Architect Marina Resende Gaia de Souza reflects on her experience of the Venice Summer School 2025
This is not a technical analysis, but a personal reflection of what my eyes captured during the two-week summer school Sustainable, Healthy Cities: Building for the Future course, led by the European Cultural Academy, the Global Centre on Healthcare and Urbanisation, and The King’s Foundation during June 2025. Urbanism can not always be systematised, but incorporates a sense of belonging. And as an onlooker, I observed an urban community in part seeking to preserve an identity and traditions, resisting modern economic and demographic pressures. William Bird proposed that humans ‘are designed for walking. We are also designed to live in a place where we feel valued and safe so that communities may thrive’. I had the opportunity to see how this concept functions and is challenged in daily life during my experience in Venice.
Choosing Venice as a case study for the Sustainable, Healthy City course invited us, as students, to immerse ourselves in a scenario where many residents still follow traditions that date back centuries: they would either walk or travel by boat to their destination, passing by street markets, a plethora of small businesses, and global retail chains: Venice, after all, has always been a merchant city. Part of these urban rituals connect Venetians directly with the environment beyond buildings and quays, experiencing high tides depending on the season, weather, and moon cycle, known as the acqua alta.
I had the privilege of staying in one of the oldest neighbourhoods. Each day for two weeks, I walked about twenty minutes from Cannaregio to Palazzo Bembo, where the summer school classes took place. The experience often felt like a journey back in time, as if reliving daily life as it may have been for a Venetian centuries ago. Not only was it a journey back in time, but I also became acquainted with a routine. Walking down the Canale de Cannareggio before the morning fish market, then following the scent of fresh fruit.Enter a tiny alley that would turn into a large via, spot the clock tower with a zodiac chart, I am close. After several more turns, the aroma of truffles would fill the air. Turning left, the Rialto bridge would appear a few metres ahead of me. Would I have noticed all this without walking and taking time to observe?
My journey to the Palazzo each day soon revealed regular commuters and their walk to work. Beyond my own temporary commuting routine, one day we took the ferry to the island of Sant’Erasmo. We were introduced to Fiorella ‘Cosetta’ Enza, a farmer who explained traditional cultivation methods, including how water is extracted from a source 100 meters below the ground, and how they delivered their produce to Venice – a direct delivery from the market garden of Venice to residents and restaurants, which prioritises locally sourced vegetables to a local market.
The intent of this course, however, was to assess what has made this 1605-year-old city endure, and what are today’s challenges. Our project was to analyse, and to provide a plan to generate more sustainable forms of urbanism in the district of Tronchetto. When first visiting Tronchetto with the class, the initial thought that came to mind was ‘grey’. The area was a drab blotch on the lower-left corner of the map, with seemingly no vegetation, and a rectilineal shape, indicative of its artificial creation during the 1960s to accommodate parked cars, and later cruise ships. By comparing the old city to this ‘annex’, there was no clear association between them, other than functionality. While the original settlement is made up of sinuous and organic lines shaped naturally by its citizens throughout the years, Tronchetto follows a rigid grid. It is straight, cold. The streets were deserted – few trees, few people, no sense of place. It felt that we were no longer in Venice.
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Course teachers, David Howard and Matthew Hardy discussed the impact after the Venetian municipality ceased to accommodate cruise ships at Tronchetto, creating a vast, underused port facility that could be reintegrated into the city for public benefit. That was one of the concerns our group approached when we were designing new solutions for the site. Tronchetto reminds us of the challenges of disconnected and underused urban areas, and the possibilities that may exist for more sustainable redevelopment.
An additional topic worth exploring was an event that happened during our programme: the marriage of Jeff Bezos to Lauren Sanchez. Numerous Venetian residents joined protests against the celebration, reacting against the ability of the very wealthy to ‘buy’ parts of a city for a day. The Venetian municipality responded by saying that the revenue raised from hundreds of weddings each year was an important source of income to support the city, but reaction against this celebrity event combined with the increasing public resentment at overtourism, housing price growth, and wider concerns of environmental impact.
It became clear to me that Venice in many ways is resisting contemporary pressures, especially through its structural limitations on transport and tourism. To what extent can Venice reconcile present-day needs with the preservation of its historic identity? Should other historical cities follow the example? Those were questions I had after completing the course, which remain to be answered.