Edinburgh and Venice: Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living in Geographically Challenged Mercantile Communities

Abstract

Through a comparison with the urban and residential solutions employed in the city of Venice in the period 1500-1780, this chapter provides a reasoned contextualisation of the Scottish tenement within a broader European scenario. In Edinburgh, this typology evolved from organic and self-organised juxtaposition of private and semi-private spaces, vertical accesses, and commercial spaces in the Old Town, to its structured and respectable reinterpretation as New Town building-block. This is in turn compared with the parallel evolution of its Venetian counterpart, the residential and commercial casa fondaco, also an experimentation with and progressive optimisation in the design of compact, high-rise, mixed-use urban dwellings. While Edinburgh embraced expansion and the potential of the tenement model - once regularised and restructured - to offer accommodation in the modern context of the New Town, Venice was unable to transform a way of life bound by the social, economic, and spatial constraints, leading to further fragmentation. The strength of the Scottish tenement model lay in its flexibility rather than in its exceptionality;it celebrates its successful transformation from organic agglomerate to codified, respectable residence - a transformation which, the Venetian case study reveals, is not to be taken for granted.