The Strategic Making of Sustainable Venice
摘要
Drawing on a constitutive understanding of strategic communication [Falkheimer and Heide (Strategic communication: An introduction. Routledge, 2018), (Strategic communication: An introduction to theory and global practice. Routledge, 2022); Winkler and Schoeneborn (The research handbook of strategic communication. Edward Elgar, 2023)], this chapter examines how the municipality of Venice’s strategic sustainability communication not only represents the city’s sustainability practices but also constitutes what a sustainable Venice means in the first place. In particular, it analyses a communication campaign to inform tourists about flooding events as well as an interview with a local politician. The findings show that the making of a sustainable Venice is the result of a negotiation of the meaning of sustainability between the specificities of the local urban setting and the meaning found in the global discourse. Extending analyses of the strategic use of language to communicate about sustainability, this chapter shows how strategic sustainability communication is a process that involves both crafted and emergent instances of strategic communication in the constitution of sustainable places. As such, it helps to circumvent some of the limitations of representational understandings of strategic sustainability communication by showing how such practice is inherently political, influencing the transformation of urban places in the age of climate change.