Venice, Italy, often called the floating city, Venice or simply La Serenissima, is a miracle in water. Built on marshes and a lagoon rather than solid land, its history is a remarkable story of human innovation, resilience, trade, politics, and warning. As we now imagine future floating cities to meet climate threats, Venice’s past provides both inspiration and caution.
Venice: The Floating City
Foundations in Water: Birth of a Floating City
Venice was founded in the 5th century AD, traditionally on 25 March 421, though it gradually developed rather than being built all at once.
The city stands upon some 10 million wooden piles, oak, larch, alder, elm, and pine, driven into the lagoon’s muddy, brackish soil, often underwater and deprived of oxygen. Because the wood is submerged, fungal decay is extremely slow; over time, minerals in the lagoon water help “harden” the wood (a partial petrification), increasing durability.
On top of these piles, Venetians laid wooden planks and then layers of Istrian stone, brick walls, and lighter stone elements. Buildings were constructed to be relatively low-rise (to avoid overloading), using bricks, lightweight stone, and with attention to balancing weight. The architecture also features numerous canals and bridges rather than roads, turning waterways into streets.
Thus, Venice was, effectively, engineered from the water up, a kind of floating or water-borne city in its own way.
Rise: From Lagoon to Maritime Power
Over the medieval and Renaissance periods, Venice grew to dominate trade between East and West. Its strategic location on the Adriatic Sea, its powerful navy, and its trade treaties (for example, with the Byzantine Empire and later with various powers like the Ottomans) allowed Venetian merchants to traffic goods such as spices, silks, salt, and luxury materials from the Orient and northern Europe. Venice became rich, cultured, and architecturally lavish. Palaces lining the Grand Canal, Venice (its main thoroughfare), St Mark’s Basilica, the church of San Marco, and the Rialto Bridge all stand as hallmarks of that golden age.
Venice also developed advanced institutions: its legal system, governance (the Doge, the Venetian Republic), banking, shipbuilding, maritime technology, and diplomacy. Venetian trade history, its treaties, its colonies, and its maritime empire made it one of the preeminent powers of the Mediterranean.
Grand Canal, Venice
Environmental Strain and Sinking: The Downward Drift
Venice has always had to contend with water, but over time, environmental changes, human interference, and climate pressures widened the challenge. Some of the key issues:
Subsidence: The city is sinking, slowly. Partly from the compression of sediments, partly from groundwater extraction in earlier centuries (though that is now controlled). Structures such as church towers or heavy buildings (e.g., bell towers) have shown measurable sinking over centuries.
Rising Sea Levels (“acqua alta”): Increasing frequency of high tides flooding the city; these floods have become more severe and more frequent. For example, the famous 1966 flood, when water rose to ~1.94 meters above the datum flood level, flooded much of Venice. More recently, in 2019, 1.87 m floods caused widespread damage.
Overtopping & Tide Surge: Storms, wind events, and lagoon dynamics (including subsidence of surrounding land, changing sediment flows) make the lagoon’s defences more challenging.
Pollution and environmental mismanagement: The health of the lagoon has been affected by pollution, poor management of waste, alterations in water flow, and infrastructure, which sometimes harms the delicate balance needed to maintain the lagoon’s ecology.
In response, Venice has undertaken engineering projects, perhaps most notably the MOSE project, mobile flood barriers at the lagoon inlets, designed to close during tide surges to protect the city. The project has been delayed, expensive, and controversial (cost, ecological impacts, long-term maintenance).
While Venice’s decline is often framed environmentally, there are strong social and economic dimensions too.
Since its mid-20th-century peak, the population of Venice’s historic centre has dropped dramatically. In the 1950s, around 175,000 people lived in the old island city. In 2024, that number is under 50,000. Many people have moved to the mainland (easier transport, modern housing, less tourist disruption).
Tourism has become the dominant industry. It supplies a large share of Venice’s GDP, but creates pressures: overcrowding, wear and tear on infrastructure, high housing costs (short-term rentals pushing locals out), and loss of everyday services for residents. The very popularity of Venice’s landmarks, St Mark’s Basilica, the church of San Marco, Grand Canal in Venice, now contributes to the strain.
Heritage agencies (including UNESCO) have flagged Venice as at risk. For instance, UNESCO recommended placing Venice on the heritage danger list due to risks of “irreversible” damage from climate change, mass tourism, and insufficient integrated strategic responses.
So Venice is both a marvel and a living warning: a city that was literally floated on piles and prosperity, but which is now threatened by both water and people.
Lessons for Modern Floating Cities
As the world confronts rising sea levels and climate change, the idea of floating or water-borne cities is no longer science fiction. Projects like Oceanix Busan are already in development.
Here’s what Venice teaches those modern efforts:
Area | Venice’s Experience | What Floating Cities Can Learn |
Foundations & Materials | Piles of wood, stone, brick, built carefully to distribute weight; environment (lack of oxygen) preserving materials. | Use of durable, locally available materials; ensure foundations remain submerged & oxygen-free; careful weight-management and modular design. |
Water Management / Sea Rise | Venice faces threats from regular flooding, surges; environmental mismanagement makes things worse. | Must build in adaptability; designs like MOSE barriers, but also natural buffers, flexibility; floating platforms should cope with the tide, storms. |
Environmental & Ecological Balance | Lagoon ecology is delicate; altering flows can worsen siltation, water quality, and flood measures can harm tidal dynamics. | Floating city design should integrate with marine habitat regeneration, avoid harming natural flows, and have zero waste and water recycling systems. |
Social & Economic Sustainability | Reliance on tourism made Venice vulnerable; population decline, loss of local services. | Floating cities need a mixed-use economy, community participation, long-term residents, not just tourist appeal, affordable housing, and access to services. |
Governance & Maintenance | Venice is burdened with legacy infrastructure; projects like MOSE are costly, slow, and require strong governance and funding. | Governance must plan for long-term maintenance, resilient institutions, funding models, regulation of tourism, and environmental protection. |
Modern floating-city prototypes already reflect many of these lessons. For example, Oceanix Busan, designed by Oceanix in collaboration with BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), UN-Habitat, and local partners, proposes modular floating platforms serving neighborhoods of ~300 people, mixed uses, self-contained water, energy, food, and zero waste systems.
Decline & Hope: Will Venice Survive?
Venice is not yet beyond saving. Many measures are underway:
MOSE mobile floodgates, which became operational in part in recent years, aim to reduce frequency and damage from “acqua alta.”
Tourist regulation: fee systems, limiting group sizes, banning large cruise ships from passing near St Mark’s Square, and regulating day-trippers. These aim to reduce the damage.
Restoration of historic buildings, better maintenance of canals, and better policies to preserve lagoon ecology.
Still, the risk remains real: if sea-level rise accelerates, if sediment supply to the lagoon is compromised, or if climate events worsen (storms, flooding), Venice’s structure and identity are imperiled.
Lessons from Venice for the Future Branding
Venice’s story is a double-edged one. On one hand, it shows what humans can achieve: a city built on wood and water that became one of the greatest economic and cultural hubs of the world. On the other hand, it reveals how fragile such achievements are, how environmental shifts, neglect, and unsustainable practices can erode even the most brilliant structures.
As we strive toward designing floating city Venice-inspired communities, for regions threatened by flooding, coastal land loss, or climate change, we would do well to borrow not just Venice’s beauty and imagination, but its engineering principles, its respect for natural systems, its need for social balance, and its humility before nature. A vision embraced by the Floating Economy, which seeks to create sustainable, resilient communities on water.
Social & Economic Shifts: Tourism, Depopulation, & Heritage Risk