Venice - Analyzing the Economy After COVID

SerenDPT has partnered with SmartDest, a research project funded by the EU whose purpose is to find innovative ways to address the vulnerabilities in cities that have an overreliance on tourism. Their work is part of an initiative to assess the state of the Venetian economy and to develop creative solutions to improve it. One of the goals of SerenDPT is to quantify the cumulative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Venice so that action can be taken to reveal shortcomings in planning and help the city to monitor trends. We aim to help SmartDest and SerenDPT achieve this initiative by compiling data into a single website that can provide clear visualization of trends - particularly in post-pandemic economy - for local governmental agencies, organizations, and concerned citizens. Therefore, the goal of our project is to improve the WPI Venice Retail and Hospitality website’s capacity for collection, organization, and visualization of retail and hospitality data using semi-automated tools. To meet this goal, we will: 1. Compile and organize existing data on retail shops collected in recent years; 2. Collect data on the current state of the Venetian retail and hospitality sectors; and 3. Compare the state of the retail and hospitality sectors before and after COVID. At the close of our project, we expect that the ‘Venice Shops’ website will be improved to display and sort all of the shop data that has been collected through meaningful figures that help visualize trends in the economy.