisciplinary knowledge in the heritage sector and c) it approaches heritage as social construction, involving the selection of structures, from buildings to entire areas, and from legal documents and political instruments to ideologies through which societies are seen from dominant positions, often disguising conflict.