Few feats of urban engineering have the same claim to public fame as canals do. In their rudimentary forms, they are as old as civilisations and empires, and have been instrumental in their sustenance. In their most sophisticated forms, these artificial waterways can regulate floods, help channelise and navigate resources & humans, and foster entire cities. Venezia is, of course, the quintessential image that the mind conjures. The city of canals bears these channels as more than an urban identity, with recreation built on its fringes. It is the carrier of Venice's lifeblood, a way of life, but also its undoing in the face of a gargantuan climate crisis, threatening its very existence.

This disposition brings to light the account of canals as a tool of colonial control; the British and the Dutch, both naval superpowers, did build colonies around the world by splicing, flaying into unsuited terrain, morphing the very physiology of the land. Another unseemly city of canals a world across, Jakarta (a former Dutch colony) is sinking too as a result, just differently from Venice. The famed site of the recurrent art and architecture Biennales is then one of the many parables of the split side of intelligentsia, of knowledge and resource conduits, of information flow and of veritable channels of trusted infrastructure.

This week's dispatch channels this enquiry in the wake of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, curated by Carlo Ratti under the theme 'Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective'. A review of the Biennale beckons the agency of this isolatory yet shared intelligence, questioning the supposed neutrality of tech as a vessel for progress. A compilation of interviews with the curators of the Belgium, Nordic Countries, Denmark and UAE pavilions delves into their ambitions and their navigation of the myriad provocations of the Biennale. A curious profile of People's Architecture Office, China, explores plug-ins, much like canals, as a means of revitalising urban environments. A new vertical mausoleum in LA's iconic Hollywood Forever Cemetery conduits 'renewal' in solemn ways.

By their inherent virtue of being interventions, canals present a cautionary tale. Too often, established flows and networks evade questions on who owns them, who controls their flow, and what directions or ends they serve. Curiously, while canals initially disrupt the source streams, altering native habitats along with influencing migration, eventually, the algae blooms and the fish return.