VeNiss · Venice's Nissology. Reframing the Lagoon City as an Archipelago: A Model for Spatial and Temporal Urban Analysis (16th-21st centuries)

In the historical tradition, Venice is a city without walls and gates, and hence lacking suburbs. VeNiss reverses this trope by examining the urban, political, and cultural patterns connecting the capital with the chain of over sixty islands forming its lagoon fringes. Investigation of their integral role in Venice's spatial practices establishes a ground-breaking approach for the study of historic cities' margins as connective tissues, a subject seldom tackled by urban scholars. Reframing Venice within its archipelago, this project addresses that gap and explores the impact of urban edges on city planning, economic dependence, social responsiveness, and artistic production.From the 16th century, Venice became critically conscious of the granular nature of its hinterland, constructing a governance that involved the islands. Lagoon sites were systematically included in the network of capillary infrastructures for the city's supply, defence, and healthcare as well as civic rituals. Cultural entanglements sometimes bypassed the city, as novel lagoon architectural solutions permeated the Italian Peninsula through the agency of religious communities. Maps, atlases, and books of islands published on and in Venice helped consolidate the capital's archipelagic thinking into a coherent framework.VeNiss sheds light on this physical and theoretical construct –abruptly interrupted by the fall of the Venetian Republic (1797)– through a holistic project which combines social history, architecture, art and literary studies with advanced digital technologies. Coupling close archival readings with modelling systems, it proposes a pioneering methodology to reconstruct the islands' transformations alongside their interwoven relationships in a geographically- and temporally-based digital environment. VeNiss will constitute a crucial contribution to Venetian history while providing a valuable model for future urban studies seeking to visualise dispersed places through time and space.