What happens when environmental change is experienced not as a single catastrophe, but as something that accumulates gradually through everyday life? One of LRG’s 2026 Research Fund projects is using Venice to develop a new way of researching landscapes whose past, present and uncertain future are unfolding at the same time.
Living with slow disaster: creating a multimodal landscape biography protocol for Venice is led by Dr Annaclaudia Martini, Tenured Assistant Professor in Human Geography in the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna. Her research specialises in geographies of affect and post-disaster landscapes, but this project also brings her professionally into a landscape she knows in a very different way: Annaclaudia was born and grew up in Venice.
The project starts from an established method known as landscape biography, which approaches landscapes as places with life histories: layered environments continually shaped, remembered and contested over time. Annaclaudia argues, however, that a method designed primarily to read landscapes backwards needs to change when applied to places whose future is itself one of their most contested layers.
Venice and its lagoon provide the testing ground. Here, recurring aqua alta – high water – sits within a much slower landscape of sea-level rise, subsidence, changing patterns of habitation, tourism pressure and continuing debate around how the city should adapt. Through oral histories, walking interviews, affective mapping, archives, photographs and video diaries, Annaclaudia will explore not simply how residents remember their changing landscape, but how those memories shape what they imagine, fear and hope for its future.
We spoke to Annaclaudia about living inside a “slow disaster”, why the landscape can sometimes ask better questions than the researcher, and what changes when landscape biography begins to look forwards as well as back.
Congratulations on receiving an LRG Research Fund award. What does this funding mean to you personally and professionally?
Thank you. I am delighted this project has been funded and look forward to developing it.
I am originally from Venice and did both my BA and MA there, so at a personal level this is an opportunity to pursue a project I have had in mind for a long time. Professionally, it allows me to open a new strand of research in a city I know very well personally, but which I would like to understand from a different perspective through the project. It merges that personal interest with the opportunity to test a methodological framework I have wanted to use for years.
I lived Venice as a home I could leave and could go back to if needed. Now I can explore its temporalities differently: from the archives to interviews with residents – those who have remained, for good or bad, through the pressures of overtourism and high water, aqua alta.
Your project focuses on Venice, but it is really about developing a new way of studying landscapes. Could you tell us about the central idea behind the project?
The central idea is to recognise the sedimentation and stratification of temporalities, materialities and imaginaries within landscape. Methodologically, that can be approached by adapting landscape biography.
Landscape biography treats a landscape as something with a life history, continuously reworked by the people who live within it. But in archaeology, and in the relatively few works applying the approach across the wider social sciences, it has been built almost entirely to look backwards. It was developed for places whose past is deep and whose future can largely be assumed. It is very good at reading accumulated layers, but has almost nothing to say about a landscape whose future is the most contested layer of all.
So the project rests on a methodological question: what does landscape biography look like when the landscape is not stable, and when the people you are interviewing are narrating forward as insistently as they narrate back?
My answer is that we need to build in what I am calling future landscape biography, and that we cannot do that with the largely quantitative toolkit landscape biography has relied upon so far.
It needs oral history, walking, affective mapping, photo and video diaries, and methods capable of holding emotion, embodied knowledge and the agency of non-human elements such as tides, subsiding ground and flood barriers.
Venice is where I test this, but it is not really what the project is about. The aim is to produce a transferable, honest and openly available protocol that can be used for other cases of slow disaster.
You describe Venice as a “slow disaster” landscape. What does that term mean, and why is it a useful way to think about places experiencing gradual environmental change?
“Slow disaster” describes a catastrophe whose harm is distributed through time rather than concentrated into a single catastrophic event. The terminology borrows from Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” and challenges the dominant grammar of disaster, which imagines a sudden rupture with a clean before, during and after – often followed by preparedness, risk reduction and recovery.
Slow disaster suggests that catastrophe can instead be woven into ordinary life.
In Venice, recurrent flooding can be understood not as the disaster itself, but as a visible symptom of a slower catastrophe involving subsidence, rising seas and the steady hollowing out of a resident city under pressure from overtourism.
Aqua alta has affected Venice and its lived landscape for a very long time. In many buildings, for example, nobody lives on the ground floor anymore. High water causes damage but, for now, has not made it impossible to live in the city.
And aqua alta is not necessarily the only slow disaster we could identify there. Overtourism creates another form of constant pressure on the city and its possibilities, coupled with political failures to manage it and the frustration experienced by residents. Metaphorically, it is another form of a city drowning.
