Affect and climate change in the communicative making of vulnerable urban futures. The case of Venice, Italy.

This paper explores the relation between strategic climate communication and the organization of common affects in the constitution of the affective atmospheres of vulnerable urban places. As such, it investigates how political and industrial actors’ strategic framings of the climate crisis imply not merely a preferential understanding of such crisis, but also its preferential affective experience. Through semiotic and ethnographic analysis in the fragile setting of Venice amid exponential sea level rise, the paper thus explores how strategic efforts of portraying sea level rise as momentary and harmless tangibly serve the creation and maintenance of an atmosphere of Venice as a safe and alluring touristic destination. In order to claim so, the paper proposes an understanding of strategic climate communication as comprised of three intertwined attributes: performativity, materiality and affectivity. As a performative, materialist and affective practice, in fact, strategic climate communication is here understood less as the intentional message of actors for specific purposes, and more as the continuous orchestration of communicative practices in the constitution of politically charged affective relatings to urban space.