As grey infrastructure turns green. Along the Padua-Venice waterway

The landscape of the Po Valley features a delicate hydraulic balance, which has been achieved through the construction of works that have kept safe different kinds of settlements through time, though not preventing some dramatic floods, even in recent times. Canals, dams, sluices, and riverbanks compose a widespread and peculiar infrastructural landscape, which constantly reminds us of the careful, meticulous, and tenacious effort of transformation and management of the land, which has been necessary for urban, agricultural and, since the post-war years, industrial development. Today, owing to climate change, this system is no longer fit to guarantee the safety of the numerous and widespread urban settlements which, especially in recent years, have multiplied and sprawled over the whole land of the region. Floods in the last decade (e.g. November 2010) are, according to experts, only a warning of what could happen if the hydraulic network does not get integrated and improved. In order to mitigate the flood risk in Veneto, one of the hypotheses, on which different experts, both political and technical, agree, is to implement a detention basin by completing the missing stretches of the Padua-Venice waterway, a long unfinished canal designed at the end of the 1960s, which is today one of the largest Italian hydraulic infrastructure wrecks. In the 1970s just about 7 out of the 17 planned miles (approx. 11 out of 27 km) of waterway were actually built, i.e. the starting and final stretches located respectively in the industrial district of Padua and in the cargo port of Venice. This paper deals with design scenarios turning this abandoned waterway into green infrastructure that works both as safety device and as landmark as well as a formal and spatial device capable of re-composing a large amount of scattered artifacts while re-designing landscape.