Thinking in terms of slow disaster allows us to examine these stratifications and mundane events: how pressures compound, sometimes release, and affect not only the past and present but the future of the city.
Landscape biography has traditionally been used to understand how landscapes evolve over long periods. What inspired you to adapt this approach for contemporary environmental challenges?
I was looking for a method that would allow me to work with the temporal layering of slow disaster, and landscape biography is an approach that takes temporal layering seriously.
It recognises that landscape carries several timescales at once, and that different groups remember and inhabit those timescales differently. A slow disaster is, before anything else, a problem of time, because risk and harm do not fit neatly inside a single event frame.
In Venice, continuity itself is precisely what is in question. Much of the relevant evidence is not in the ground or the archive, but in how people talk about their doorsteps, their flooded shops and their neighbours who have left.
Climate change has intensified this, and change is now happening at a faster pace, making some of those transformations more visible and traceable.
One of the most intriguing aspects of your project is its emphasis on both memory and the future. Why is it important to study not only how people remember landscapes, but also how they imagine what lies ahead?
Because in a slow-disaster landscape, the future is not simply speculative. How people narrate what is coming is shaped by what they have already watched disappear, while what they choose to remember is shaped by what they believe is still worth saving.
It becomes a daily practice of expectation and calculation: whether to repair a ground floor or abandon it; whether to sell it to an investor who may know little about high water; whether another home passing out of resident ownership represents another small step in the city’s transformation.
Memory can become nostalgic – a retreat into the past – but it is also one of the ways expectations of the future are constructed. One of the concerns I hear informally from people I know is whether their children will be able to stay in Venice, and even whether they would want them to.
Those anticipations are already doing work in the present. They shape what people maintain, what they let go, and what they are willing to grieve for in advance.
There is also an asymmetry worth naming. Venice has an enormous, well-funded and institutionally supported memory apparatus: heritage designation, restoration and an entire economy constructed around the city’s past. Its future, by contrast, is discussed largely through the language of engineering and projection, within which residents can appear principally as a population to be protected rather than as people possessing expertise and agency.
A biographical method that only looks backwards risks reinforcing exactly this division of labour, in which residents get to own the memory, while technicians get to own the future.
The two therefore need to be studied together. Ideally, I can develop a protocol that treats each as a product of the other.
Your research combines oral histories, walking interviews, mapping and other creative methods. What do these different approaches reveal that conventional interviews alone might miss?
Conventional interviews, particularly with participants I have not met before, can sometimes feel stilted, mechanical and limited. I imagine landscape biography as a slow, layered uncovering not only of the landscape but of the lives of some of those who live within it.
Using multimodality not only in the project’s outputs but also in its methodology can help build relationships and trust with participants, if it is done properly. That is why the project involves repeated visits rather than a single period of fieldwork.
Walking interviews, for example, work because the landscape asks better questions than I do.
A step, a doorway, a shop that used to be something else – or simply the feeling somebody has about their city and its environment – can be better understood by walking through it together and listening. As different features of a place become visible, they can prompt forms of narration that a seated interview simply does not reach. They also anchor memory to a particular material trace rather than to a general opinion about the city.
Affective mapping has a different purpose. It registers intensity rather than simply location. It allows participants to show where the landscape presses upon them, and at times asks them to imagine a landscape that is no longer there – or is not there yet.
Photo and video diaries do something different again. They extend the research into the long stretches between events: the ordinary weeks in which a slow disaster actually happens. They also give participants agency over what they choose to represent.
As someone who was born and grew up in Venice, how does your own relationship with the city shape your research? Does being both an insider and a researcher present particular opportunities or challenges?
It presents both.
I am a native Italian speaker and speak Venetian dialect, so there is no need for translation or language mediation. I also have a network in the city that a researcher coming from outside would need time to develop.
And I have an embodied knowledge of the landscape. I know what the sirens signalling high water sound like. I know something of what it feels like to be a resident continually surrounded by people who do not live in the city, and the frustration of watching a city slowly disappear – even though I have not lived there for 15 years.
That is also the challenge. Having been away for 15 years makes me a particular kind of insider.
One risk is that participants speak to me in shorthand because they assume I already understand, and I lose precisely the explanations I need. Another is keeping my own opinions and perceptions of the city in check.
I am dealing with that structurally rather than relying on good intentions. I will maintain a reflexive research diary that explicitly addresses the insider/outsider dynamic and share those reflections with collaborators. The aim is to avoid reading my own biography into somebody else’s.
