We today increasingly experience our lives through interfaces – Google Maps, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, and so on – thus intertwining our daily tasks, routines and social practices with the code and data of digital platforms (Dodge and Kitchin 2005). This intermediation enables these platforms to engage in data commodification, value extraction, and data governance within our every-day life (Langley and Leyshon 2017). In what has been referred to as a novel form of colonialism, these platforms employ the medium of data to transform social relations into market relations, allowing capital to annex new aspects of human life (Couldry and Mejias 2020).
For cities, in particular, the rise of platforms has been transformative. A large share of the data extracted and accumulated by these platforms is location-based (Thatcher 2017; Zook and Graham 2007), thus mediating social practices that blur the distinction between spatial and digital (Kitchin and Dodge 2014). An emerging literature on “platform urbanism” describes a condition “whereby platform-based business models ensure the generation of urban data largely takes place within proprietary data ecosystems” (Barns, 2017, p. n.p). This literature highlights the centrality of the urban in this emerging form of capitalist accumulation, suggesting irreducible, co-generative dynamics between platforms and the city (Barns 2019; van Doorn 2019). Platforms are coming to “alter the conditions through which society, space, and time, and thus spatiality, are produced” (Kitchin and Dodge 2014, p. 13), using data as the new means to remake the city in capital’s image (Couldry and Mejias 2020).
This paper uses Airbnb as a case of platform urbanism, and seeks to go from these abstract characterizations of “data colonialism” to their concrete implications in everyday urban life, by examining how platforms’ data extraction is coming to remake spatial imaginaries. The paper theorizes and empirically examines what we will refer to as “platform placemaking”: a process in which platforms mobilize their users as “discursive investors” (Zukin et al. 2017, p. 459), to shape spatial imaginaries in the interests of the platform. As platforms like Airbnb employ locational user data – in the forms of reviews, images, and descriptions – for commodifying urban place and “annexing human life directly to the economy” (Couldry and Mejias 2020, l. 926), they transform not merely the short-term rental market, but “the very fabric of city life” (van Doorn 2019, p. 2). Airbnb curates a social infrastructure that enables users to participate discursively in the process of making “place”, while nudging and directing them to reshape the city in its image (Törnberg and Uitermark 2020). Airbnb thereby expands commodification not only by expanding short-term rentals into residential parts of the city and into the “private” space of the home – but also by employing user data to mobilize placemaking to package urban communities as products for outsiders’ consumption (Bialski 2017; Goyette 2021; O’Regan and Choe 2017; Stabrowski 2017). By examining this, the paper answers Sadowski’s (2020) call for research on how platforms produce spaces for extraction and enclosure: if we understand platforms as a contemporary “milieu of accumulation, of growth, of commodities, of money, of capital” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 129), then we should seek to examine how they undertake the production of productive space.
Platform placemaking is an important part of what Peters (2016) refers to as ‘Airbnbification’: the changing socio-cultural landscape of urban neighborhoods produced by Airbnb. These include the destruction of community coherence, changing character of urban neighborhoods, and transformation of residential communities into tourist spaces – but it centrally also concerns shifting discourses and imaginaries of place (Ferreri and Sanyal 2018; Watkins 2015). As cultural geographers have long argued, language is both reflexive and generative of the social world; they can shape and direct, hurt or empower (McGeachan and Philo 2014, p. 546), as “space, time and social constructions are productive of, and produced by, languages and their usage” (Kanngieser 2012, p. 338). As Medeiros puts it, “language is the chisel with which we shape and sculpt and slice the world around us” (2010, p. 95). As platforms acquire the power to direct this chisel, questions are raised of what type of urban culture will be thus produced.
These changing spatial imaginaries impact long-term residents in concrete ways. While early research on Airbnb focused particularly on its effects on rental markets and the displacement of long-time residents, recent studies have highlighted the emotional and symbolic impacts of Airbnb. These studies point to its contribution to displacement in a broader sense: not merely physical relocation, but changes in the unique character and social identity of place (LeGates and Hartman 1981; Rozena and Lees 2021) – what gentrification scholars call ‘cultural’, ‘indirect’ or ‘exclusionary’ displacement (Hyra 2017; Lees et al. 2008). Recent studies have looked at the emotional effects associated to short-term rentals, and the ways in which Airbnb have alienated residents and contributed to feelings of displacement, alienation, and loss of community and identity (Pinkster 2016; Rozena and Lees 2021; Spangler 2020).
