Genesis of a fluid metropolitan space : urban metamorphoses in Venice and Veneto

In this essay, we will try to present such a chain of metropolitan metamorphoses, with particular reference to the second post-war period, discussing the emergence of a city region connected to a larger and internationalized polycentric megacity (at least for some kinds of flows), which is, however, still rooted in some basic cultural and social characters. In such a city region, there is no coherence or clear order; tradition and innovation, cosmopolitanism and localism, modernity and postmodernity, industrial and post-industrial are all present in a fairly small physical space (if compared to metropolitan areas such as Paris or London). For a strange case of circularity in history, Venice became one of the most important metropolises of the world in the late Middle Ages as a reticular space of flows, and its destiny is nowadays still linked to the global flows.