Post date: Oct 02, 2012 1:50:14 AM
Venice, a famous tourist destination city, has most of its economy and income related to tourism and recently has been faced critical situations like population decline, aging tendency of population, and loss of traditional food stores. Hence, our project is aimed to indicate the driving force behind depopulation via investigations on the changing retail and hospitality sectors, and correlate these elements with tourism as well. Making a new categorization for stores and separating hotels out of stores will be vitally important, since past IQP groups were working on either one or two sestiere (district) and having different coding system. As a result, we will be responsible to create a baseline for future projects, which is compiling all the past stores data using CSV file and manage them by using the City Knowledge Console. Our final goals are to put the store and accommodation information on the website venipedia.org, draw conclusions and make recommendations on the City of Venice. As long as we finished the field work to collect data, we will be able to correlate the demographics, tourism, stores and accommodations in Venice. The trends of depopulation and booming tourism will be indicators of the evolution of Venetian stores and accommodation. We will make recommendations on the dynamics of Venetian lives, which might be on protecting the traditional food stores or regulating the tourism and the expanding hotel industry. One of our deliverable is to create an interactive map on Venipedia, with a time slide showing the shift of store types in every year (since 2009 to 2012) and the map could also have directions to the nearby stores according to to store type, input name or location.
As traditional food stores and services for locals will be categorized out in our reformed coding system, our map will be helpful for Venetians to find shops by types, like barbershop, traditional open-air market, pharmacy and so on. Concerning the aging population issue that the Venetian average age is 48.3 with 34.9% residences older than 60, our map will be incredibly useful for elders to find the neighborhood store without traveling too far to purchase. The map will also benefit tourists or visitors leading to the nearby accommodation or store. The movie Bread and Tulip we watched on our Italian class has a good example. Mrs. Barretto, a typical Italian housewife from Pescara, first time came to Venice alone when she was traveling with her family and then left out on the highway cafe. She could barely find a temporary lodging on the first night in Venice and then later on, she asked for a room from Mr. Fernando, a waiter she met in the restaurant. Mr. Fernando provided a small room in his cluttered apartment. The Italian word affittacamere mentioned in the movie, is literally means landlord, but as the room-renting service becomes popular, affittacamere refers mostly to the room-renting services at present. There are types of accommodations in Venice, like alberghi, bed &breakfast and affittacamere.
Every time I and my partners think of when we were in Venice, we always get excited about living in Venice. I cannot wait to see such beautiful lagoon city filling by historical and cultural elements, with no vehicle throughout the city except that Santa Croce has a bus station connecting mainland and the main island. Walking will be a preferred transportation means in Venice and walking a lot is actually the best way to maintain health. We are even considering that a morning walk in Venice will be a good idea! Non Vedo I’ora! (I can’t wait!)