The paper thus seeks to examine how Airbnb is implicated in the discursive and symbolic dimensions of the commodification of place by examining the discourses of its platform placemaking. Like platform studies focuses on the way technical designs of platform infrastructures shape networked cultures, so we suggest the study of how the technical designs of urban platforms shape the increasingly digital cultures of cities. To study this empirically, the paper proposes a critical approach to digital data analysis, which draws on the data produced by these platforms to examine the conditions of its production, analyzed through a combination between critical discourse analysis and digital methods. To theorize how Airbnb is implicated in the discursive and symbolic dimensions of the commodification of place, we draw on the literatures of postmodern tourism and new urban tourism, which have long been interested in the symbolic commodification of place.
Using New York City as the empirical case, and drawing on reviews and listings through a “heterodox” computational social science approach (Törnberg and Uitermark 2021), we argue that the cultural logic of Airbnb is quintessential of post-modern tourism – and that literature on the staging of far-away tourism destinations as “exotic” and “authentic” can be applied to examine the Airbnbification of residential areas at the Western “urban frontier” (Smith 2005). We find that Airbnb’s tourism gentrification is founded on the commodification of a sense of belonging, marketing an authenticity founded in processes of othering, thereby serving to devalue the spatial capital of the rooted population (Jansson 2019; Rozena and Lees 2021). We will begin, however, by situating Airbnb in the emerging literature on platform urbanism.
Airbnb and platform urbanism
What distinguishes short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb from regular hotel businesses is that they do not own rental real estate, but instead act brokers between those with space to rent and those looking for short-term lodgings. Airbnb thus leverages the real estate assets of a multitude of companies and individuals, without actually owning any housing stock. Seeking to align themselves with progressive movements for urban change, Airbnb regularly presents their role as enabling “home sharing”, which “puts money into the pockets of regular people” (Hickey and Cookney 2016, n.p). More realistically, the platform role affords important business advantages: acting as intermediary between producers and consumers means that Airbnb can collect commissions on market transactions with relatively low fixed and variable costs (Sadowski 2020). The role furthermore provides important competitive advantages to hotels, by shifting responsibility for taxes and regulations onto “hosts” – while simultaneously refusing to share host information, suing governments and tax agencies, and wielding their user community as a lobbying power to fight stringent regulation (Törnberg 2021). In this sense, Airbnb operates as a “regulatory entrepreneur”: its innovation and competitive advantage lies in a scheme which grants plausible deniability, while it functions to provide real estate capital a vehicle to bypass, fight and litigate public regulations (Pollman and Barry 2016; van Doorn 2019).
The Airbnb business model has become ubiquitous in recent years, defined by companies which do not provide product or services, but rather own and manage proprietary “multi-sided” markets which connect buyers and sellers (Langley and Leyshon 2017). This platform model has become so dominant in the contemporary economy that scholars have described an emerging “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2017), “platform society” (van Dijck et al. 2018), “digital capitalism” (Schiller 1999), or “surveillance capitalism” (Foster and McChesney 2014; Zuboff 2019). While neoliberalism sought the annexation of new fields by the market, digital capitalism can be understood as seeking the annexation of the market itself by private companies (Staab 2019). Such proprietary markets generate profits by owners leveraging their intermediary position to function as rentiers of the digital economy (Sadowski 2020), while acquiring significant power to organize and control these markets.
The growth of platforms is however also linked to their capacity to use their intermediary position to extract digital data. Data has grown into the defining commodity of contemporary capitalism, with the literature describing a mode of capitalist accumulation organized around its capturing, processing, and monetization (Couldry and Mejias 2020; Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger 2013).
The value of data relies on its capacity to capture, analyze, predict and control the social world, thereby enabling the annexation of new aspects of human life into capitalism – “liquifying” areas previously inaccessible to capital and expand the production resources available to capital (Van Dijck 2014; see also Lohr 2015). Couldry and Mejias (2020) describe this as a “data colonialism”, in which human life, rather than natural resources and labor, have become the subject of colonial appropriation. Through data, everyday life is abstracted, quantified, and dispossessed: just as industrial capitalism employed the medium of money to transform all economic relations into market relations, so digital capitalism employs the medium of data to transform social relations into market relations. Data colonialism thus goes beyond neoliberalism by annexing human life directly to the economy and reorganizing it fundamentally in the process. Whereas neoliberalism was at war with the parts of social life that remained outside the market, data colonialism simply appropriates all of life for markets (Couldry and Mejias 2020).
