Enforcing Regulation of the Plateatici

Post date: Sep 15, 2015 9:53:8 PM

In Venice, there is a large demand from tourists for romantic 'al fresco' dining services in the city. Tourists crave to sit outside and take in the atmosphere of this beautiful city, and restaurants are happy to meet this need. However, this comes at a cost. Restaurants, looking to accommodate the tourist's desire to sit outside, begin to take up more and more space in public squares and walkways. Incidentally, this can often cause problems in especially crowded campos and in the worst cases, accidents can occur between waiters trying to serve food and pedestrians trying to navigate the crowded area.

Currently, the City of Venice has initiated regulations to control this occupation of public space and the government has placed limits on the extent of the area an establishment is allowed to occupy, mostly based on how much space the campo can allow for and how much the business can pay. However, this system is not well enforced and according to the book, Venice: The Tourist Maze, "Police come around every year or so to check that restaurants are keeping within there allotted space". This means that unless the restaurant is directly interfering with another establishments space, they can usually get away with taking up more space than they were allowed. To make matters worse, the book also explains, "the nature of the punishment itself has encouraged restauranteurs to stretch out their plateatici as much as possible, since police fine offenders 20$ per square meter over their allotted area, up to a maximum fine of 450$." This means more and more restaurants are simply willing to pay the fines and greatly extend their plateatici despite the narrow campos.

This poses an interesting problem for our project since we are working to combat the problems associated with the plateatici. How can we go about enforcing regulations? Are stricter punishments the solution, at the cost of business to the restaurants? Maybe the application we develop can help in some way? All these questions and more are ones we need to carefully consider in our project as we try to address the problems created by the plateatici.

Image credit to : http://www.lovethispic.com/