Social Carrying Capacity of Mass Tourist Sites: Theoretical and practical Issues about its Measurement’

Congestion is an important management problem at mass tourist sites. This essay focuses on the social carrying capacity (SCC) of a tourist site as indicator of residents’ and visitors’ perception of crowding. In case of conflict between the maximum number of visitors (MNV) tolerated by residents and by visitors themselves, the policy-maker has to mediate. Thus the site SCC is here in general defined as the MNV tolerated which results from a compromise between the residents’ and visitors’ SCCs. We consider the case in which the residents’ SCC is lower than the visitors’ SCC. The site SCC can be measured by making reference at least to two criteria of social choice: the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) based on the utility maximisation criterion, and a voting rule. The use of one method rather than the other depends on the data available about the individual preferences on crowding. Assuming that the monetary value of individual preferences is known, a maximisation model is conceived. The solution is the site SCC intended as the number of visitors which maximises the social welfare function. In practice, nevertheless, the policy-maker may not have all the data for the solution of the maximisation problem. In this situation, the site SCC is computed by applying the majority voting rule (MR), and in this case it is intended as the MNV preferred by the majority of residents and of visitors. Discussion is made about the conditions that have to be satisfied in order to make the optimum number of visitors, obtained through a maximisation model, equal to the MNV tolerated by the majority of voters, and about how a Pigouvian tax has to be computed in different situations. Finally, the results of a case-study are presented in order to show how the MR works in order to establish a site SCC.