The literature on digital and platform capitalism has recently begun to recognize the centrality of the urban in the platform economy, as platforms and urban space are co-constituted and geospatial dimensions are ubiquitous in data representations. “Platform urbanism” has thus become an important field of research, examining the entanglement between platforms and the city – and the governance of the latter by the former. Through their data extraction, platforms should be understood not only to transform markets or transactions, but as to reconstitute the very “perceptual fabric of space, a fabric that knits socio-spatial practices into something we have come to think of as ‘the urban’” (Barns 2019, p. 56). The urban ambitions of platforms such as Airbnb are thus significantly broader than providing short-term rentals; as (van Doorn 2019, p. 2) argues, “Airbnb aims to co-shape the terms of current and future policy debates pertaining not just to home sharing/short-term rental but also to the very fabric of city life”.
As digital platforms are coming to redefine urbanity, urban space can no longer be treated as merely spatial: the social practices associated to digital media – checking in, posting stories, taking selfies – blur, if not erase, the line between the spatial and the digital (Gordon and e Silva 2011; Graham and Zook 2013). As data and code become part of the very infrastructure through which spatiality is produced, urban space itself is becoming “hybrid” (De Souza e Silva 2006) or “digiplace” (Zook and Graham 2007). Data extraction and its commodifying capacities are hence coming to seep into the very production of urban space (Törnberg and Uitermark 2022).
However, while these literatures provide the central conditions and outlines of this emerging platform urbanism, as (Leszczynski 2020, p. 190) recently noted, “platforms are not first and foremost ecosystems of value extraction and capital accumulation, but rather of mundane connectivity and interaction”. Understanding platform urbanism requires an understanding of platform urbanism as a phenomenon of the urban everyday; urging a move from the abstract to the concrete. While it is becoming clear that digital capitalism is in the process of remaking cities in the image of capital, “as of yet, we are unsure as to what kind of urban culture this may produce” (Kitchin et al. 2017, p. 27).
The literature on platforms like Airbnb does gives important clues. Significant research has explored Airbnb’s impact on cities and tourism, focusing in particular impact on rental markets (Barron et al. 2018); (Horn and Merante 2017), racial biases (Edelman et al. 2017; Kakar et al., 2016; Kakar et al. 2018; Leong and Belzer 2016), links to gentrification and displacement (Cox, 2017; Gant, 2016; Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018), as well as on effects on traditional businesses and labor (Guttentag, 2015; Oskam & Boswijk, 2016; Zervas et al. 2017).
Recent literature has also begun to also emphasize the effects on urban culture, focusing on how the marketing of private homes and everyday local residential life as a consumption experience has implications for the wellbeing of long-term residents. Airbnb drives socio-cultural changes described as an amalgamation between gentrification and touristification, captured under the concept of “Airbnbification” (Peters 2016; Rozena and Lees 2021). Airbnbification shifts the focus from physical displacement to “indirect displacement”, in which the character and social identity of place is shifted, driving residential alienation, disruption and erasure of long-term communities (Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019; Freytag and Bauder 2018; Spangler 2020). Complaints from residents concern feelings of unease and a sense of loss – loss of belonging or of “feeling at home” in their neighborhood (Colomb and Novy 2016; Pinkster and Boterman 2017; Richardson 2015).
The suggestion of this paper is that Airbnb’s data extraction is part of driving the place alienation and indirect displacement associated to Airbnbification, by mobilizing a shift in the spatial imaginaries of urban place. Our focus here is to examine what type of urban culture this shift produces. To theorize this, we turn to viewing Airbnb through the literature on new urban tourism and postmodern consumption – which has long been interested in the symbolic consumption of urban place – to theorize how Airbnb’s data colonialism symbolically and culturally shapes the city in capital’s image.
