Platform placemaking and the digital urban culture of Airbnbification

Abstract

This paper develops the notion of “platform placemaking”, describing how platforms mobilize user data to remake urban spatial imaginaries in their interests. Using Airbnb as a case, the paper studies the digital urban culture of “Airbnbification” – examining how Airbnb’s reviews and descriptions become part of reshaping urban place, while contributing to the place alienation of long-term residents. Airbnb feeds a surge in urban tourists on the hunt for “real urban experiences”: off-the-beaten-track, everyday and mundane urban life, seen as representing something “real” and “authentic”. This paper situates Airbnb in the literature on postmodern consumption, and examines the way hosts and guests on Airbnb stage, perform and construct cosmopolitanism and “authentic” urban place to cater to the values of new urban tourism. The paper introduces an approach to studying digital urban culture through platform data, using computational discourse analysis to examine Airbnb in New York City. By linking narratives in reviews and neighborhood descriptions to census data, we examine how authenticity and cosmopolitanism is staged and marketed. The paper argues that Airbnb serves to promote a value system that devalues the cultural and spatial capital of long-term residents, implying that the new tourists’ cosmopolitan longing to belong may thus come at the cost of the locals’ own sense of belonging. The platform placemaking of Airbnb thus emphasizes urban place as a consumption experience, while depressing other ways of experiencing the city.

Workcation (Workation) Travel Experiences, Satisfaction and Revisit Intentions: Focusing on Conceptualization, Scale Development, and Nomological Network

“…Although a business framework for digital transformation has been proposed in a variety of ways (Ebert & Duarte, 2018; Matt et al, 2015; Westerman et al, 2014), most notably, it has innovated business operations which has led to a new ecosystem for products or services where existing operations and systems are substantially upgraded or changed (Gong & Ribiere, 2021; Mergel et al, 2019). In the tourism context, while the spatial division of the traditional tourism experience has been clear (Cohen, 2019), the boundary between the workspace and the tourism space can be blurred as the sense of place is lost due to digital transformation (Reichenberger, 2018; Törnberg, 2022). Consequently, a new type of travel, such as workcation (also called as “workation”), indicating an extended stay at destinations where travelers can fulfill their employment obligations and take a break from their regular working routine for travel and leisure activities, is emerging in this context.…”

The curatorial turn in tourism and hospitality

“…Platforms also enable users to participate in making places or destinations. Törnberg (2022, p.1) identifies “platform placemaking” in which users are “shaping imaginaries of urban place in their interests” (p. 2). Curation is more than a marketing technique: it also links the choices of consumers to narratives that provide meaning for others.…”

Platform—driven housing commodification, financialisation and gentrification in Athens

“…This blurry status also reflects in policy inaction, as it becomes difficult to distinguish between occasional homesharing and commercial operations (Grisdale, 2021). In the same vein, Sadowski (2019) argues that rentier platforms "in their attempt to activate value in and extract rents from what they deem to be unproductive or uncommodified assets, are performing their own version of voodoo economics updated for the digital age", while, besides the private spaces of homes, Törnberg (2022) argues that STRs also commercialise urban communities as wholes through "platform placemaking". Dal Maso et al ( 2019), focusing on the case of Juwai, a platform that connects real estate agents with Asian buyers, argue that relevant platforms through their capacity to connect remote actors and bridge cultural asymmetries within the digital sphere, capitalize and extract value building on "the different cultural practices, colloquialisms, traditions, languages and social norms of the user groups".…”