venices [29.10.2007]
Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. But then again, neither is Kansas...
~ Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places, 1996: 19
Aveiro is a medium sized town in Portugal that is sometimes known as 'the Venice of Portugal' because it has a series of small canals running through it. The canals are very lovely (you can take a tourist boat on them) but despite the obvious watery parallel I'm pretty sure they are no Venice! In truth I can only guess at this because I have never actually been to the paradigmatic Venice. But as it turns out I have been to many other Venices.
I had no idea that I was already an avid collector of Venices having traveled to Bangkok (The Venice of the East); Dubai (The Venice of the Middle-East); Annecy (The Venice of Savoie); Bruges, Stockholm and Amsterdam (all known as The Venice of the North), the more literally named Venice Beach and more locally Woy Woy: known affectionately as The Venice of Australia only because it is prone to flooding and which inspired a 1934 film by Claude Flemming actually called “Woy Woy: the Venice of Australia”.
And apparently there are still many, many more Venices that await me. Japan, which I've yet to visit has a multitude of Venices: Hiroshima, Yanagawa, Otaru, Kagoshima, Kurashiki, Osaka, Sakai and Matsue all claim the sobriquet, The Venice of Japan. There is another Venice of the North: Saint Petersburg. And Venices of the East: Udaipur, Basra, Barishal, Alappuzha, Suzhou, Palembang, Vilkovo, which all goes to show how ‘the East’ is a less precise term than ‘the North’. Zhouzhuang claims to be the 'Venice of the Orient'. I could only find one Venice of the West: Nantes.
Scandalously, as far as I can tell, there are NO Venices of the South.
The list goes on and on, with increasingly finite divisions and subdivisions and at risk of adding one more frivolous list to the already swollen annals of city listings I've itemized some of these other Venices at the end of this post - but I welcome more!
The plethora of Venices got me thinking about another project I'm working on. Along with my colleague known on the web as Whitebait (we're keeping with the seafood theme), I'm undertaking a major publication on urban rivalry. One of the premises of our study is that city identities are formed in a relational network of cities which overvalues distinction or difference: what Rob Shields calls a 'differential social spatialisation' in which places are principally understood as 'places for this' and places for that'. What is nice about the Venices is that although they demonstrate this point - showing how particular cities seek to differentiate themselves from their local context - they do this by appealing to an over-riding sense of their similarity (with Venice). Of course the point is that Averio's desire to be like Venice is way more likely to demonstrate that town's similarity to Nantes, Osaka or even Woy Woy, as one more in a line of would-be Venices.
Venices
Fort Lauderdale - Venice of America; Cranford - The Venice of New Jersey; Trenton - The Venice of America; Wickford, Rhode Island - The Venice of New England; San Antonio -The Venice of the U.S.; Sunny Isles - The Venice of America; Birmingham - The Venice of the Midlands; Bourton-on-the-Water - The Venice of the Cotswolds; Tongli Village - The Venice of China; Mopti - The Venice of Mali and Africa; Dohomey - Venice of Africa; Ganvie - The Venice of Africa; Massaua - The Venice of Africa; Hoi An - The Venice of Vietnam; Recife - The Venice of Brazil; Giethoorn - The Venice of the Netherlands; Zhujiajiao - The Venice of Shanghai; Nan Madol - The Venice of the Pacific; Hamiltron - The Venice of New Zealand every 3 years (a personal favourite); Lagoon City - Venice of Canada; Cambridge - Venice of Canada; Mykonos - Venice of Greece; Chania - The Venice of Greece; Seville - The Venice of Spain; Wroclaw - The Venice of Poland; Gyor - Venice of Hungary; Korcula - The Venice of Croatia; Dubrovnik - The Venice of Croatia; Rovinj - The Venice of Croatia; Banjarmasin – The Venice of Indonesia; Belen – the Venice of South America; Tigre - the Venice of South America; Bogota - The Venice of South America; Madang - the Venice of the South Pacific; Bamberg has an area entitled ‘little Venice’, which consists of a few houses perilously close to the river. The country name Venezuela itself means 'little Venice'. And in 1912 Gérone was celebrated in a self-titled film as ‘la Venise espagnole’.
