Pay-As-You-Go Urbanism

[Image: By San Rocco].

In December 2010, San Rocco, an Italian magazine dedicated to contemporary spatial culture, produced the two images seen here. They were created in response to a move by the Italian Minister of the Interior to extend an anti-hooliganism ban—originally intended as a way to protect the city from violent sports fans—and using it, instead, as a means for spatially preventing "political rallies."

San Rocco have thus shown both Venice and Rome closed off behind museum-like turnstiles and security barriers, or what the magazine calls "efficient technological devices to regulate access to public space."

[Image: By San Rocco].

Even divorced from their political context, though, these images are provocative illustrations of another phenomenon: that is, the museumification of urban space, particularly in Venice, a city steadily losing its population.

The idea that we might someday see the urban cores of historic European cities simply abandoned by residents altogether and turned, explicitly, into museums, surrounded by pay-as-you-go turnstiles, does not actually seem that far-fetched.

(Spotted via Critical Grounds).