Venice and its Lagoon, a UNESCO World Heritage property, epitomizes the challenges of water-related climate change. Historically, it has been an exemplary site of human life in close interaction with water. Today, with rising sea levels and intensifying storm surges, it offers a powerful case for developing cohesive, inclusive, and adaptive water management. The lessons emerging from Venice have relevance to other UNESCO heritage sites. In all its complexity, Venice underscores the need to recognize water’s dynamic nature in governance and to avoid reliance on rigid, fail-safe solutions, instead emphasizing collaborative actions supported by political commitment. This article reframes the heritage of Venice and its lagoon as a dynamic, amphibious process, and argues that collaborative, adaptive governance is the only viable path to a sustainable future.

Active mobility in peri-urban areas is influenced by sprawl, limited public transportation, and reliance on private vehicles. This study redefines active mobility in peri-urban and low-density contexts from a territorial perspective informed by the Veneto Region and reframes micro-hubs as socially oriented, network-integrated elements rather than scaled-down urban hubs. This study adopts a qualitative, theory-driven methodology combining a multidisciplinary review of the active mobility concept with thematic analysis to identify mobility hub characteristics, followed by analytical synthesis, the classification of mobility hub types, and a set of social indicators for analyzing their performance. These methods are used to develop a framework for understanding mi-cro-hubs as socio-spatial components of active mobility networks. Results indicate that a network of minor roads and micro-hubs can support shifts toward active mobility when aligned with daily mobility patterns and supported by multi-level governance. The study outlines the socio-spatial roles of micro-hubs and defines them as nodes that link local networks and everyday mobility systems, distinguishing three roles: network, welfare, and civic. Socio-spatially integrated micro-hubs can be effective in reducing car dependence while providing transferable policy-oriented actions for similar peri-urban and low-density areas.

Active mobility in peri-urban areas is influenced by sprawl, limited public transportation, and reliance on private vehicles. This study redefines active mobility in peri-urban and low-density contexts from a territorial perspective and reframes micro-hubs as socially oriented, network-integrated elements rather than scaled-down urban hubs. This study adopts a qualitative, theory-driven methodology combining a multidisciplinary review of the active mobility concept with thematic analysis to identify mobility hub characteristics, followed by analytical synthesis, the classification of mobility hub types, and a set of social indicators for analyzing their performance. These methods are used to develop a framework for understanding micro-hubs as socio-spatial components of active mobility networks. Results indicate that a network of minor roads and micro-hubs can support shifts toward active mobility when aligned with daily mobility patterns and supported by multi-level governance. This study conceptualizes micro-hubs as socio-spatial nodes embedded within dispersed mobility networks and, drawing on the Veneto region as an analytical context, employs an existing typological classification—network, welfare, and civic—to interpret their roles in shaping a context-sensitive framework for active mobility in peri-urban and low-density areas. Micro-hubs become socially integrated spaces that may contribute to strategies for reducing car dependency while providing transferable policy-oriented actions for similar peri-urban and low-density areas.