Author: CIGH Exeter

This is the first in a series of blog posts created by students of the 2026 ‘Linguistic Landscapes‘ Summer School at Venice International University, in conjunction with the University of Exeter and KU Leuven.

Karin Swahn, Shinhaz F. N. & Wenhan Kang

Space can be understood through the interrelated dimensions of perceived, conceived, and lived space (Lefebvre, 1991). Walking through the Rialto Pescheria and Beccarie area in Venice, we encountered the city primarily through the perceived dimension of space. We understood the area through what we saw, heard, and noticed through our senses. As visitors, we experienced the space without inhabiting it as part of our everyday lives and without the planner’s perspective through which urban space is conceived. Wenhan Kang, our only Italian-speaking member, was also the only one who had previously visited Venice, leaving the other two of us to encounter the area as tourists with analytical gazes.

To analyse this, we decided to frame our material through the concept of authenticity. According to Zukin (2008, 2010), authenticity has become increasingly important as a way of marketing and selling urban spaces since the 2000s. Zukin challenges the conventional idea of authenticity as something inherent, traditional, or sincere by presenting it, instead, as a quality that is socially constructed and externally recognised. It does not necessarily represent local residents and often reflects the tastes of the middle and/or upper classes. In this sense, authenticity can function as a form of power that contributes to gentrification and the displacement of an area’s original inhabitants.

What does “authentic” look like in urban spaces? According to Zukin (2008, 2010), it often appears through small shops, “ethnic” restaurants, alternative forms of lifestyle consumption, and carefully constructed narratives attached to venues or products. We know what these narratives look like: “this shop started as a dream between two friends…”, or “our cicchetti continues the fish market’s tradition of combining fresh fish, international influences and old recipes…”. Zukin (2010, p. xiii) describes such authentic spaces as using, “bits and pieces of cultural references: artfully painted graffiti on a shop window, sawdust on the floor of a music bar, an address in a gritty but not too thoroughly crime-ridden part of town.” While this description is rooted in an American context, similar authenticity markers can be found in Venice, for example in wooden signs, chalkboards, and the mixing of Italian and English.

In Venice, tourists’ search for authenticity produces a space that is constantly judged by its appearance, cosmopolitan character, and performance of heritage. It creates a city of heightened representation and romanticisation, in which locals’ lived space is given very little room. Residents often have to navigate streets crowded with tourists who suddenly stop to take photographs. It is, therefore, fitting that Venice has been described as a “museum city” (Blackwood & Tufi, 2015; Tufi, 2017). Venice can also be understood as an assemblage of heterotopias in Foucault’s sense: spaces that are simultaneously real and unreal, situated within time yet somehow outside of it (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986; Tufi, 2017). In the following, we present our assemblage of authenticities and heterotopias through three themes: heritage as branding, homogeneous door signs and ghost doors, and vernacular authenticity.