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Within the growing amount of literature on short-term rentals, which has started to increase in the past three years, research has focused mainly on world tourism cities, and intuitively on the cores of cities. Additionally, the economic actors serving as suppliers in the short-term rental sector are too often taken for granted. While existing research confirms the growing presence of real estate agencies and transnational investors who own or manage a significant number of apartment buildings with a purely corporate aim, what is more controversial is that which happens on the other side of the market: local homeowners becoming short-term rental sector suppliers. Focusing on the Italian city of Turin, the article contributes to this debate by exploring the profiles and economic lives of middle-class Airbnb ‘hosts’. Drawing on a set of in-depth interviews, the article provides a categorization of different types of, what we call, ‘marginal hosts’, and an analysis of their specificities and narratives. The study, carried out at a neighbourhood level, shows that the interplay between post-crisis austerity, which has impacted on occupations and income, homeownership and platform capitalism have provided new value-extraction opportunities. We will conclude by arguing that social class should be more specific to the analysis of short-term rental sectors, simultaneously underlining the need for further systematic research on suppliers.

In Italy, as in other southern European countries, both the notions of diversity and multiculturalism have only recently come into use. In this article, we show how over the last 30 years two Italian cities, Turin and Naples have been transformed and reshaped by patterns of mobility and informal commerce that we have referred to as 'shadow circuits'. Shadow circuits work through the connection of distant places in Europe and the Mediterranean and contribute to the understanding of complex, stratified societies, mobile societies in particular. A mobile ethnography perspective has been carried during fieldwork and is discussed in length in this article. The examples of Turin and Naples are particularly useful because, unlike many other Italian cities, both have developed pro-multiculturalism and pro-diversity policies in the last two decades. This makes them particularly interesting case studies for addressing the gap between diversity as a policy and diversity as a social fact.

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Le secteur du logement constitue une entrée pertinente pour comprendre le contexte actuel de diffusion de l’austérité. C’est particulièrement vrai pour les pays du sud de l’Europe et notamment l’Italie, qui conservent des caractéristiques spécifiques en matière de logement et de welfare. Cet article explore les nouveaux usages de la propriété qui se développent pour faire face à l’austérité, et notamment la diffusion des locations de courte durée sur les plateformes en ligne (Airbnb et similaires). Après un cadrage sur les spécificités de la ville de Turin, notre cas d’étude, on se focalisera sur le quartier populaire de Aurora, au Nord du centre-ville, et sur la géographie locale des locations temporaires. Il s’agira d’étudier les diverses formes de rente urbaine qui s’élaborent dans les pratiques quotidiennes en contexte d’austérité, en particulier au sein des classes moyennes. L’analyse des entretiens permet d’interpréter ces comportements comme des stratégies de contournement du quotidien de la crise. La conclusion porte sur les implications à long terme de ces pratiques, en particulier pour ce qui concerne la structure urbaine et la reproduction des inégalités sociales, tout en suggérant de nouvelles pistes de recherche.