Abstract

Cruise ships are at the same time among the most popular and most controversial means of travel. Photos of oversized ships, passing through the historic center of Venice, have become iconic. This paper explores the background of the debate over cruise ships in Venice. Using research at the intersection of culture and technology, the history of technology, urban anthropology, and social movement theory, it sheds light on how the spatialization of the cruise industry through infrastructures affects Venice and the lagoon. In this paper, I will retrace the development of these interdependencies to show how activists, associations, and citizen campaigners address and perform these entanglements. Protest has turned the ship into a powerful symbol for the infrastructural appropriation and transformation of natural and urban space. Since transportation and traffic routes influence people’s everyday lives, it is important to consider their impacts on practices, spaces, and relations, especially in a city like Venice, where footpaths and waterways form an important element of the identity of both the city and its inhabitants. Through its actions, its tacit knowledge of local space, and the explicit knowledge the protest network produces, it both opposes and adds to hegemonic discourses. I argue that the cruise ship has been transformed into a metaphor of global capitalism, which in turn renders it a symbol with transnational impact.