Tourism-Atlas: strategie di sviluppo e gestione delle trasformazioni indotte dal turismo in destinazioni sia consolidate che emergenti

The work focuses on the early results of the Tourism-Atlas (T-Atlas), an international research platform investigating sustainable development of tourism systems and the territorial changes induced by the tourism on the environment and landscape. This contribution aims at showing how the comparison between design experiences -in both established and emerging contexts- might contribute to finding more effective and sustainable strategies for addressing touristic evolution in a supra-regional perspective. In the first comparison we face the topic of urban seafronts, outlining in which way they can act as service aggregators in different urban situations, generating a new kind of public space able to organize, at the same time, the beach’s functions and uses. Describing the projects for Cattolica (Italy) and Vlora (Albania), we stress the importance of involving and integrating tourism facilities in the urban environment transformation in order to avoid any detachment between them and the rest of the city. In the second case we analyse the accessibility issue as a key factor for addressing a regional touristic model and balance tourists flows among different areas. We start illustrating the proposal for the “Mississippi” pier reuse in Gabicce (Italy) and the strategic process that brought to the idea of a seaway network that succeed in exploiting the touristic potential of several similar spots along the Italian Adriatic littoral. Then we show how this concept has been used for the southern Albanian Riviera planning proposal. By these comparisons, we aim at demonstrating how -working on some invariants as services, accessibility and sustainability thresholds of visitor flow - is possible to outline a range of actions and solutions which can be effective both in contexts where the hospitality model has reached a deadlock, and where the future conditions are extremely uncertain and dynamic. If the comparison between emerging and established destinations is therefore useful from a methodological point of view, at the same time, it highlights, regardless of the context, a basic consideration that is one of the T-Atlas major theoretical outcomes: every touristic territory is ultimately an in-transition area.