If you have been reading previous entries in this blog, you will know that I recently visited Venice in Italy. It was a short and enjoyable break; it is a city with its own character and style – and it serves a particular interest of mine, photography, very well.Venice, as many of you will know, is a city built on marshland. Although the evidence is rarely directly visible, historic Venice is built on top of long wooden stakes struck through the water and into a clay bed, with stones built on top. The problem is, the water levels are rising. On the first day of our stay rain pelted down and this alone was enough to have flooded much of the famous Saint Marks Square by the time we got there. Paddling was very much in order. (By the way, don’t get too confused by the ‘Eiffel Tower’ appearing in the image to the right… it is an ‘artistic’ hoarding).

In a way, I was thrilled to see this side of Venice. It was a real demonstration of one of the problems it faces more and more frequently – although in this case rain-water was the culprit and not sea levels.

But for all of it’s beauty and ‘quaint’-ness, Venice is falling apart at the seams. I’ve never quite understood what makes pealing paint or stucco / plaster an attractive quality, but Venice has it in spades, on a sunny day. But the fact is, Venice also has plenty of dirty little back streets and plenty of areas where the sun never shines. On a bright day, you probably ignore them as they almost inevitably lead to some picturesque little scene, often featuring a bridge, a canal, and perhaps a gondola a floating by beneath you.

Nevertheless, to imagine Venice as somehow perfect is almost impossible. By the way, I do have some programming related points to make here… I’m getting there!

St. Marks Square for example, where paddling was the thing to do. Just next to the ‘Palazzo Ducale’, the home of the Doge (Duke) of Venice. Careful observation of the pillars that surround the palace suggests that there is no bottom to them. In fact, they were built with a traditional widened base, but the pavement levels have been built up to such an extent over time that these pillar-bases can no longer be seen. As a result, when one pays attention to the scale of the ground floor, it seems foreshortened and stubby.

So Venice is changing. Layer upon layer of pavement height increases are being made, walls are being raised to hold back the water – and this again was something that could be seen going on. New drainage facilities were being installed in front of the Palazzo Ducale, and the pavement levels were being raised. To my surprise, though, the pavement levels were being raised about 10cm, it seemed to me. Which does not seem substantial considering the extensive rises in sea level that are expected over the next few decades (although, other projects are also underway which will also, supposedly, help control those rises in sea level).

So, perhaps as implied by the title of this piece, Venice more than most cities shows itself as being like a software application that has been continuously modified – but somehow, it’s never got past version 1. Sure, it might be version 1.1345.1223, or something, but somehow still version 1. Sure, individual areas of Venice have been changed… the famous Basilica de San Marco (shown in the first image) is actually at v3, and doubtless many buildings (subroutines) have been changed. Yet the underlying structures are still those that were required for firstly, a refuge from marauding armies, secondly a base for major international trade operations, and finally, tourism. Yet this sounds a lot to me like functional-creep. Hey – wouldn’t it be great if our application had some religious relics? Let’s put it in an easter egg, and import some cool Christian relics man!

The analogy is not great, I accept. There are a million reasons why a city probably should not be compared to software development, and even in software development, it is often acknowledged that ‘build it twice, deliver it once’ is not possible… and there have certainly been examples of ‘throwing your code away and starting again’ have been crazy things to do. In software development, many of us remember dealing with the Year 2000 problem (before it happened, fortunately); in some cases we were able to ensure that a similar problem did not recur for thousands of years, and in others, just 30 years or so… but this still seems considerably less expensive than rebuilding a whole city.

But, my history in software development has often been strongly related to support. The kind of support that gets me called at 2am to fix some problem or other. This makes my sensibilities very strongly oriented towards writing code that works despite the dodgy input. It makes me want the problem to be self-evident when I am called, and most importantly, it makes me want the problem to be easy to fix when it happens.

Now, as it happens, Venetians seem to handle puddles very well. The police have very fetching thigh-high boots (but regrettably, I saw no female officers wear them), and all the builders have water-pumps to clear ditches already… so perhaps for them this is a ‘problem they can handle’… they’ve prepared themselves for this sort of support, so they are good at it. Nevertheless, from a software perspective, putting off a problem ‘for a few years’ has been shown to be costly.

On a related note, about a week or two prior to my visit to Venice, Hurricane Katrina had caused turmoil across the South Eastern states of the USA. Not only did that hurricane cause unbelievable levels of damage to the physical infrastructure directly, but it resulted in the City of New Orleans being flooded when walls holding the water back broke, at currently inestimable cost in human life and property. New Orleans is built below sea-level.

So maybe, after all, it is time for city planners and so on to take a leaf out of the software developers book. You can build cities on fault-lines if you have the technology and the money. But call me crazy, building a city on mud, below sea-level or in the mouth of a volcano just seems bound to lead to disaster.

Nature is bigger than all of us.