It is not yet widely known that one of Mr Berlusconi’s last acts in office was to sell Venice to the Disney Corporation.  I can give you a sneak preview of the Corporation’s Strategic Plan.

       Disney will manage and finance the completion of the MOISE barrier to schedule.   These costs will be recovered from admission charges.  The basic charge will be €50, as at Eurodisney, but the majority of customers – or guests, as Disney policy calls them – will come on a package deal.  In the peak season, from mid June to mid September, admission to Venice will only be available as part of a guided tour. 

Disney expects that the most popular package will be the one day Venice experience.  Guests of the Venice experience will arrive by train in the modernised station, from which they will cross the Grand Canal from the mainland ticket office to the new €1 billion visitor centre.  The visitor centre will offer audio visual presentations of the culture and history of Venice, lecture rooms, libraries and theatres, a shopping mall focussed on souvenirs and other Venice related material, and restaurants of all kinds and price brackets.  Merchandising in the city itself will be strictly controlled, and traditional in style – Italian coffee shops, trattoria, boutiques.

       It is expected that first time guests will spend at least half their time in Venice in the visitor centre, not only spending money, but gaining some understanding of what they will see and the context that gave rise to it.  Their two hour tour of the City will begin with a water bus trip down the Grand Canal and an excursion into the lagoon.  They will land by St Mark’s Square and walk to the Rialto where the water buses will take them back to the visitor centre.  A wide range of other tours, some focussed on themes, others on areas of the city, and accompanied by full briefing in the visitor centre, will be offered to repeat guests who are not making their first- or only visit – and will show them quieter parts of the city – free of the crowds of guests enjoying enjoying the basic Venice experience tour.  Outside the peak season, individual admission will be available, at €50.  There would be Ruskin weeks, in which no guided tours would be permitted, and numbers would be strictly limited.  Tickets for these weeks for the general public would be expensive – and generally sold as part of a package with hotel accommodation –but a limited number would be allocated to scholars and educational institutions, and by ballot.

       Disney’s longer term strategy recognises the two issues that put ‘Venice in Peril’.  One – the problem that bought the Venice in Peril organisation into being – is the need to protect the city from the sea.  The other – well recognised if less often articulated – is the inexorable growth of tourist numbers.  For Disney, both of these are opportunities rather than problems.

       Let me say a little about numbers.  Venice today receives an estimated 15 million visitors a year.  Over the next few decades, the strategic plan anticipates that the number wanting to visit Venice might grow by a factor of three to five, as a result of increased literacy and rising incomes, primarily in Easter Europe and, above all, Asia.

       There is little we can do to stop this happening:  and we ought to welcome it.  Venice is one of the crown jewels of Western European civilisation, and if we are part of that civilisation and want to promote its values, we want as many people as possible to go to Venice.  It may be politically incorrect to say so, but I would certainly be pleased if some of the millions – of mostly illiterate – people who visit Mecca each year came instead to Venice.  The issue is how to accommodate, indeed promote, this cultural tourism without letting it destroy what people go to see.  Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded;  anyone who has been in Venice in August knows what Yogi Berra meant.  We need to imagine what this might be like with three times as many people.

       But for Disney Corporation, growth in demand is an opportunity, not a problem.  And so it is for those who are concerned about the long term position.  The only definitive permanent means of seeing Venice’s future turns the lagoon into a fresh water lake behind sea defences, in line with the Dutch model.  As in Holland, this is expensive:  as in Holland, it becomes affordable by means of the development potential of reclaimed land.  The lagoon is more than large enough to accommodate the international airport and hotels needed to cope with larger tourist flows.  In this sense, the answers to the two issues that put Venice in Peril come together.  The effect would be to turn Venice, its coastline and hinterland, into Europe’s principal destination for cultural tourism.  The Venice region is a tourist centre today, largely independently of the city, for beach holidays based mostly on accommodation.  There are other nearby locations, in Italy and Croatia, better suited to these purposes.  The Disney strategy revitalises the area and builds, largely on reclaimed land, new accommodation outside the city in all price ranges.

       In high season, this accommodation would allow very large numbers of people to enjoy holidays mixing cultural and resort activities.  Out of season, the strategy visualises agreements with colleges in Asia and the United States that would bring students to the Venice region for courses, from a week to a month, introducing them to Western European history and culture.

       Handing Venice to Disney is not, of course, a serious proposal.  But the purpose of the exercise is to illustrate that the problems of Venice are not problems of science or of finance but problems of organisation and management.  Disney Corporation would provide, and present arrangements do not provide,  three things:  first, the capacity to make long term strategic decisions:  second, the ability to manage activities in an integrated manner which is the only way of accommodating currently fifteen million, prospectively fifty million, people on a tiny island:  thirdly, a willingness to make hard choices, to force a resolution of conflicting demands.

       None of these exist today.  There is no strategy.  The growing number of visitors to Venice interfere more and more with each others’ enjoyment. The proliferation of different interests and demands in the political process ends with outcomes which are satisfactory to nobody.

       Yosemite National Park is an area of outstanding natural beauty located close to one of the largest conurbations in the world – the coastal strip of California.  The National Parks Service has established a balance between the conflicting needs to allow millions of visitors to go there and yet to preserve what it is they want to go and see.  Their management segregation accommodates the different demands of those who want only to catch a glimpse of Yosemite Falls from the bus and those who want to get away from it all in a seven day hike.

       This is possible because a century ago control of Yosemite was taken away from the – very small – number of people who live in and around the Yosemite Valley and managed as a national asset by the US Federal government.  What we call today World Heritage Sites include both natural attractions, such as Yosemite, and man made attractions, such as Venice, and, thanks to the National Park concept, many of the natural attractions are today well managed and preserved.  Amongst heritage cities, Venice is an extreme case.  No other historic city is so impractical in its design for modern living.  No other historic city is so concentrated.  No other historic city has such a high ratio of tourism to other economic activity. 

I expect to hear many comments from the floor tonight on the lines of ‘we don’t want to turn Venice into a park’.  They will talk about a theme park, rather than a park, because the word park conjures positive associations, the phrase theme park negative ones.  But all parks have themes, and Venice is already a park.  The majority of people in Venice at any time are tourists.  The majority of people working in Venice at any time have travelled into the city for the day to serve tourists. In these fundamental respects, the economics of Venice are the economics of Yosemite and Eurodisney not the economics of Slough. And the economics should drive the politics – Venice’s tragedy is that it is located in the country with the most disfuncti8onal political structure among advanced countries.  The succession of historic events that make Romano Prodi successor in title to the Doge of Venice is what has put Venice most in peril.  As a business economist, I have learnt that shortage of money is generally the manifestation of a problem rather than the problem itself.  Small businesses fail because they run out of money, and blame their bank:  but the underlying issue is lack of customers, or the level of costs, or lack of management skills to relate one to the other.  And this is equally true of non-profit organisations.  At Oxford I would frequently hear ‘if only we had as much money as Harvard we wouldn’t be in such a mess’ which got it just the wrong way round.  To have the best educational brand in the world and no money is a management problem, not a financial problem.  For the most beautiful city in the world, visited each year by fifteen million people with open wallets, to be in danger of physical and economic collapse, is a management problem, not a financial problem.  I give you the motion:  enough money has been spent saving Venice.