Airbnb and new urban tourism
The literature on urban tourism of the 80 s and 90 s studied a modernist tourism with clear boundaries between tourism and everyday urban life. In this form of tourism, particular cities and places became tourist destinations – “tourist cities” (Judd and Fainstein 1999) like Las Vegas or Venice, within which tourism was further concentrated to particular areas – “tourist bubbles” (Judd and Fainstein 1999) or “enclavic tourist spaces “ (Edensor 2008) – enclosed and regulated urban areas within which tourist activities were focused and its effects on the urban fabric most easily observed (Selby 2004). Tourism was thus seen as isolated from urban everyday life, producing commodified hyper-real “non-places” within these bubbles, focused around events and iconic architecture, but with limited connection to the rest of urban life (Novy 2010). The effects of tourism were positioned within the larger homogenizing and standardizing impact of globalization. This was epitomized in Sorkin’s (1992) notion that global consumerism would replace local particularities with theme park versions of themselves: a “Disneyfication” which would imply a simultaneous decontextualization and homogenization, as this was required for the successful packaging and marketing of places as universally consumable products (Zukin 1993).
The postmodern shift in consumption constituted a consumer rejection of this form of tourism – critical of what was seen as an inauthentic and unethical form of consumption. This transformation was part of a shifting role of consumers, who could no longer be content with the homogeneous mass-consumerism of the previous era (Gartman 2004), but now was to take on the project of constructing a lifestyle, that is, to display their consumer individuality through an assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions (Featherstone 1987; Giddens 1991). Consumer goods became like words in a language, which postmodern consumers use to tell stories about themselves, to be read and classified in terms of taste and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1993). Urban place was increasingly brought into this symbolic marketplace, where it was given a value as a cultural commodity, thus becoming like any other post-industrial consumer product (Zukin 1989, 2009).
With this shift, the boundary between tourism and everyday urban life – once clear and well-defined – has become increasingly blurred. This commodification of urban place is changing how we visit and relate to the city, expressed in cities around the world seeing a surge in a type of tourism that emphasizes “real urban experiences”: leaving the beaten-track tourist attractions for the everyday and mundane activities of urban life (Sequera and Nofre 2018). These places and activities are seen as markers of the real and authentic (Maitland 2010), which are central values in what has been called “new urban tourism” (Frisch et al. 2019; Novy 2010). These tourists seek the consumption of local amenities in diverse and ethnic neighborhoods – what Maitland (2007) refers to as “new tourism areas”. This transition is thus part of a broader shift towards longing for authenticity in current consumer culture (Gilmore & Pine, 2007), constituting a reaction against passive consumerism and commodification, which is interlinking with contemporary cities increasingly turning toward tourism as a means of economic development (Gotham 2005, 2018).
New urban tourism is part of a broader shift of capitalism in which symbolic capital has grown ever more important as a basis for monopoly rents (Harvey 2012). The value of products in other words increasingly draws on their discursive dimensions, in which the capacity to tell stories within which “authenticity, originality, uniqueness, and special un-replicable qualities looms large”, serving to “ground their claims to the uniqueness that yields monopoly rent” (Harvey 2012, p. 104). As capital seek the monopoly rents that derive from depicting commodities as incomparable, the “branding” of cities becomes big business, having significant drawing power upon the flows of both tourists and capital.
This shift importantly concerns the power of collective symbolic capital – a power within the hegemonic classificatory struggle over taste, which sets the logic of the cultural realm, and the rate of conversion into economic capital (Bourdieu 2011; Featherstone 1987). While Bourdieu did not include place in his forms of capital, later authors have expanded on his work to include a role for place (Centner 2008; Pred 1984; Veenstra 2007). Centner’s (2008) notion of “spatial capital” captures the way in which urban place is related to these symbolic struggles, using Lefebvre (1991) to expand on Bourdieu (1986), by adding the ability of different groups to access, appropriate and define urban places and neighborhoods as a distinct form of capital. In this way, the symbolic conflicts over place concern the ability of locals and visitors right to feel a sense of belonging, speaking to the notion of the “right to the city” (Harvey 2012). What is marketed is not only a visit to a neighborhood – but a construction and staging of what the neighborhood is. As the concept of “cultural displacement” (Abramson et al. 2006; Hyra 2015) highlights, this can lead to reduced attachment to place, as the cultural understanding of the neighborhood changes so profoundly that residents no longer recognize or identify with their home (Maly 2011; Zukin 2009).
