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This work addresses a key question for the construction and evolution of university cities: their retentiveness of the student population once they complete their studies. It so does with a focus on a distinctively tourist city like Venice, highly attractive for young adults in education, yet at the same time subject to strong pressures for displacement of stable residents. The balance between these two forcefields seems to be on the losing side in recent years. In our research we trace this evolution, through the life histories of a sample of graduates at local universities that resided in Venice in different periods over the last 30 years. We therefore tackle the experiences, motivations and perceptions that have either favoured their integration in this 'dream place', or triggered an eventual decision to leave, framed by the irresistible expansion of the city's tourist dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ongoing transition of Venice towards a short-term city, posited as an urban form which accommodates the dwelling practices of temporary populations as tourists, at the expenses of a stable resident population. This shift is approached through the conceptual framework of resilience, which is also explored in its political and discursive dimensions. At the base of the emergence of a short-term city, we analyse the redistributive impacts of short-term rentals mediated by digital platforms and their influence on the housing market, but also the related entrenchments of a local policy agenda supporting the resilience of the industry itself above that of the city as a living organism. After illustrating the development of the hospitality sector in the city fabric over the last four decades and presenting the historical challenges that Venice has been facing in regard to its capacity to retain a stable population, we seek to unravel the debate on 'the future of Venice', which confronts local and global agents defending a 'conservationist' approach for Venice as an ineluctably tourist city, with social actors who claim for the defence of residence – and therefore for a ban on STR – as a necessary condition for a socially resilient alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gentrification processes in the Italian context are frequently connected to the rise of the tourist industry, which has led several cities with a rich architectural and cultural tradition (such as Venice, Florence or Rome) to experience rapid demographic change and displacement. The combined effects of modern industrialization and suburbanization processes and a conservationist approach to urban heritage have left the physical fabric of some historical cities mostly intact, but have deeply transformed their social fabric, progressively dismantling their traditional mixture of social classes. Through the emblematic case of Venice, this paper aims to retrace the choices that have contributed to the rise of the city-as-an-attraction, starting from Venice's early economic specialization in the tourist industry at the end of the eighteenth century and following its development through the last two hundred years. From the construction of the mainland new towns of Mestre and Marghera to the ongoing touristic saturation of the historical city, Venetian gentrification and touristification processes can be interpreted as a peculiar expression of an implosion/explosion urban dynamic, which laid the ground for the rise of the current tourist monoculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]