Tourist Carrying Capacity: A Fuzzy Approach

This paper discusses the concept of tourist-carryingcapacity of an urban cultural destination and presents a model for determining its optimal level. The model is then made operational within a “fuzzy” linear programming approach that is tested in the case of the historical center of Venice. The “fuzziness” of the model makes it possible to take into account the distribution of benefits and costs from tourism between the tourist-dependent and the tourist-independent resident populations who confront different categories of tourists and day-trippers