MATTEO MELIOLI
Satellite Image showing Venice, Marghera (the industrial area in the mainland) and the main urban hub of Padova and Treviso
THE PLACE: MARGHERA AND VENICE
The industrial port of Venice (Italy). Marghera is a vast industrial area that lays behind Venice, in the borderline territory between the mainland and the sea, the lagoon. For centuries, the Venetian Serenissima Republic has protected the areas like Marghera from any kind of human activity in order to allow its military survival, thus preserving an environment of canals and sandbanks that remained unkempt until the industrialization of the first post-war period. From 1905 to 1990 a series of reclamations stole lagoon areas in order to settle industries of any kind, from the iron and steel to the naval ones, from the chemical plants to the refineries. If Marghera’s past history tells us of continuous industrial expansion, the current one deals instead with soil pollution, abusive dumps and hundreds of discarded plants. Abandonment is, actually, a slow but gradual process, which involves above all the field of chemistry and induct. The reasons can be found in the high costs of plants maintenance, of the purification plants, of the reclamation activities and the safety measures, which are all procedures that the law has imposed only recently, after the 1995 process against the top management of the oil companies. The situation in the previous years was quite different: the waters of the lagoon collected more than two million liters of polluting agents, the top management kept their mouths firmly closed, when dealing with the danger of the substances, which were elaborated in the plants and which were responsible, like VCM, for hundreds of deaths by cancer. Today, it is expensive to produce something without polluting: the environment has its own price, the life of the workers has a price, but this is not happening anywhere. The oil companies, the same that once built the petrochemical area and now abandon it, are shifting the refineries towards Eastern Europe, where the costs are contained and the opposition to this kind of structures is less vigorous than in the industrialized countries. A problem, which is not yet solved (that of oil) leads to another one, that of what to do of the dismissed areas. Today Marghera is a territory where abandonment gives the spectator a feeling of disorder and absence; it is a land with no future, which can not be industrialized because its soil is polluted but, on the other hand, can not be de-industrialized either because the costs would be unsustainable; and which can not be loved, since for decades it has caused intoxications and deaths.
Picture taken from the top of San Giorgio’s bell tower and it shows the profile of the historical city with its bell towers and on the back the skyline of Marghera’s industrial area with its chimneys. Down: detail of the previous picture where the chimneys’ skyline (studying area) and the Salute church’s domes overlay.
THE ISSUE: THE OBSOLETE INDUSTRIAL SITES
Marghera like many other ports of the Mediterranean area faces a fast and unstoppable de-industrialization process but considering the historical and environmental contest of the city of Venice the consequences are dramatic and in the mean time emblematic.
Venice is a city forever in equilibrium with its own fragile environment and on the other hand we look at an industrial area in its clear state of abandonment that it is a failure for whom in these last fifty years took advantage on the territory. During the years of the post-war period it was necessary to rebuild the country as soon as possible. Marghera being readily accessible from the sea, connected by roads and railroads to the cities of the mainland was the best area where to concentrate all the elements that nowadays make up the ENICHEM (the petrochemical area).
This is the beginning of the petrochemical area’s story that lasted for about half century during which Venice, Mestre and the other cities of the mainland have been involved in heavy transformations. At the beginning Mestre was just a tiny fortified village and Marghera a small community of fishermen surrounded by swamps. Nowadays, Mestre is in the centre of an urban area that, with Venice and Marghera, counts nearly a million of inhabitants, an area where the historical centre of Venice and the urban fringe clearly contrast each other with the result of a paradoxical scenario. Venice is always the same and it does not suffer substantial transformations unlike Marghera that just beyond the lagoon, draws a landscape of factories and chimneys in continuous mutation. The historical centre of Venice has been crystallized forever but the urban structure round it, found its way on the territory invading and surpassing the petrochemical area of Marghera. The process that is not linear at all, it follows the way of the progressive additions, changing the territory into a big kaleidoscope of urban agglomerates where it is anachronistically surviving a huge industrial area. Nowadays, the size and entity of the dismantling process, tell us how it is missing a homogenous planning of the urban space that in the other hand it used to grow into independent sections.
RE-USE AND RECONVERSION
The crucial issue is which future give to areas like these. A solution could be a drastic reconversion, destroying everything and cleaning the polluted ground just like in Germany for the industrial areas of the Ruhr. This choice, economic as well as cultural, represents a paradox: In fact to raze to the ground factories and refineries with the same lack of concern of who built them up or just keep them as future memory have no sense. The re-use and reconversion oppose and attract each other just like the group of people that emphasize the archaeological value of the industrial architectures and those that would like to quit with the past, erasing it.
Looking at the future we can understand the great potential of such areas being so close to urban centers, main thoroughfares and networks of canals flowing into the sea. The location of those areas is the barycentre of an urban structure that at the beginning was suffocating under the bulky presence of the industries and now can be a landmark for lodging, employment and development. If the future pre-announces a fast and radical transformation we do not have to forget the roots, dramatic and hard roots that changed the history of this territory. Do not forget means to preserve the industrial world’s architectures but more than everything else is to be aware of the mistakes and willing to turn page.
