What it is

AIDA is the field academy of CORE Venice Lab. One week in the Venice lagoon, aboard, in groups of ten to twenty. Not a conference, not a guided tour: a working week in which a real water system is read, measured and argued over by the people who run it and the people who live in it.

What it is for

Every coastal community is being asked the same question in a different accent: how do you keep a place alive when the water changes faster than the institutions that govern it. Venice has been answering that question for twelve centuries, with successes and failures that are both still visible from a boat. We use that visibility to teach.

How it works

Four programmes, one shared method:

• Start from the system, not the problem. The first day is spent understanding how tide, channels, islands, barriers, boats and people hold together.
• Learn from the people who decide. Barrier operations, sediment management and morphological restoration are explained by practitioners, including their failures.
• Measure something, so somebody else can repeat it. Every cohort leaves behind a protocol another group can run.
• Hand it over. The week ends with a handover to a named custodian and an archived record, so the next cohort starts where this one stopped.

Half the week is outdoors. Teaching is in English.

The exchange module

AIDA carries a module of exchange and learning — collective intelligence — for the small water communities incremental global network: places facing the same water problem as Venice, from the opposite end, that learn from each other rather than from a centre.

The week opens with a Local Socio-Ecological Warm Up: before measuring anything, the cohort acclimatises to the place — its water, its people and the way the two have negotiated with each other for twelve centuries.

The philosophy in four lines

Fragile places do not become resilient by being protected. They become resilient when enough people understand them well enough to argue about them competently.

Beauty is not decoration here. Wonder is the fastest way to make a complex system worth understanding, and we use it deliberately.

Who it is for

Universities and study programmes · leadership teams working on climate and complex systems · engineers, port and water authorities, environmental firms and heritage practitioners · municipalities, wetland managers and school networks twinning with Venice.