How the smart-city dream collides with the lagoon’s unruly, ungovernable heart
In this essay for Domani, Stefano Dealessandri explores a Venice that is no longer just a city, but a playable environment. Part surveillance infrastructure, part theme park, part algorithmic experiment. For its 1600th birthday, Venice hasn’t received a facelift from surgeons of glamour but from Mayor Luigi Brugnaro and a cadre of tech entrepreneurs. The result is the Smart Control Room, an enormous digital command centre on Tronchetto Island that monitors the urban organism through 800 cameras, sensors, and data streams. It tracks tourists and gondolas, traffic and weather, even the movements and demographic profiles of anyone holding a phone. Officials describe it as a tool for safety and mobility. But its promise of “total control” reveals something closer to a corporate panopticon.
Dealessandri situates Venice within a broader critique of smart-city ideology: the belief that digital systems can optimise urban life. He argues, “distributed intelligence” often becomes a vehicle for privatisation, where public space is increasingly guided and sometimes governed by private companies and opaque algorithms. Venice, already strained by mass tourism and Airbnb-driven displacement, becomes the perfect testing ground for this shift. Disneyfication has long turned its streets into scenery and its residents into background actors. Now, with the introduction of an entrance fee for day visitors, the city openly resembles a controlled attraction including queues, tickets, and curated experiences.
This fusion of surveillance and spectacle creates what computer scientist Anton Nijholt calls urban gamification: the transfer of video-game mechanics into real cities. Sensors and dashboards shape behaviour, reward compliance, and define how people move. Venice becomes a real-time simulation in which inhabitants risk becoming either players following prescribed routes or NPCs reduced to predictable patterns coded by invisible authorities.
Yet the essay insists Venice contains an antidote to this totalising vision: the lagoon itself. Dealessandri turns to wetlands, marshes, estuaries and muddy in-betweens as ecosystems that resist categorisation and control. Drawing on medieval literature and the work of scholar Elspeth Whitney, he presents wetlands as threshold landscapes where boundaries dissolve and perception becomes entangled.
Dealessandri concludes by proposing a dual strategy: strengthen concrete, accessible ways for citizens to govern their own data, and invest in artistic and material practices that make the city more porous, more negotiable, and less governed by invisible code. Venice, he argues, may be turning into a video game but the lagoon reminds us that not everything can or should be rendered playable.
Mackay on the selection:
We’re all familiar with stories about Venice and overtourism; it’s become, by now, a standard, surface-level complaint. This piece, however, explores the phenomenon from a different, original, and frankly disturbing angle. As Dealessandri shows, Venice is no longer just grappling with visitor numbers; it has become a high-tech urban laboratory for profiling and surveillance on a massive scale. This isn’t merely about managing crowds; it’s about converting a historic world city into a highly-regulated, depersonalized environment; a “videogame,” as the author puts it. This is a thought-provoking consideration of the ethical, social, and long-term implications for citizenship and urban life when local institutions decide that ‘total management’ is the only answer to mass tourism.
The original article was published in Italian as Venezia è un videogame in NERO Editions (Not/ NERO).
It available here.
NERO Editions (Not/ NERO) is an Italian independent publisher and cultural platform known for its cutting-edge engagement with contemporary art, critical theory, and radical thought.
Summary by ZN.
