The reconversion of the Litoranea Venetian Waterway: an opportunity to rethink the eastern Venetian coastal system

This article investigates the relationship between territory and infrastructure in order to offering new ideas for the management and design of coastal landscapes. As a case study, are exposed the results of a project concerning the Venetian Litoranea Waterway, an old waterway that flows along the Adriatic venetian coast. The need for reactivate the waterway - now under-utilized and never fully completed – becomes an opportunity to study a broad-minded approach, based on the analysis of the of both the environmental and economic issue. The aim of the work is to provide a model able to face with the problems afflicting the entire coastal system and provide a valid alternative to the current seafront employment strategies. The concept of combining skills deriving from civil engineering, economics, and landscape architecture, is fundamental in order to studying a wide-ranging approach to the problems emerging from the analysis and the critical issues affecting the coast and the entire waterway system. This point of view permit to obtaining results usually not taking into account by ordinary planning. On the basis of the problems affecting the Adriatic coast under examination - such as coastalerosion,subsidenceandsaltwater intrusion - the project proposes a radical transformation of the reclamations area surrounding the waterway, towards a more resilient and less burdensome structure to manage. By the creation of a wet buffer, developed along the waterway, makes it possible to unveil new opportunities for tourism exploitation linked to the lagoon areas, which can be used as a flywheel to implement compensation and financing of the project itself. The process would able to obtaining a safer and more cost- effective territory. The entire approach contemplatesalarge-scaleorganizationof urban development, using planning tools capable of modifying coastal morphology, supporting trends of erosive phenomena. The deepening of the relationships that arises from the process of urbanization of the soil, together with the awareness of the variability of economic contexts and environmental conditions, become the starting point for the development of new synergies between infrastructures, tourist offer and coastal occupation processes