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.

Città e crisi ai tempi di Airbnb: il Lower East Side (NYC) / Vacirca, Ludovica; Barioglio, Caterina. - In: U3 I QUADERNI. - ISSN 2531-7091. - STAMPA. - Urbanistica Tre, I Quaderni:09(2016), pp. 47-54.

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

VACIRCA, LUDOVICA;BARIOGLIO, CATERINA
2016

Abstract

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.
2016
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11583/2678098