Climate change is affecting many places around the world through gradual rather than sudden change. How transferable do you hope your new research protocol will be to other landscapes facing similar pressures?
I want to be careful here, because the protocol is deliberately not universal. It is phenomenon-specific – slow disaster – and initially contained within the context of Venice and its lagoon.
What I hope will be transferable, first and foremost, is the thinking process for working with stratified landscapes.
I do not necessarily imagine transferability as a model or checklist that anyone can follow unchanged. I am aiming for a structured way of thinking about stratified landscapes that is pliable enough to be applied to places with different contexts but experiencing a comparable situation of slow disaster.
At this stage, before testing and writing the protocol, I imagine that what transfers is the architecture rather than the content: the sequence of methods; the way anticipatory narratives are elicited without leading participants; the integration of more-than-human actors into a biographical frame; and, importantly, a documented account of what did not work.
Your project brings together environmental change, cultural heritage and everyday lived experience. What do you hope landscape researchers—and perhaps practitioners beyond academia—will learn from this work?
For landscape researchers, I hope the contribution will be methodological: that landscape biography can be extended forwards in time and that doing so changes what it can be used for.
For practitioners such as planners, heritage managers and adaptation specialists, I hope the research offers a methodological tool that can, where appropriate, be translated into policy approaches that listen better to residents’ knowledge.
Adaptation planning often consults people about preferences: What would you like? Which option do you prefer? Biographical work asks something different: What have you already lived through, and what have you already learnt to live without?
That is a different kind of evidence. The knowledge I am interested in accumulates over decades and, in Venice, is currently held particularly by older residents.
There is also a question of heritage. Venice’s cultural value is strongly protected through its UNESCO designation and because tourism creates demand for its preservation. But while heritage is protected, residents’ liveability is not necessarily protected in the same way. Residents are being pushed from the city while historic properties can become accommodation or investments rather than homes.
That tension between preserving a landscape and sustaining the life within it is an important part of what this research needs to address.
Looking ahead, what would success look like when this project reaches its conclusion? What do you hope will exist that does not exist today?
Very concretely, a working protocol for slow-disaster landscape biography, openly available through Landscape Exchange and the University of Bologna’s repository.
Alongside it, I hope to produce a methods article for Landscape Research, an experimental multimodal piece, and an Italian-language version of the protocol and findings returned to the Venetian organisations and participants who made the work possible.
Conceptually, success would mean demonstrating that the protocol is transferable. I will call it a success when somebody else – or I myself in the future – can effectively use it to work with another landscape under pressure from a slow disaster.
How will support from the Landscape Research Group help you take this research further than would otherwise have been possible?
The first thing is time. LRG support gives me a practical basis for negotiating with my university for the time needed to conduct fieldwork.
Biographical oral history cannot be done through a hasty visit. It requires time and repeated presence, unhurried conversations and a willingness to return.
The second is experimentation. LRG is willing to fund a methodological pilot with an experimental component – including the possibility that, after a year, my protocol may still be incomplete.
Experimental methodological work can be difficult to finance, but this fund gives me precisely the support I need to test a method, revise it and improve it before potentially scaling it up. It could also give me an opportunity to test an approach that I may later develop within a larger European research project.
Finally, publishing the protocol through Landscape Exchange means that it can be pressure-tested by peers rather than only evaluated by reviewers. For a project whose central output is a method, that kind of circulation is integral to improving it.
Finally, if readers remember just one thing about your project, what would you like it to be?
I would like people to remember that Venice is not a warning about a “somewhere else”. It is a place where people are already living inside a climatically difficult future – one that may be becoming more widespread than we want to admit.
Looking forwards as well as back
Over the course of the project, Annaclaudia will develop and adapt the landscape biography protocol, undertake repeated periods of fieldwork in Venice and its lagoon, and then refine and publish the resulting methodology. Participants will be approached through trusted community relationships, with findings returned to participating organisations in Italian.
The repeated presence matters. So too does Annaclaudia’s own relationship with Venice. A reflexive research diary will run alongside the fieldwork, helping her interrogate what it means to research a landscape that is simultaneously a field site, a former home and part of her own biography.
What emerges may be less a universal methodology than a new way of asking questions. Instead of treating landscape as simply the accumulated product of what has already happened, Living with slow disaster asks how memory, anticipation and everyday adaptation continually shape one another – and what landscape research can learn when the future becomes part of a place’s biography too.