A vision for Porto Marghera

• International Competition I 2018 I 1st Prize
• Location: Venice, Italy
• Team: A. Farmazon, A.Myserli
• Host: Fondazione di Venezia – La Biennale di Venezia
• Status: Pending invitation on further implementation of the project in phase 2 [2019] I Exhibited in Venice Biennale Pavillion in 2018

Porto Marghera, once in the forefront of a thriving petrochemical industry, stands today as a remaining tessera in-between Venice’s touristic boom, infrastructural pressures and critical environmental decay. As pollution has reached an all-time high, one wonders: Is this the end? Far from Cartesian modernity’s dualistic character (humanity versus nature and vice versa), the proposal addresses urbanisation as a multi-scalar field of cascading resource streams, materials and circular metabolic flows. Based on Marghera’s industrial heritage, a vision towards a new material ecology-economy is shaped: Porto Marghera as a synthetic landscape of new ecological systems, remediation mechanisms, depollution strategies and closed-loops of production, manufacturing and supply, supported by local workers, flora and fauna and re-purposed local processing facilities. This process of re-directing Marghera’s urban economy towards bio-based activities and closed or semi-open resource streams manifests an in-situ re-coupling of anthropogenic and natural processes; a highly experiential and cooperative ever changing landscape, an infrastructural ecology of the future.