Overtourism? Cities count – OVERTOURISM

In the current context of the overtourism controversy in European cities, a polemic that could be exacerbated by the role of human mobility in the Covid-19 health crisis, the argument of numbers is central. This controversy emerges from 2015 onwards with criticisms, demands and resistance to tourism from the inhabitants of certain highly touristic European cities, coming up against those who believe that tourism is positive, even necessary, especially for the economy, which should be openly reinforced and promoted. In this controversy, the statistical argument is often put forward. However, it comes up against the inability of managers and inhabitants to make political and statistical arguments coincide in a context of increased mobility. At the same time, new statistical dispositifs are emerging, that of big data and the attempt by many actors to quantify through numerical traces. With the Covid-19 crisis, where tourism is momentarily at a standstill, there is a particularly propitious moment to study the way in which the statistical argument is used to point towards "overtourism" or "undertourism".

Our research project has two objectives: 1. to observe the ways in which the statistical argument around tourism is used by cities and their citizens, whether in favour of overtourism or undertourism or any other dimension that appears to be relevant; 2. to test the hypothesis of the advent of new forms of tourism governance of cities (such as "smart cities") linked to the development of big data in order to identify the "governmentality" that would correspond to it. To do this, we study on the one hand the production of the figures mobilised in the current controversies in four European cities and, on the other hand, the political uses of the statistical argument (for the growth of tourism? against mass tourism? against certain forms of tourism? as an electoral lever?). As a byproduct, it will lead to an unprecedented mapping of the various sources of statistical production on tourism, useful for the knowledge of the phenomenon and which could inspire producers and users of these figures.

From a theoretical point of view, two disciplines will be convened: on the one hand, the sociology of quantification which studies the conventions and practices of "numbering" in a constructivist epistemology and their political dimensions; on the other hand, geography which constructs tourist cities as a scientific object but which also studies the controversies surrounding overtourism through the specific entry of the territorial relevance of quantification (neighbourhood, scale, extension, etc.). From an empirical point of view, the case studies will concern: a) Cities that are unevenly affected by tourism and where the controversies around tourism are different: Venice and Lucerne, where the overtourism debate is in full swing; Paris (an emblematic metropolis from a tourism point of view) and Lyon (a secondary metropolis whose economic strategy is partly based on tourism); b) the respective national statistical contexts, whose specificities will be presented and discussed, in order to highlight their own local quantification schemes; c) the global context, with the study of the World Tourism Organization (WTO), among others. The methodology developed is that of the disciplines convened: sociological interviewing and observation in relation to the statistical production process (choice, data processing), its social character (actors), and its political use, i.e. "who", "how", "why" of the data. The spatial dimension will also be taken into account because of the three scales dealt with (international, national, urban/neighbourhood) and in the notions of mobility and flows that tourism implies.