The Max Planck Partner Group “The Water City” brings the city and the environments of Venice into focus as the basis for historical and comparative studies on global geo-anthropological processes. We take into account the multi-faceted reality of a “hydropolis,” which has always constituted a crossroad of environmental, cultural, political, economic, and migratory phenomena. The Partner Group creates a bridge between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jean, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; it connects a group of international scholars whose research is motivated by common environmental and cultural-political concerns about the present state of the world vis-à-vis its scientific and technological transformation.
The Partner Group is headed by Pietro Daniel Omodeo.
A series of comparative studies and research activities will be developed in this framework. The first work includes:
- Preparation of a digital publication on the lagoon management in the seventeenth century based on unpublished archival sources and rare early-modern books on running waters.
- Creation of an iconographic database on the Water City project which includes representations of Venice and its waters at various levels: cartographic maps, vedute and symbolic representations.
- Research on the water management of Tenochtitlan / Mexico City in the early modern period based on archival research and aimed at the publication of an Open Access volume for the Series Knowledge Hegemony. The book should deal with the hydraulic environment of Mexico City, its techno-scientific aspects, and the social implications among the different groups of the multicultural society of the time.