New demand for using the city: tourism as urban function

The paper considers the relationship between tourism and the city assuming that the tourist phenomenon affects urban organization and generates impacts on urban environment. Trends in tourist statistics show that “urban tourism” is increasing its share and most European cities increase as tourist destinations (+8.1% international a.). Although urban tourism is constantly gaining in importance, there are few attempts to examine benefits of integrating this phenomenon within the urban planning processes in order to achieve the integration among the targets of promotion and development and those of safeguard and environmental conservation. According to these premises, the paper considers tourist cities as “vulnerable” urban systems as they are stressed by an additional urban load. This condition affects present tourist cities and underlines the need of a redefinition of the traditional tools of urban governance. The target of the paper is to individualize the conditions that could reduce the vulnerability of tourist cities and it focuses on three aspects: the changing occurring in tourist demand; the changing occurring in the urban supply system in order to fulfill this “new demand”; and the outlining of urban conditions to integrate the tourist function into the urban governance processes. The spread of new communication technologies (ICTs) is radically changing the ways of use the city and it represents an opportunity to improve quality of urban supply. Nevertheless, at present it seems to emerge a significant imbalance in favor of the promotion of the city (image) through innovations of product (app., sensors, electronic circuits,...) rather than the definition of a planning process to optimize the positive effects of tourism, making urban system more efficient. The paper proposed tries to investigate on this aspect.