Airbnb’s product is quintessential of new urban tourism. This can be seen in its marketing of the idea to “live like a local”, and claims of providing an alternative to impersonal and mass-produced travel (Roelofsen and Minca 2018). Airbnb presents themselves as an alternative to mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences, by offering the experience of sleeping, living, and feeling “belonging” in the spaces where “real life” supposedly takes place. According to an Airbnb-conducted poll (cited in Sans and Quaglieri 2016), 96% of Airbnb guests want to live “like a local” during their stay. As Sans and Quaglieri (2016) argue, Airbnb appears as a field for the “cosmopolitan consuming class” (Fainstein et al. 2003, Judd 2003). By blurring the distinction between residential and tourist areas, Airbnb claims to offer integration in local neighborhoods and access to every-day life. This is in part enabled by the platform’s capacity to leverage legal grey zones and its policy entrepreneurship to by-pass zoning regulations and thus expand the hospitability industry into residential areas (Gurran and Phibbs 2017).
Focusing on the Airbnb as a platform marketing new urban tourism suggests that Airbnb should be understood not merely as a proprietary market for short-term rentals, but simultaneously as a site for the production and “staging” of urban place as a postmodern consumer product. Airbnb’s product is not merely released “‘latent space’ within existing buildings” (Barns 2019, p. 81) but a cultural product of community, belonging, and authenticity. Correspondingly, Airbnb is not merely the owner of a proprietary market, but of a user “community” that carry out the staging and production of this cultural product. Airbnb mobilizes its users to become “discursive investors” (Bronsvoort and Uitermark 2020; Zukin et al. 2017) and to carry out the discursive work necessary to package place as an attractive postmodern product. The focus on data extraction thus shifts the attention to Airbnb as an interface for the symbolic marketplace of the city, driving changes in the cultural lives of cities by bringing new aspects of urban life into market relations.
In what we will refer to as “platform placemaking”, Airbnb thus stages and frames urban place as desirable postmodern consumer products. This concept draws on the notion of “placemaking”, which designates the social, political, and material processes by which people experience places, emphasizing that places are constructed through social negotiation and contestation (Pierce et al. 2011). Residents, organizations, and social movements seek to frame places (Martin 2003) in ways that assert a particular neighborhood identity, emphasizing certain characteristics of residents and the landscape in ways that capture their experiences or support their interests. The capacity to define, describe, or characterize a place and its community constitutes an important form of power, as place identity holds a central role in supporting and driving activities and political agendas (Martin 2003). Geographers have in particular examined mass-media’s power to define and shaping such place identities, based on their hegemony to shape discourses of place (e.g., Beauregard 2013; Brown-Saracino and Rumpf 2011; Martin 2000). The here proposed notion of platform placemaking goes beyond this form of power by pointing to the novel form of control over placemaking processes embodied by digital platforms (Törnberg and Uitermark 2020). Just as Airbnb provides a market for its rental property, it mobilizes and curates a community for discursive production: reviews, listing descriptions and photographs, which are curated to form an ‘interactive lifestyle magazine’ through which users can window-shop for urban place that fits their particular lifestyle assemblage. By controlling the social infrastructure, Airbnb can steer the discourse through subtle nudging and technical designs. For ‘guests’, Airbnb frames reviewing as an interpersonal message to the host, as well as a contribution to the community good. As economic investors, ‘hosts’ become also discursive investors, driven to support the imaginaries of Airbnbification. The discursive power is far from evenly distributed among hosts – just as the Airbnb market is highly dominated by a small number of professional hosts, so is the discursive production of place dominated by these influential users, who claim the lion share of the visibility.
Airbnb thereby partly resolves the fundamental contradiction that “the marketing itself tends to destroy the unique qualities [that] provide a basis for monopoly rent” (Harvey 2012, p. 104): hosts are engaged to tell a story of a place, of which they, their home, their belonging, their ‘local life’, and their community is part of the product – cast as authentic, original, unique, and un-replicable, in Harvey’s (2012) terms. While social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter extract user data for advertising revenue, Airbnb leverage user data to stage and commodify urban place. The intersection of latent real estate and user reviews is thus a concrete embodiment of the intersection between financialization and datafication at which Airbnb operates.
We now turn to the question of how to empirically examine what type of spatial imaginaries this produces, through the examination of user data.