Evaluation of the Reception Capacity of a Certain Area Regarding Tourist Housing, Addressing Sustainable-Tourism Criteria

Abstract

The emergence of new 2.0 net collaborative economies has brought an increase in the number of tourists, changing the paradigm of the tourist-housing sector in the main cities around the world. This has directly impacted inhabitants and land-use planning, and there is no general agreement yet between different public and private agents on how to deal with the problem. In this document, a model supported by scientific approaches is presented to assist in planning for sustainable land use through assessing its reception capacity to host tourist housing. The area of study is a medium-sized city in Spain with four UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The methodology is based on the application of the multicriteria decision paradigm in the geographical information systems’ field to deal with complex problems with several alternatives and various criteria to be evaluated. As a result, we obtained a classification of every part of the study area, depending on the reception capacity of the considered uses. The main conclusion is that tourist housing must be regulated, although its effects cannot be generalized, since specific analysis for every neighborhood in a territory is needed.