Home-sharing as transnational moorings

Abstract

Barcelona, one of the main destinations for Airbnb users, has turned into one of the main stages for the now global debate around short-term rentals and their impacts on resident communities. Criticism has mostly focused on the conversion of housing into conventional tourist apartments while less attention has been paid to the problematization of short-term rentals in primary residences. Important questions thus arise as to whether these allegedly genuine forms of home-sharing should be ‘formalised’ at all through a regulation, and which type of controls should be applied. Our research helps to excavate this issue, shedding further light on the different logics and practices behind the development of home-sharing, and discusses the limitations of a regulation which is being introduced. To this end, it offers an in-depth analysis of the home-sharing supply in Barcelona, tackling its social and spatial logics, which is framed in the broader debate on processes of social change affecting inner cities. It then focuses on el Raval, one of Barcelona's core neighbourhoods where home-sharing practices have become more diffused, revealing how these practices are strongly correlated with high residential mobility and the presence of a single-dweller childless European resident population. Finally, we argue that home-sharing becomes an equally problematic agency of conversion of housing into a mooring for mobile communities, further contributing to potential gentrification and the displacement of residents.

Keywords:

• short-term rentals
• Airbnb
• home-sharing regulations
• host community
• Barcelona
• el Raval
• transnational mobilities

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to show our gratitude to the editors of the Special Feature and to the anonymous reviewers for their insights and their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, although any errors are our own responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

Source: own elaboration of data from insideairbnb.com, idescat.cat and Ajuntament de Barcelona (2017a).

Source: Authors’ own elaboration of data from www.bcn.cat/estadistica

1 The data set is sourced from the information publicly available on the Airbnb website on 8th December 2016 and is available at http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Albert Arias-Sans

Albert Arias-Sans is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Barcelona. Email: [email protected]

Alan Quaglieri-Domínguez

Alan Quaglieri-Domínguez is a Lecturer of Bachelor in Leisure Management in the Department of Business Economic, Health and Social Care at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland. Email: [email protected]

Antonio Paolo Russo

Antonio Paolo Russo is a Professor and principal researcher of the Research Group on Territorial Analysis and Tourism Studies (GRATET) in the Department of Geography at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Email: [email protected]