Città e crisi ai tempi di Airbnb: il Lower East Side (NYC)

Founded in 2008, after the American housing bubble collapse and in the midst of the global financial crisis, Airbnb is an online platform facilitating short-term rentals that enable people to diversify their incomes making money from underused assets. Replacing the traditional real estate supply chain and answering with a bottom up approach to the housing demand, Airbnb redefines the role of private and public actors in urban transformation processes and it introduces a new system of value production. In New York, where in the last ten years rental housing has become less affordable with the result that a larger proportion of households pays thirty percent or more of their income to rent, Airbnb became a necessity and, at the same, an opportunity to produce value breaking the mechanisms both of the real estate industry and the touristic market. City becomes the place of a struggle that reveals unexpected alliances between different actors: privates, public administrations, hoteliers and local groups. Mapping and analyzing Airbnb’s offers in the Lower East Side, this paper aims to explore how this house-sharing service, as an answer to the economical crisis, could reinvent the urban and domestic environments reframing the boundaries between private and common spaces and suggesting new living scenarios. In a neighborhood marked by struggles over residential change and displacement since the 19th century, the Airbnb phenomenon lead to rethink about urban redevelopment exploring role and potentiality of a service acting both as accelerator of gentrification and instrument of resistance against it used by local inhabitants.