Overtourism in Cities of Art : A Framework for Measuring Tourism Carrying Capacity

Many destinations across the world suffer from the consequences of excessive manmade pressure tied to the explosive growth of tourism, often resulting in a loss of cultural identity and environmental degradation. Cities of art, in particular, contend with the difficult challenge of managing their historic centres while trying to balance the requirements of daily life for their residents and the needs of tourists visiting the main attractions. Local administrators need strategic tools that provide reference guidelines for defining and monitoring specific cautionary thresholds with which to define tourism policies oriented to sustainability.This paper presents a model for analytical measurement of the tourism carrying capacity of historic centres of cities of art consisting of about fifty indicators. The set is accompanied by an analysis of the tourist profile and of the tourist destination system under study, aimed at facilitating the collection of data used to calculate the indicators and their supporting role in decision-making for Destination Management Organisations (DMO) and the public administration.The case study presented is that of the UNESCO World Heritage Historic Centre of Florence for which the analytical model was applied experimentally over the three-year period of 2015–2017.The results of this first implementation show the capacity of the model to assist the city in its definition of a sustainable tourism policy for the historic city centre able to supply a detailed picture of the changing tourism phenomenon and its economic, social, and environmental implications