Short-term rentals such as Airbnb have become a persistent element of today’s urbanism around the globe. The impacts are manifold and differ depending on the context. In cities with a traditionally smaller accommodation market, the impacts might be particularly strong, as Airbnb contributes to ongoing touristification processes. Despite that, small and medium-sized cities have not been in the centre of research so far. This paper focuses on Santa Cruz de Tenerife as a medium-sized Spanish city. Although embedded in the touristic region of the Canary Islands, Santa Cruz is not a tourist city per se but still relies on touristification strategies. This paper aims to expand the knowledge of Airbnb’s spatial patterns in this type of city. The use of data collected from web scraping and geographic information systems (GIS) demonstrates that Airbnb has opened up new tourism markets outside of the centrally established tourist accommodations. It also shows that the price gap between Airbnb and the housing rental market is broadest in neighbourhoods that had not experienced tourism before Airbnb entered the market. In the centre the highest prices and the smallest units are identified, but two peripheral quarters stand out. Anaga Mountains, a natural and rural space, has the highest numbers of Airbnb listings per capita. Suroeste, a suburban quarter, shows the highest growth rates on the rental market, which implies a linkage between Airbnb and suburbanization processes.

The inner-city oil refinery in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, has been shaping the city’s urbanism as an employer, but also as a polluter and a physical barrier for more than 80 years. The megaproject Santa Cruz Verde 2030 aims at transforming this area into a mixed-use urban quarter. Based on a mixed methods approach, this paper analyses the impacts of the megaproject by means of document, spatial and statistical analyses. The project is estimated to increase the city’s green areas by 39 % and the number of hotel beds by 70 %, provoking a strong touristifaction. Santa Cruz Verde 2030 stands for a new type of megaprojects, offering a variety of uses and sustainability wordings. Nevertheless, the impacts might reconfigure the city’s urbanism as a whole, shifting centralities to its southwest. On a neighbourhood level, spillover effects are expected to have diverging consequences. While in the Los Llanos neighbourhood gentrification and tourism are fostered, in Buenos Aires the megaproject implies the opportunity to integrate this currently segregated quarter into the city. Against this background, the paper outlines the necessity of transparent planning and monitoring processes, in order to ensure the sustainability of this new urban quarter.

Within the neoliberal context of today’s urbanism, a growing number of inner-city megaprojects aim to transform brownfield sites—accompanied by gentrification and tourism. However, there is no systematic review exploring the interplay between these phenomena. This paper aims to systemize the existing scientific contributions by means of a literature review. Using different databases, a total number of 797 scientific documents have been identified. After several screening steps, a final set of 66 studies was included in the review. I present an analysis from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, exploring bibliometric aspects, concepts, methods, and relevant lines of discussion. The area studied is a relatively young and emerging field. Within the discussion, there is a strong dominance of countries located in the global north, with Spain, the UK, and the U.S. at the forefront. From a methodological point of view, qualitative and mixed methods are mostly applied. The discussion of megaprojects, gentrification, and tourism has an important descriptive focus, with main topics such as planning, justice, and motivations. There are considerable conceptual deficits, as one-quarter of the studies do not clearly explain their methods. Future research needs to find ways to enable knowledge transfer to planning practice.

Megaprojects, as a part of neoliberal urbanism, have become an important element of cities worldwide. In Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, the megaproject Santa Cruz Verde 2030 represents this type of project. The ambitious plan seeks to transform the city’s oil refinery into an urban quarter. However, since its announcement in summer 2018, no critical public discussion has taken place, although the project is expected to reconfigure the city’s waterfront and its tourist model. In this context, it is particularly the stakeholders’ point of view that is neglected. We thus offer a qualitative analysis of five interviews with local stakeholders from the real estate sector, politics, urban planning and an environmental association. The analysis shows that the interviewees feel insufficiently informed by the project’s initiators. The project is interpreted as an elitist symbol of how the project’s initiators understand urban development. While some of the stakeholders want to accelerate the whole process, others call for a more integrative and participative planning approach. Moreover, the observed marketing campaign is directly linked to the upcoming elections. The interviewees observe a simple top-down planning process, which contradicts the promises of the initiators to enable civic participation and integration.