Leaving Venice, come hell or high water

Another Life:  There is probably no good day for leaving Venice, but the first rain-clouds in a week and first lappings of wayward winter tides - the acqua alta - across the city's quays and door-sills seemed to make it a bit easier.

If a change is as good as a rest, then swapping the wild spaces of Thallabawn for this extravagantly wrought human hive had promised an ultimate refreshment. Besides, I was feeling some guilt about not having tried harder to get to Venice while it and I are still here.

The city in October is more livable, its famous light even more radiantly crystalline, the lagoon's mosquitoes thinned out among some of the less-troubling crowds of the year. Japanese parties flock to the gondolas, lolling on their cushions like emperors with one arm lazily raised - this to video each other videoing each other while drifting down the Grand Canal. Mere Venetians struggle aboard overcrowded (but still amazingly efficient) vaporetti with elaborate perambulators and shopping bags on wheels.

As residents, their numbers have dwindled almost to the point of no return. More and more commute from the mainland to their work in Venice while their island homes become costly apartments to let to visitors. But there is still a native, early- morning city, hurrying over the bridges and down the narrow calli with briefcases, toolbags or schoolbags, or manning back-canal barges to take out the tourists' abundant and unsorted rubbish.

Trained by the thrillers of Donna Leon, I followed Commissario Brunetti to early, stand-up espressos in corner bars, feeling a vibrancy of city life and togetherness I had not enjoyed since my youth. The tight 10 sq km of Venice, laced with alleys, waterways and revelatory spaces, is an urban dream, even without its gems of art and architecture. No wonder the Chinese want to restore their own historical "Venice" - Tong Li, on the Yangtze delta - to make a new city woven with water.

I learned this from "Citta", the huge Biennale exhibition about the world's cities, architecture and social futures that fills Venice's old Arsenale dockyard buildings and the national pavilions of the city park (it closes on November 19th). If one's tour of the Doges' Palace is an awed meander through centuries of power and glory, a day at the Biennale is a march through a future as urban ant. The Chinese, again, grab the eye with cities contoured like mountains, the skyscrapers' rooftops greened with growing food.

Among 50 competing countries, Ireland performs exceptionally well, its team of architects widely congratulated for actually doing what the Biennale promised on the tin. Confronting what they call "a global case study in extreme suburbanisation" and Ireland's lack of co-ordinated national planning, their polemical pavilion offers alternative, "super-rural" visions.

There are twin ribbons of low-density housing down each side of the Shannon, with islands of amenities floating up and down in between, like Venetian barges, to bring a weekly "urban buzz" to a quarter of a million people.

There are four-family tower houses, one family to each frontage, that revolve once a year to change the view. There are second homes along the coasts that sink into the ground when not in use. And there are whole new swathes of low-density suburbia, spaced out between bioenergy crops along the hinterland of motorways, or down the east coast, served by high-speed trains and connecting with a bridge across to Wales. (For a fuller picture, go to http://www.irish-architecture.com/tesserae/000019.html).

It's now almost 40 years since the massive Buchanan Report on regional planning was published by a Fianna Fáil government (on a weekend, as I recall, to take up Monday newspaper space that might otherwise go to a Fine Gael ard fheis). Like its successors, it was fingered for local political profit and then ignored. The doges' Venice worked, no doubt, to similar motivations, but somehow, and with popular support, it became preposterously beautiful as well.

It's tragic that nature's great contribution to that beauty, as well as to the city's trade and riches, defence and even sanitation, now threatens to undermine and destroy it. From autumn to spring, sirens wail to warn of acqua alta, as rain from mainland estuaries swells the tides in the lagoon, the rising sea-level quantified by digital signs on the quaysides.

The hugely costly project to build flood barriers at the sea's channels into the lagoon, begun under Silvio Berlusconi, seems already to be sinking into political and financial quicksands, a not unexpected fate.

Global warming, we are warned, could threaten civilisation: nothing could symbolise this more woundingly than the death by drowning of one of its finest creations.