Tourism Morphometrics in Venice: Constructing a Tourism Services Index (TSI) to unmask the spatial interplay between tourism and urban form

Abstract

Understanding how the built environment affects tourism saturation in cities is of central importance to the efficacy of tourism management strategies that rely on spatial datasets to inform space-specific policies. By employing the historic city of Venice (Italy) as a case study, this article provides a nuanced methodology defined as “tourism morphometrics” to inform tourism management plans and to detect urban form configurations prone to “overtourism.” The research contribution is twofold: first, it harnesses spatial datasets on lodging (6642 Airbnb listings, InsideAirbnb), dining (997 restaurants, Tripadvisor), and shopping (226 stores, Google Points of Interest) to construct a highly-granular ‘Tourism Services Index’ (TSI) that reveals the spatial distribution of tourism service capacity in Venice; second, it empirically reveals the spatial interplay between urban form parameters—landmarks, bridges, and street network—and TSI values. More specifically, statistical analyses found that TSI scores were positively associated with the number of street intersections, street widths values, and proximity to landmarks and bridges in Venice. The results offer insights into the relationship between tourism services and the spatial features of urban environments in which visitors move and behave. By leveraging by-product geospatial datasets, this research argues for a renewed management of overtourism through space-specific planning models.