Spatial planning with exceptions, tourism without limits
The issue is not about stopping every investment. It is about first answering a fundamental question: how much water is available, how much wastewater can the treatment facilities handle, how much waste can the system manage, and how many people can the island accommodate at the peak of the tourist season?
Corfu is already buckling under the pressure of tourism, yet planning continues to treat each new investment separately, as though it existed independently of those that came before it.
The Merlin Estate, with its 609 stremma, is back in the investment spotlight. At the New Port, the mega yacht marina, for which a contract has been signed, also provides for hotel use. In Dassia, large tourism developments have already changed the scale of hotel activity. Yet as new capacity is added or planned, no one is publicly presenting an overall assessment: how many more beds can Corfu accommodate?
The new Special Spatial Planning Framework for Tourism introduces restrictions, classifications, minimum land-area requirements and building conditions. However, it also retains special regimes, transitional provisions and different development options. As a result, restricting an individual investment does not amount to limiting the overall burden of tourism.
This is where the fundamental ambiguity lies. The state regulates in detail where and under what conditions a hotel can be built, without making it equally clear whether the area can accommodate the additional visitors. Invoking carrying capacity loses its meaning when it is not translated into binding, measurable limits.
In Corfu, the problem is not theoretical. Water shortages, inadequate sewage infrastructure, dysfunctional waste management and congested roads are already part of everyday life, particularly in August. These are not future risks that must be anticipated at some point. They are existing shortcomings against which further tourism activity is being planned.
Each investment may, in isolation, appear lawful, economically beneficial and desirable for development. Taken together, however, they may exceed the area's capacity. And responsibility for this cumulative impact does not rest with each investor individually. It rests with public planning authorities.
The suspicion that spatial planning ambiguities are deliberately maintained to leave room for an ongoing succession of exceptions cannot be substantiated merely by their existence. Their consequences, however, are clear: they make public scrutiny of the cumulative burden more difficult and leave room for successive approvals without any common, transparent assessment of the overall impact.
GIORGOS KATSAITIS
