Migropolis: Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation

by Wolfgang Scheppe, IUAV Class on Politics of Representation

In winter 2006, under the stewardship of philosopher Wolfgang Scheppe, a collective of students from the IUAV University in Venice fanned out to subject their city to a forensic structural mapping. Out of this fieldwork, conducted in the Situationist psychogeography tradition, there developed a three-year urban project that produced an enormous archive comprising tens of thousands of photographs, case studies, movement profiles and statistic data. From this archive, Venice, sited as it is at the junction of three migration corridors, emerges as a classic instance of the increasingly globalized city in which a decimated inner-city population meets armies of tourists and a parallel economy supported by illegal immigrants. In a map that cleverly branches out into visual essays, written essays, data maps and interviews, the globalized territory of Venice is microscopically dissected and defined as an urban metaphor, the city becoming an "atlas of a global situation."

1344 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2010