VE-LAW | The historic city centre regulation

The 'VE-LAW' research unit wants to reconstruct the legal status of historic centres as unitary cultural assets, not a complex made up of the sum of individual monumental fragments. The absence of ad hoc state legislation on historical centres, the scarcity of regulatory references, and the laws of derogation from local town planning instruments are clear symptoms of the disinterest or unsuitability of current public policies with respect to the challenge of historical centres, and this approach has had manifest results, including the depopulation of centres to the benefit of mass tourism and the related transformation of entrepreneurial activities. The slowness of the legislature is contrasted by an evident local liveliness, which, also with the contribution of jurisprudence, is developing new models for the protection of historic centres. The objective of this research is to follow and recompose these processes of legal innovation, also by comparing them with similar evolutions registered in foreign experiences.Among historic centres, that of Venice, a city of art and a Unesco site, presents special characteristics. Faced with the pathologies determined by the tourist exploitation of this city, one must, therefore, question oneself on the possibilities that the current legal system offers local and state administrations to influence phenomena that fatally lead to its degradation. In this sense, the research, also moving in a de jure condendo perspective, aims at identifying possible ways that could be taken by the state legislature, leveraging the specificity of the object to be protected and the urgency of preserving it as a heritage at risk.