Speaking of high-quality architecture, a new building could certainly bring some kind of civic capital to a city and could even be desirable, although it should not be taken for granted that it will. Mario Botta, one of the great architects of our times, gave us a fantastic example of how this can be achieved with his design for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto in northern Italy, which was perfectly inserted into the historic urban fabric, not only increasing the numbers of tourists and visitors, but also injecting new lifeblood into Rovereto’s culture, its ambition for the future, and its civic identity. Yet the very same architect also designed a two hundred-foot-tall residential tower in Sarzana, near Pisa, which did in fact produce some civic capital: it. sparked protests by a local citizens asso- ciation and the comment from anthropologist Franco La Cecla that “cubic meters by famous architects don’t make a city.”

The purely economic way in which the formula of creative destruction is used becomes all too clear when the destruction is wreaked by natural causes, and yet the creators of new cubes cheerfully rush to the scene of the disaster to deploy their creativity. This is exactly what happened to L’Aquila in central Italy in the wake of the 2009 earthquake when the picturesque fortress city was reduced to ruins; or what happened in the Emilia-Romagna region where, after the government had allowed belfries and towers to collapse out of negligence soon a er another earthquake, a restoration conference held in Ferrara in 2013 launched a rebuilding initiative under the slogan “Where it was, but not how it was.” Some of the proposed models included a tower festooned with enormous red lips, or a tower built entirely out of wheels of Parmesan cheese... examples of destructive distruction.

Instead, when St. Mark’s Campanile collapsed on July 14, 1902, it was decided that an exact replica of the bell tower would be built in exactly the same place. The same went for the Santa Trinita Bridge in Florence and the Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio of Bologna a er they were destroyed by aerial bombard- ments during WWII. It’s di cult to imagine how those cities would look today if this hadn’t happened. In Venice, the Campanile is a ectionately referred to as el paròn de casa by the locals—the man of the house—because its presence and imposing height (almost 300 feet) towers over the square and the city. Venice might seem to some like a good place where one could experiment with real estate projects and acts of destruction that are more or less creative, and crush the present in the name of the futuristic. Indeed, if it continues to lose its inhabitants in the way that it has, it may well become such a laboratory, until it nally transforms into a city without a people.