Regional competitiveness in tourist local systems

Since the past century, Marshall had described some industrial districts, in England, as agglomerations of small and medium enterprises specialized in a specific production activity. Starting from his contribute, in the last decades an immense literature has been written on industrial districts in Europe and around the World. Italian scholars gave particular attention to this local system of production and extended and developed the concept coined by Marshall. In other countries, different territorial models played a central role as milieu or cluster, for instance. In particular, in the last years these models have been extended to non-industrial fields like culture, rural activities and tourism. In the first part of the paper, a review of the main contributions on the territorial models applied to the tourist industry is proposed like the tourist milieu (Peyrache,-Gadeau, 2003, Bramanti, 2001), tourist cluster (Gordon, Goodall, 2000; Nedlac, 1999; Van Den Berg, Braum, Van Winden, 2001) or tourist district (Becattini et ali., 2001; Aci-Censis, 2001; Antonioli Corigliano, 1999). Thus, we define a model of tourist district and we address how extend to the tourist industry the competitive advantages created from networks of traditional marshallian industrial districts (Marshall, 1966; Becattini, 2000). In the second part of the paper, we perform a methodological exercise of spatial identification through GIS tools. The methodology of identification of industrial districts elaborated from Sforzi (1990) is extended to tourist industry and the adaptability of our model in the Italian territory is verified. The analysis starts from the travel-to-work areas (TTWAs) (Smart, 1974; Combees et al., 1982), which interprets the daily commuting flows due to work reasons defined in Italy by the ISTAT on the 1996 Intermediate Census on Industries and Services. A map of the Italian TLS is presented.