Overtourism and Its Local Consequences

The term "overtourism," describing a level of visitor volume that measurably degrades a destination's environment, infrastructure, or resident quality of life, entered widespread use in tourism-industry and academic discussion around 2017, popularized in part through reporting by the trade publication Skift and taken up soon after by UN Tourism itself, which published a 2018 report, "Overtourism? Understanding and Managing Urban Tourism Growth beyond Perceptions," acknowledging the phenomenon as a genuine policy challenge rather than purely a media narrative. Venice has functioned as the paradigmatic overtourism case for over a decade: the historic city's resident population has fallen from roughly 175,000 in the 1950s to well under 50,000 by the 2020s according to Italian municipal statistics, even as annual visitor numbers reached into the tens of millions, a divergence widely attributed in urban-studies literature to short-term tourist rentals and tourism-oriented retail displacing long-term housing and everyday local services such as grocers and pharmacies.