Although Italian cities have undergone several waves of touristification, concerns about overtourism have only recently become widespread. In the article, we suggest that the diffusion of short-term rental platforms is not merely a concomitant factor, but is crucial to understanding the how and where of contemporary overtourism. To this end we apply a fractal methodology to identify, map and compare those parts of the city that are most affected, and measure the pressure short-term rentals have on city centres as places of residence. By allowing the conversion of residential apartments into tourist accommodation, we argue, short term rentals contribute to the displacement of residents more directly than a generic process of gentrification or touristification. Second, platforms such as Airbnb not only contribute to increasing the accommodation capacity of urban areas, but radically change the morphology of the tourist city. The growing concerns about overtourism are not due to the rising number of tourists per se, but to their increasing penetration into the residential city. We suggest, therefore, that to conceive of overtourism merely as overcrowding is not only inadequate but counterproductive. Even though the depopulation of city centres is difficult to reverse, the coronavirus emergency is an opportunity to plan a different city where tourism coexists with other urban uses and functions.

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Italy has been at the forefront in the implementation of place-based regional development strategies during the 2000s, and it constitutes therefore a privileged point of view to investigate the contents of the approach, its potentialities as well as its limitations. In light of those limitations, several scholars have recently directed their attentions toward a typology of policies - territorial cooperation - which may be regarded as a trans-regional and transnational approach to regional development. In the paper, we offer a review of the main criticisms of place-based strategies and of the main distinctive dimensions and the potential value added of territorial cooperation initiatives, in light of recent debates about territorial vis-à-vis relational approaches to regional development. The identification of transnational spatial units, joint management authorities and trans-regional strategies, it is argued, may indeed help to overcome some of the limitations of place-based strategies - namely, the risk of policy capture, territorial introversion and communitarian confinement - while incurring in others - institutional isomorphism, technocratic management and democratic deficit. As the European political and economic space become increasingly trans-scalar and networked, the two policy domains may potentially learn from each other, and a new generation of local policies may emerge which are both territorial and relational, place-based and trans-regional. © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav