Educational Media Reviews Online

This film provides discussion and visualization of environmental issues that challenge one of the most famous and popular cities in the world, Venice, and solutions to them, focusing primarily on two periods -- its foundation and nowadays. Both are worth explaining and visualizing for students (even if the topic of sinking Venice is well-known) and the film does excellent job by utilizing drone visuals, providing outstanding animation, visiting remote spots, talking to local conservationists and so forth. Many courses may benefit from this film: urban studies, human-environmental interaction, architectural preservation, urban engineering.

The film nicely complements "We Built This City" series (2003) that presented histories of London, New York, and Paris through the prism of their challenges and technological solutions -- to better students' understanding of why cities prosper in some periods and slow down in other times. It would be most useful if this film is of that kind -- by comprehensively showing evolution of Venice, explaining its differing importance in different periods, and how technologies of those time(s) helped the city. Architecture highlights allow to condense narrative, structure it. For example, the canals were quintessential elements of urban infrastructure of so-called trading cities (e.g., Hanseatic Brugge) and that perhaps should be highlighted in the film. The towers -- the film perhaps should mention their importance to Italian urban societies (e.g., Bologna) and the challenges of building them in Venice.

Unfortunately, the subtitle of the film ("The Technological Challenge Through The Ages") is misleading -- the challenge discussed is instead of the environmental kind, and there is no consistent coverage of all "ages" -- instead, after presentation of the city's foundation, the films skips other periods and focuses on the contemporary period. Students may like discussion of MOSE project (a series of movable dams costing billions of euros and intended to block the sea in case of high tide). As a geographer, I admire the film's presentation of the city in context of its lagoon as a whole -- yet would also prefer if the theme of inner differentiation of Venice is not lost. This film (and many other) would be of greater relevance to educational users if it is divided into chapters (12 minute is the best length for film screening in class).