Venice's Nissology. Mapping and Modelling Venice's Aquascape in a Historical Perspective

Abstract

In the historical tradition, Venice is a city without walls and gates, and hence lacking suburbs. The project Venice's Nissology (VeNiss) reverses this trope by examining the urban, political, and cultural patterns connecting the capital with its lagoon archipelago through a web interactive 3D map, intended for researchers and the wider public alike. This is a geo-­spatial semantic infrastructure that, as a sort of historical Google maps, enables a journey through time and space to discover and visualise the layered histories of Venice's over sixty ‘domestic' islands. VeNiss tells a story of half a millennium, starting from the sixteenth century, the very moment in which the city began consciously to structure its lagoon territory. Allowing users to navigate across the digital historical lagoon, the research platform brings the once densely-­populated islands to life in their physical appearance as well as in their social arrangement. Through bi-­ and three-­ dimensional digital models interwoven with pertinent historical information, the online infrastructure helps investigate, interpret, and represent the long-­lasting dynamics of Venice's centre-­periphery relations, blending the physical and functional dimensions together and displaying them as an on-­going flow. By reframing the lagoon as a large-­scale ‘urban fringe', this project re-­evaluates the Venetian archipelago as the fundamental connective tissue of the city's political, socio-­economic, and cultural practices.