Venice is one of the most famous iconic destinations and one of the most emblematic cases of overtourism affecting a historic city. Here, social movements against tourism have emerged as a reaction to vastly unsustainable tourist flows that have had dramatic and transformational impacts on Venetians’ lives. The aim of this paper is to investigate how tourism transforms the social, cultural, and everyday geographies of the city. The effects of tourism on the historic city are conceived as a process of continuous transformation and repositioning. Taking into consideration the most tangible daily practices of tourists (eating, sleeping, and buying) and the finer dynamics of Venice’s tourism problem, we translate data on these practices into a temporal and spatial analysis to better understand how dynamic the texture of the city is in relation to the tourism subsystem. A comparison between 2008 and 2019 is conducted to evaluate the impact of tourism on residential uses of the city and measure the sustainability of growth of the tourism facilities. The investigation highlighted an impressive accommodation’s growth, from 8.249 in 2008 to 49.260 in 2019 of bed places (497% growth) in the entire historical city, a similar expansion is also evident in the total number of restaurants that has increased by 160% in all districts and a variations of 4% in shops instead of a population decline of −13% in the same period. In addition, a residents’ survey in spring 2019 was conducted to better understand the intensity of these impacts and the motives for depopulation and the anti-tourism movements. We focus on how tourism, if not managed and planned, radically changes the social and urban structures of the city and the lives of local residents. We conclude by presenting some local theoretical and practical insights into the touristic pressure, provided by citizens’ associations on one side and policymakers on the other.

In 2016, Italian production of wine exceeded 51 million hectolitres and among the twenty regions, the region with the most production by volume (millions of hectolitres) was the Veneto region, north-east of Italy, with almost 11 million. In particular, the success of Prosecco at the global level is the most important driving factor at both the economic and productivity levels. The worldwide success of Prosecco wine entails a remarkable change in both the local and regional configuration of agrarian landscapes. Traditional winegrowing swiftly changed into an intensive monoculture with remarkable investments and the spread of new viticulture entrepreneurships. The discussion proposed here intends to investigate the process of heritage construction or ‘heritagisation’, UNESCO candidacy, as an important issue for rural tourism promotion in the context of a productive winescape. We concentrated our analysis on the DOCG area, a complex space where several forces need to coexist; the productive drive of growing requests (global and local) of Prosecco, as well as rural representation based on local habits and a concrete hilly landscape. Rural tourism is clearly an important sector in terms of revenue and employment, especially for local communities, and it can help to ensure economic stability; however, doing so in a way that benefits the area and the landscape is not so straightforward. There are potential problems in facilitating increased urbanization, such as the standardization of landscape and damage to the area if plans are mismanaged. In the case of best practices, a desirable model of tourism can be tapped into while helping rural regions take advantage of more sustainable tourism development and landscape management.

This article extends our understanding of inland waterways by theorising the temporary absences of water in canals and rivers as possibilities for action, that is, affordances. The interplay of temporary absence and presence of water in the inland waterways provides a range of potentialities for various activities and practices. Affordance theory can help us to further theorise material absences and position them as important elements of performing, practicing and interpreting place. We show how temporary absence of water can create spatial, historical and communicative affordances, affording the movement of boats, revealing and recreating the past and raising environmental awareness. The paper is based on semi-ethnographic research on the rivers and canals in the United Kingdom and Italy, featuring document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with various waterway users.

River contracts (RCs) are voluntary agreements between stakeholders for managing water bodies and involve participatory, evidence‐based action plans. Increasingly, European authorities recognise that effective water policies require bottom‐up, inclusive decision‐making. Despite widely held assumptions about the benefits of including stakeholders in river basin management and encouraging participatory mechanisms of decision‐making, the growing rhetoric about the need for public engagement implies that this ‘new’ paradigm of water management remains filled with ambiguities. Adopting ethnographic methods and drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources, this paper analyses three RCs in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region of Italy. These case studies reveal the potential for RCs as tools not only for water management, but also for increasing stakeholder involvement through place‐making activities conceived as potential hydrophilic encounters. In order to understand whether RCs contribute to a fluvial sense of place, we looked at the effects of top‐down versus participatory processes. We asked whether RCs were considered participatory processes designed to achieve a co‐designed outcome or simply territorial management projects that objectify the river as something to be developed. We found that ratifying an RC was not, in itself, proof of an effective process; rather the nature and quality of an RC was determined by the degree and type of participation. We contend that participatory events and sharing information are not sufficient in themselves to achieve the active involvement of all stakeholders. We argue that the best framework for enabling place‐making and enhancing a sense of place is to develop RCs within a process that includes a high degree of participation. This enables citizens to shift from simply being passive recipients of plans to becoming effective territorial actors.

Humans and water have a complex relationship that includes various dimensions such as sociocultural, political, legal and ecological. Considering the ubiquity of water, we need a more holistic perspective to help us see water not as a static entity but rather as one in constant movement, physically and conceptually; acknowledging the interplay between water and humans is essential to understanding societal narratives deeply embedded in places. In this special section, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explore inland waters, taking a water‐centric view instead of a land‐centric one. The special section delves into the emerging hydro‐social connections, diverse forms of expertise, governance models, collective and spontaneous actions, and resilience strategies within the context of inland water bodies, exploring how canals, rivers and wetlands are experienced and represented as places. The papers in this collection show that any form of placemaking should take responsible stewardship of water, embrace its dynamic nature, and present a realistic pathway towards sustainable solutions for present and future water challenges.

The authors of this article were involved in the conceptualisation and organisation of the first international conference on Inland Waterscapes, subtitled ‘Nature, Society and Culture in Hydrography,’ held at the University of Udine between 22nd-25th May 2024. The following essay draws on an extended dialogue between us prior to, during and after the conference about how to comprehend and characterise the relationship between water, landscape and human society in interior locations. In the following sections we consider the waterscapes of Udine and the broader Friuli-Venezia Giulia region (and discourses about these) in the light of aquapelago theory (formulated within Island Studies to refer to terrestrial and marine environments closely integrated by human livelihood activities). Informed by our focus on the specific locale, we propose and evaluate the usefulness of the concept of interior aquapelagality to comprehend the assemblage of liquid and material elements in the region and their changing social function and character over an extended duration. Our conclusion suggests the potential usefulness of the concept and invites other researchers to evaluate its application to other contexts.