The lesson festivals have taught that tourism still hasn't learned

It has by now become increasingly widespread — the awareness that, to put on a festival capable of generating real value for a territory, you first need to know that territory, develop an offering coherent with the curiosity and needs of its citizens, and finally build activities that can reconcile attendance numbers with the supply capacity already active in the areas where the festival is held.

These very brief rules, which seem dictated by common sense, nonetheless took a very long time to establish themselves, and even today, despite a growing sensitivity toward cultural sustainability, it is far from rare to stumble upon cultural productions that aspire to transcend precisely those constraints which such precepts, in practice, impose.

This aspiration to become ever "bigger" is, for that matter, understandable. Festival organisers are driven not only by cultural ambition but also by economic incentive to extend the number of participants as far as possible. Not just for the revenue directly generated through ticket sales or ancillary services, but also for the notoriety and territorial relevance that follow — conditions which in turn ease access to private funding (more sponsors) and public funding (grants and financing), which then allow more prominent cultural figures to be engaged, in what, within the perimeter of a festival, is undoubtedly a virtuous circle.

Facing these growth pressures, however, there is a broader context — represented precisely by the territorial dimension — which aims (or should aim) at achieving a balance between supply and demand in terms of accommodation, services and transport, without even factoring in the other "basic logistical" dimensions: urban decorum and cleanliness, security management, city traffic flows.

In this dichotomy — with a private actor and attractor on one side, and the territory as a public subject (and not merely an administrative one) on the other — it is possible to trace, in miniature, the very same dichotomy that has pushed an increasing number of Italian cities to the brink of a tourism crisis.

At the root of all these imbalances, in fact, lies a different vision of the "built landscape."

Take a neighbourhood shop: in purely monetary logic, the owners of a small retail business know perfectly well that, all else being equal, the more traffic the street outside sees, the more people may walk through the door.

Just as the owner of a B&B knows full well that the more visitors there are in an area, the greater the likelihood of renting out rooms to potential tourists.

To be clear: there is no moral judgement embedded in any of these conditions. Nor can the entire dynamic be simplified into a dichotomy between a "selfish private sector" and a "victimised public sector": museums, galleries, monuments and archaeological sites today operate according to the very same logic. Grow. Grow to become more sustainable, more relevant, to achieve national and international visibility.

Nor do local Administrations or the national Government show themselves to be genuinely averse to an ever more significant influx of tourists into our urban centres. It is no coincidence that in a country overflowing with studies — perhaps even more studies than tourists — no analysis has ever been carried out that systematically examines the relationship between the maximum capacity of an urban system (logistics, waste management, public transport, private provision, accommodation and catering services, etc.) and the number of "arrivals."

Targeted analyses have undoubtedly been produced, such as the one drafted by Cà Foscari (University of Venice) and coordinated by Professor Jan Van Der Borg, which estimated the "maximum carrying capacity" of the city of Venice at around 19 million visitors per year, against the 28 million estimated at the time the research was published (2018).

However, the full urban capacity has never truly been calculated: how many people — residents and tourists combined — can coexist within a given territory at the same moment, and for how long the urban system as a whole can sustain any maximum peaks.

The limited appeal of such studies is obvious: establishing a maximum carrying capacity can prove to be a prelude to restrictive measures, or at the very least to structured public controversy directed at the Administration, or else risk being methodologically weak, requiring constant monitoring of all the dimensions that might in some way affect the final results.

Without going into overly technical detail, however, it is also worth pointing out that having indicators — even approximate ones built on proxy measures — could be not only a tool for managing tourist flows, but also for managing urban activities as a whole: both in large urban centres and in those territories which, even if less saturated, nevertheless present logistical constraints and sustainability balances that are all the more delicate.

The creation of such a dashboard — developed also drawing on some virtuous experiences, such as the one described in a document from the Comune di Firenze (Florence city council) concerning the city's UNESCO historic centre — could not only create a system of governance complementary to the territorial planning frameworks of a purely urbanistic character currently provided for by our regulations, but could also foster the emergence of a cooperative structure among different smaller territories.

Cooperation between contiguous territorial areas is, in practice, one of the most effective solutions for increasing our capacity — both to offer and to manage — liveable spaces as much as tourist spaces. Such cooperation, while presenting evident arguments in its favour, does not always find concrete application: partly for cultural and historical reasons, partly for a lack of real opportunities.

The creation of real-time territorial "distribution" tools, calibrated to supply and demand, with provision for transport services to and from contiguous territories to be activated on the basis of information flows, could undoubtedly stimulate reflection and inter-municipal agreements, transforming even the smallest borgo (village) into a node within a wider territorial network, and thereby fostering not only its promotion but also its capacity to generate public value — not only within its own administrative perimeter, but in neighbouring municipalities as well.

If there is one thing that the first years of this century have taught us, it is that it is terribly difficult to trigger cultural transformations by starting from cultural debate, while it is instead far easier to achieve disruptive cultural impacts by starting from the creation of tools.

Rather than reasoning about policies, it is therefore worth beginning to reason about the tools that would make those policies, in the eyes of everyone, the simplest and most effective choice to make.