Airbnb Commodity Cities

Airbnb has helped transform the world’s major cities into theme parks for tourists and resorts for the rich. This book shows the very concrete and devastating effects that one of the protagonists of so-called ‘digital’ or ‘platform capitalism’ – Airbnb – has on urban space, housing, and city life.

Airbnb is in fact a powerful technological tool fuelling a huge process of social transformation: from San Francisco to New York, from Lisbon to Rome, the touristification of cities produces the expulsion of residents and local activities pushed out by tourism and other consuming activities, causing the disruption of the social, economic, relational, and affective life that has always characterized metropolitan life.

The dimensions of community, neighbourhood, and relationship disappear to make way for a new kind of real estate and rent capitalism. ‘Airbnb city good’ recounts some exemplary cases of this process, but also, above all, it tells of the new social movements rising up against the digital gentrification of cities.