Recent events highlight a precarious relationship between cities, nature, and technology. In this context, Venice is doubly relevant; It is both a singular historic example of urban, technological and natural interdependence, and one of many global sites of urbanization facing—and failing to face—contemporary ecological and man-made challenges.

In 900 years of its administration of the Venetian lagoon, the Republic of Venice – called la Serenissima for, amongst other things, its beauty and stability – engaged in massive, public works to ensure the fragile balance of the lagoon ecology that sustained it. The 14th-16th century diversions of the Po and Brenta rivers were only the most visible in a series of constant adaptations undertaken by the city; a delicate and balanced range of interventions blurring the line between administration, architecture, and ecology.

Against this history, the current ecological condition of the lagoon of Venice provides a depressing contrast. Long part of Venice’s urban fabric, the lagoon is now occupied only by massive channels, dubious aquaculture, and the waste of one of Europe’s most industrialized ports. Construction of the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (MoSE) – a massive project to place movable floodgates at the lagoon’s entrances – consumes billions of Italian and European funding at the same time as its on the fragile lagoon ecology remain very much in doubt. The city’s parallel struggle with floods of tourists has traditionally been viewed as a competing distraction to ecological management, instead of (as this project proposes), one of many interdependent flows that constitute this, and any city.

In such a contested space, maps become crucial. Here too, Venice is unique. Not only is its historic condition documented exhaustively with archival documents (architects have explored orthographic mapping in Venice from the 16th century), but it has also been the home to a unique set of developments in the most contemporary fields of mapping – digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Venice’s fabric and flows have been documented exhaustively in the past decade, not through any central governmental effort, but through the collaborative efforts of volunteers, students, and educational institutions. This public database of one of the world’s most important historic cities represents an opportunity for design, research and advocacy that is not just historically grounded, but relevant to the most contemporary of global issues.