The problem of reconverting Porto Marghera, of reclaiming the polluted areas and disposing of the toxic waste, underlines the limits of a power system that burns fossil fuels in order to get energy and synthesizes oil into plastic materials, which are subsequently abandoned in dumping grounds; a system which, when facing the always growing energetic demands, finds hard to exploit the alternative energetic sources, such as hydrogen. The areas we are talking about, since Marghera does not represent a single issue, are not only situated near the towns, but also occupy territories of high landscape and archaeological degree, which today are somehow compromised and polluted. Once they are abandoned, industrial areas become no-man’s land; when they lose their productive aim, they appear only as a hidden mosaic of abusive dumping grounds and makeshift squats for clandestine immigrants who cannot find housing elsewhere. My proposal is to use these areas, the urban and agricultural waste, as sources of energy and not as dumping materials. It is possible to plan energetically self-sufficient urban systems, capable of working in harmony with the environment and its sources, by blocking the exploiting-abandoning process, using alternative power sources and the technologies of the hydrogen system.
The hydrogen-based system is divided into two phases: the first devoted to the production of gaseous hydrogen, the second to the transformation of electric energy. In this process renewable energy sources (Aeolian, hydraulic and solar energy) can be used together with urban and agricultural waste disposal. This waste represents the most popular alternative source of energy, especially in those areas of low-density high urban expansion. The agricultural territory of Venice, where rural and urban communities follow one another, provides a high quantity of high energetic potential waste, which, if converted into heat and hydrogen, could contribute to the energetic need of the whole area. The information we have gathered shows that the system, when applied on larger scale, reaches an over than 70% efficiency, providing the need of three out of four people.
The industriall area today (shown in blue colour) and the propose urban settlement (red colour)
THE PROPOSAL: A NEW WAY TO THINK ENERGY
If it would be possible to change into “Hydrogen”, an area like Marghera’s petrochemical would have no sense to exist any longer while some of its parts like for example the power plants, would get a brand new positive meaning. We certainly notice that all the public electricity plants are located in outlying areas (often fragile areas like the lagoon). It is interesting how we keep away from our city centers exactly those structures that supplying energy and heat, they give us the chance to survive. Nowadays, the power plants are still polluting and this is why are pull-apart but with the hydrogen technology it would be safe and worthy keep them closer The environmental impact of an hydrogen power plant is at very low risk because it doesn’t produce emissions in the atmosphere (there are no combustion processes) and without steam turbines there is not audio pollution. Inside the power plant an assembled unit of fuel cells converts the hydrogen into potential difference and high temperature water (useful for heating systems). Thus, around the power plant there will be lodgings, offices and shops able to use the hot water and vapors produced. Among all the architectonic structures of the hydrogen system, that of the power plant will be the most representative. Actually, rather than one single power plant, I will plan a power plant net alternating big dimension plants, for public use, with smaller ones, for domestic use. The most striking novelty of these plants is perhaps the decentralization of their productive structures. Though some power plant-towers will be of big dimensions and higher visible impact, most part of the fuel cells will be installed in the houses, thus beginning a domestic power production.
Horizontal and vertical represent the basis formula to describe the landscape and architecture’s predominant character of the territory.
Scale models representing possible mix and match schemes of a vertical and an horizontal element (the two basis elements) Up Left: Title page of the work “the Skeleton Reanimated” by W. Blake. The image represents a vertical/horizontal symbolic ratio
THE PROPOSAL: A NEW WAY TO THINK ENERGY
If it would be possible to change into “Hydrogen”, an area like Marghera’s petrochemical would have no sense to exist any longer while some of its parts like for example the power plants, would get a brand new positive meaning. We certainly notice that all the public electricity plants are located in outlying areas (often fragile areas like the lagoon). It is interesting how we keep away from our city centers exactly those structures that supplying energy and heat, they give us the chance to survive. Nowadays, the power plants are still polluting and this is why are pull-apart but with the hydrogen technology it would be safe and worthy keep them closer The environmental impact of an hydrogen power plant is at very low risk because it doesn’t produce emissions in the atmosphere (there are no combustion processes) and without steam turbines there is not audio pollution. Inside the power plant an assembled unit of fuel cells converts the hydrogen into potential difference and high temperature water (useful for heating systems). Thus, around the power plant there will be lodgings, offices and shops able to use the hot water and vapors produced. Among all the architectonic structures of the hydrogen system, that of the power plant will be the most representative. Actually, rather than one single power plant, I will plan a power plant net alternating big dimension plants, for public use, with smaller ones, for domestic use. The most striking novelty of these plants is perhaps the decentralization of their productive structures. Though some power plant-towers will be of big dimensions and higher visible impact, most part of the fuel cells will be installed in the houses, thus beginning a domestic power production.
