Overtourism? Cities count.

In the current context of the overtourism controversy in European cities, a controversy which could be exacerbated by the role of human mobility in the Covid-19 health crisis, the argument of numbers is central. This controversy broke out with the emergence, from 2015, of criticism, demands and resistance from the inhabitants of certain highly touristy European cities against tourism, finding in opposition those who think that tourism is positive, even necessary, in particular for the economy, which must be openly reinforced and promoted. In this controversy, the statistical argument is often put forward. However, it comes up against an inability of managers and residents to reconcile political arguments and statistical arguments in a context of increased mobility. At the same time, new statistical systems are emerging, that of big data and the attempt by many players to quantify using digital traces. With the Covid-19 crisis where tourism is temporarily stopped, we have a particularly good time to study the way in which the statistical argument is used to point towards "overtourism" or towards "undertourism". >.Our research project has two objectives: 1. Observe the way in which the statistical argument around tourism is used by cities and their citizens, whether by arguing in favor of overtourism or in favor of undertourism or any other dimension which would appear relevant; 2. Test the hypothesis of the advent of new forms of tourism governance of cities ("smart cities" or others) linked to the development of big data in order to identify the "governmentality" which would correspond to it. To do this, we study on the one hand the production of the figures mobilized in the current controversies in four European cities and, on the other hand, the political uses of the statistical argument (for the growth of tourism? against mass tourism ? against certain forms of tourism? as electoral leverage?). As byproduct, we will end up with an unprecedented mapping of the sources of statistical production on tourism, useful for understanding the phenomenon and which will be able to inspire producers and users of these figures. From a theoretical point of view, two disciplines are called upon: on the one hand, on the other hand, the sociology of quantification which studies the conventions and practices of "numbering" in a constructivist epistemology and their political dimensions (Desrosières, 2014); on the other hand, geography which constructs tourist cities as a scientific object but which also studies the controversies around overtourism through the specific input of the territorial relevance of the quantification (district, scale, extension, etc.). From an empirical point of view, the case studies will concern: a) cities affected by tourism in an unequal manner and where the controversies around tourism are different: Venice and Lucerne, where the debate around overtourism is in full swing; Paris (emblematic metropolis from a tourism point of view) and Lyon (a secondary metropolis whose economic strategy is partly based on tourism); b) the respective national statistical contexts whose specificities will be presented and discussed, in order to highlight their own local quantification systems; c) the global context, with the study of the World Tourism Organization (WTO), among others. The methodology developed is that of the disciplines involved: sociological interview and observation linked to the process of statistical production (choice, data processing), its social character (actors), and its political use, i.e. << who >>, << how >>, << why >> data. The spatial dimension will also be taken into account due to the three scales treated (international, national, urban/district) and in the notions of mobility and flow that tourism presupposes.