Suzanne's Mom's Blog

I’m not sure how a floating city puts out the welcome mat, but this one is inviting young professionals to come and be part of its daily life. Just don’t try to recreate the culture of any other city there. As one resident says, “You do have to live by Venice’s rules.”

Catherine Bennett writes at Bloomberg’s City Lab, “From Karuna Clayton’s window, she can see a gondola bobbing in a Venetian canal and a simple white stone church on one side of a small campo, or city square. Normally there would also be a steady trickle of tourists walking below, but on a January afternoon amid the pandemic’s omicron wave, the square’s empty. 

“For the last nine months, this has been Clayton’s home and workspace. Formerly a commercial food photographer based in London, she now shares an apartment in Venice with her partner and two-year-old daughter, running a coaching business and teaching yoga alongside her photography.

“ ‘I’ve always called myself location-independent,’ she says. … Young, skilled and nomadic, the 35-year-old Clayton represents exactly the demographic that the new Venice-based project Venywhere is trying to attract.

“Launched in December 2021 by the Università Ca’ Foscari and the Fondazione di Venezia, a nonprofit group that protects Venice’s cultural heritage, Venywhere aim is to convince people who can do their jobs from anywhere to do so in Venice. …

“Inspired by the Tulsa Remote work program in the U.S. and a slew of similar efforts from around the world, leaders in the Italian city are eager to bring in young professionals who want to live and work there, not just vacation. …

“ ‘The pandemic has created a large population of highly skilled people who want to move,’ says Venywhere founder Massimo Warglien, a professor of management at the Università Ca’ Foscari. He believes that the pandemic’s disruptive impact on the world of work, from the ‘Great Resignation’ to a new breed of flexible and remote workers, could present a solution to Venice’s chronic brain drain. ‘This is a way of repopulating Venice,’ he says. …

“Unlike remote-worker programs in less-charismatic sites, Venywhere isn’t offering cash incentives to prospective residents. Instead, digital nomads who want to move to Venice will pay a one-time fee to get access to a concierge service that eases them into Venetian life: viewing apartments on their behalf, advising them on how to get a SIM card or access the health system, and even showing them where to shop. The platform promises to help newcomers navigate the city’s many eccentricities, connecting them with workspaces, language lessons and recreational amenities off the beaten tourist paths. …

“The latest population data shows that there are twice as many people in their 50s living in the historical center as there are people in their 20s. Sara Ajazi, a 26-year-old project manager at Venywhere, says that she was the only one of 300 students in her management class to stay and work in the city after graduating from the Università Ca’ Foscari.

For freshly minted graduates who don’t want to be gondoliers, tourist guides or waiters, building careers in Venice can be a challenge. …

“Could an injection of remote workers reverse this demographic trend? The Venywhere project is banking on a domino effect: If large firms send remote teams to the city, that will attract investment and, eventually, more startups who would hire the city’s graduates.

“But some people say it’s hard to see Venice transforming into an entrepreneurial hub or hot destination for remote workers anytime soon. ‘It’s not the easiest city to live in,’ says Riccardo Longobardi, a former Venice resident and the founder of the Digital Nomads in Italy Facebook group. ‘It’s very beautiful, but it’s a bit isolated. Digital nomads tend to look for places with a big nomad community.’

“Clayton agrees. ‘Venice isn’t set up for remote workers, unless you have a nice space to work in. There are almost no coworking spaces and it’s not a thing here to sit at a café for a few hours, getting coffee or lunch and working on your laptop. Lots of places don’t even have Wi-Fi.’

“Solving connectivity problems is one of the first things Venywhere plans to address, in part by creating a network of open-air Wi-Fi hotspots around the city. …

“To accommodate new workers, Venywhere proposes repurposing historic buildings, scattering workers across several sites. The economics campus of the Università Ca’ Foscari, where the team behind Venywhere works, is a perfect example of this: Sleek, white-painted coworking stations, student cafeterias and tutor rooms occupy mid-19th century brick buildings that used to be the municipal San Giobbe slaughterhouse.

“Alternatively, remote workers could hop on a vaporetto and head to Giudecca island, where the bare stone galleries and vaulted ceilings of former tanneries, mills and shipyard buildings in the Giudecca Art District are more often used to host art exhibitions during the Venice Biennale. Venywhere plans to use spaces like these, along with unused rooms in museums, artists’ studios that lie empty without an artist-in-residence, vacant hotel rooms and even restaurant tables between mealtimes as alternatives to the traditional rent-a-desk coworking set-up.

“ ‘This isn’t an expensive project because we are using what is already there. So many structures in the city are only half-used,’ says Warglien.

“The same can be said for the city’s rental housing during the pandemic. Living in Venice can be expensive: In the last few decades, efforts to build social housing have stalled as the region’s conservative politicians have chosen instead to turn residential lots over to the more lucrative tourist market, driving up prices in the city center. Venice has become increasingly unaffordable for Venetians, many of whom have migrated to terraferma, the mainland. The apartments that they left behind have been bought up by private companies for rent to tourists through platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com. Ocio, a local organization that investigates the city’s housing issues, has found that there are now as many beds for tourists in the city as there are for residents.” More at CityLab, here.