Evaluation of Development Policies of a Tourist Territory Confronted with Intensive Urban Development using a Multi-Agent Modeling

This article employs an agent-based model to quantify how five alternative policy packages reshape land prices, urban form and ecological pressure in Corsica-a Mediterranean island where tourism intensifies competition for scarce coastal land. The model couples housing and tourist-rental markets with heterogeneous household and investor behaviour calibrated on 2010-2022 micro-data. We compare a Business-as-Usual baseline with: (i) a blanket ban on tourist-rental investments (BTRI); (ii) a 20 % tax on tourist-rental incomes (TTRI); (iii) a coastal-setback zoning that restricts new tourist-rental investments to sites located between 1 km and 50 km from the shoreline; and (iv) a CBD-buffer zoning that applies the same 1-50 km distance rule around the central business district. Linear-regression analysis of 2 500 Monte-Carlo runs shows that, ceteris paribus, the TTRI and Coastal-Zoning scenarios cut mean simulated coastal land prices by 12-18 % and reduce intra-island price inequality while preserving aggregate housing-stock growth. Conversely, the blanket ban displaces development towards ecologically sensitive upland areas and erodes local tax revenues. These findings highlight the importance of combining market-based and spatial instruments to reconcile economic vitality with ecological integrity in tourist territories. Beyond Corsica, the modelling framework is transferable to islands and coastal regions facing similar land-use tensions.