Progetto Ancora

Every city has a foundation myth. Venice built its on water, driving timber piles into lagoon mud, turning impossibility into civilisation. For five centuries, that myth held, beauty, ingenuity, and survival fused into one of the most celebrated urban organisms on earth.Marghera is the other half of the myth.

Built on the same lagoon, from the 1920s onward, it was Venice's industrial engine: oil refineries, aluminium smelters, chlorine factories, fertiliser plants. At its peak, it employed 35,000 people. The roads that fed it, broad, utilitarian, relentless, carved the terraferma into a logistics machine, severing the mainland from the water, the neighbourhood from the factory, the worker from the lagoon that was being slowly poisoned on their behalf.

Those roads are still there. And beneath them lies one of Italy's most contaminated sites. But the poison did not arrive with the factories; it was built into the ground from the beginning. To expand Porto Marghera, vast areas of lagoon wetland were reclaimed using low-cost industrial waste and processing residues. The land itself was contaminated. Dioxins, heavy metals, vinyl chloride, arsenic, a century of production dissolved into soil and groundwater, migrating through the water table into the same lagoon that laps at the foundations of the Doge's Palace. The island is protected, UNESCO-listed, and globally mourned for its fragility. The mainland is a SIN (Sito di Interesse Nazionale, National Interest Site) designated in 1998, largely ignored, slowly sinking, and now facing rising seas pushing brackish water back through poisoned ground. The numbers are not statistics. They are a verdict.

As of 2025, only 21% of the land surface and a negligible 0.1% of the groundwater, approximately one hectare out of 1,618, have been successfully remediated since the SIN designation over twenty-five years ago. To understand why requires understanding what the ground actually is. The subsoil of Porto Marghera is composed primarily of fine-grained clays, silts, and peats, materials of exceptionally low permeability. This geology does not merely complicate remediation. It defeats it.

The standard technical arsenal, soil washing, pump-and-treat systems, and bioremediation all depend on the movement of fluids through the ground. At Porto Marghera, that movement is measured at between two and six centimetres per day. The aquifers are, in the engineers' language, semi-stagnant. A pump-and-treat well can only clean the water in its immediate vicinity, drawing from a radius that barely expands across years of operation. The pollution is geologically locked in place.

Bioremediation, using microorganisms to degrade organic contaminants, a method categorised as low-energy and often cited as the most ecologically aligned approach, faces the same wall. The microbes require the movement of air, water, and nutrients through the soil to survive and work. With horizontal permeability measured as low as 10⁻⁹ to 10⁻¹⁰ metres per second, in-situ bioremediation is effectively impossible. The food cannot reach the organisms. The organisms cannot reach the poison. The result is that bioremediation must be performed ex-situ, excavating the contaminated soil first, treating it above ground, then returning it, a process of enormous cost and logistical complexity that scales catastrophically across a 1,618-hectare site.

The conflict is not merely bureaucratic. It is geological. The ground itself is the barrier to its own healing. The institutional response to this condition has been, above all, one of containment. The marginamento, a massive engineering intervention of steel and concrete barriers driven twelve to twenty metres into the ground, encircles the contaminated zone, attempting to stop toxic runoff from reaching the lagoon. Approximately 90% of the required barrier length has been completed. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering. It is also, in the deepest sense, an admission: that the ground cannot be cleaned quickly, and that the priority is therefore to prevent the damage from spreading further rather than to repair what has already been done. The administrative framework has favoured building a container around the problem rather than actively cleaning its contents.

Progetto Ancora does not pretend that this condition can be resolved by architecture. It does something more honest, and ultimately more radical: it makes the condition the generator of the city. Removing the roads is the first act. Not a gesture of optimism, a refusal. Roads in Marghera are not merely infrastructure. They are the spatial legacy of the decisions that created the contamination: the prioritisation of logistics over habitation, throughput over ecology, speed over care. In their place, Progetto Ancora proposes phytoremediation corridors, linear landscapes of hyperaccumulator plants that follow the existing road geometry, preserving its spatial memory while overwriting its logic. Sunflowers, poplars, vetiver grass, and wetland reeds occupy the former asphalt, their root systems drawing heavy metals and organic contaminants from the soil across seasons and decades. These corridors are not parks. They are infrastructure, slow, biological, and working. They require tending, monitoring, and seasonal harvesting of contaminated biomass. That labour is the foundation of a new civic culture. The urban fabric clusters around these corridors according to a generative principle: buildings follow the remediation frontier. Where the ground has been measured and partially cleared, occupation becomes possible. Where it has not, the land remains in the custody of the plants. The city is genuinely, functionally incomplete, not as an aesthetic choice but as environmental honesty. The boundary between habitable and toxic ground is a moving line, and the architecture of Progetto Ancora is designed to respect and express that movement. Structural systems are exposed at their edges, timber connections visible, floor plates legible, capacity for addition openly declared. A building in Progetto Ancora does not present a finished facade toward the remediation corridor. It shows its bones, acknowledges its incompleteness, and waits. This is the Non Finito principle at the heart of the project.

Progetto Ancora's unfinished buildings emerge from contaminated ground as a civic statement about permission and time. Completion is not deferred; it is earned. At the centre of each neighbourhood cluster is the Campiello delle Bonifiche. The traditional Venetian Campiello was organised around a well-head, the civic infrastructure of water collection that defined social life in a city without roads or running water. Progetto Ancora returns this typology to the mainland in a transformed state. The well-head becomes a monitoring column: a vertical instrument of glass and steel that continuously measures soil contamination levels, groundwater quality, and tidal intrusion, displaying results in visible amber type. The Campiello is organised around the act of reading the ground together. The Custodians, part scientist, part farmer, part urban steward, tend the corridors, interpret the data, and make collective decisions about where and when new buildings can occur. Their workspace anchors each cluster. It holds the memory of the soil and the tools for changing it.

The productive cloister occupies the interstitial ground between clusters and corridors. As rising seas push brackish water increasingly into the terraferma, the productive landscape focuses on salt-tolerant crops, salicornia, sea purslane, sea kale, alongside aquaculture systems that work with rather than against the tidal conditions. Former industrial warehouses become biodigesters, converting organic waste from the cloisters into energy for water filtration. The city metabolises its own condition. This is what makes Progetto Ancora specifically Venetian. The Serenissima Republic was a civilisation that turned an adversarial environment into a resource, that read its lagoon with precision, managed its tidal rhythms with intelligence, and built a culture of extraordinary richness on a foundation that required constant collective attention to survive. The ground beneath Marghera cannot be quickly cleaned. The geology will not allow it. The bureaucracy has confirmed it. The 0.1% figure makes it undeniable. Progetto Ancora accepts that verdict and builds a city around the long work of changing it.

Still here. Still anchored.

The ground is not yet clean.

The buildings are not yet finished.

The fight is not yet won.

But the planting has begun.