ABSTRACT
The digital platform Airbnb is often perceived as a champion for a more social tourism industry, whereas protests all over the world frame it as a trigger for sociospatial conflicts. While the platform portrays itself as a means for amateur hosts to “share” underutilized space in a community, public discourse views professionalized segments responsible for a wide variety of problems. Theoretically, activities enabled by Airbnb's network space disturb the established order in tourism-focused neighborhoods by superimposing its valuations and translocal practices onto places. Political actors in cities around the world aim to limit the negative effects on neighborhoods, while fostering the positive effects of tourism within their territories. To understand these complex dynamics, this paper analyses quantitative platform data and regulatory regimes in five cities from the United States and Europe. The paper contributes to the extant discourses on the “refiguration-of-spaces” approach by highlighting how digitally enabled network spaces stir up conflicts in places, forcing official bodies to weigh different spatial logics to uphold territory as their domain. Findings show that cases with algorithmic regulation using a confrontative approach prove most effective; however, algorithmic enforcement intertwines the territory as a domain with the logic of the network space.
