Editorial: Contested spaces in the sharing economy

ABSTRACT

The explosive growth of collaborative or peer-economy platforms has disrupted “business as usual” in tourism and triggered broad research interest in certain aspects or players of the sharing economy. This special issue explores diverse manifestations of the sharing economy in the context of its impacts upon and complex relationship with tourism spaces, by offering six, conceptually reflexive and empirically rich studies of how the sharing economy is transforming destinations, communities, consumers and tourism governance in Nordic and Mediterranean regions. The volume sheds light on the particular political, socio-cultural, demographic, organizational, institutional and technological conditions that are shaping new collaborative endeavours in tourism. Instead of fixating on sudden socio-spatial disruptions, the contributions are observant to changes unfolding over a longer period and in different geographical contexts. This longitudinal perspective also enables a more sophisticated discussion of the sharing economy’s impact beyond tourism, and its entanglements with social welfare models, cooperative production systems, resilient communities and digital infrastructures.

KEYWORDS:

• Sharing economy
• collaborative economy
• disruption
• socio-spatial controverses

Just over a decade ago, the world was facing a severe financial crisis, bringing global economic growth to a halt. Its magnitude and devastating effects on all societal levels painfully exposed the failures of deregulated markets and absent governance. As a consequence, it compelled governments and global economic summits to direct their focus on ways to remodel a fundamentally flawed and unsustainable capitalist system. While the grand intentions voiced in Davos 2009 were never realized as wide-ranging policy interventions, the emergent sharing (or collaborative) economy has proven to possess transformative powers to revitalize the economy from the shambles of the financial crisis (Rifkin, 2014; Sundarajan, 2016). Spearheaded by digital platforms thriving on the Web 2.0, and the Internet of Things, the sharing economy enabled networking and transactions among peers on a large scale and raised great expectations around the world. Early proponents of the sharing economy (Botsman & Rogers, 2011) argued that it marked the advent of a new market logic based on the marketization of idle assets and more efficient use of resources. Sharing platforms facilitate the temporary access to goods and services in extensive and simple ways, and diminish the value of permanent ownership – one of the fundamental markers of wealth and social status in the consumer society. Social relationships and economic interactions are increasingly entangled in the sharing economy, leading to new collective and communitarian forms of value creation. Initially, it was envisaged that this hybridization would provide relevant, systemic solutions to wicked problems in the global economy, however, the past decade’s evolution of sharing phenomena asserted that they simultaneously gave rise to new challenges.

In a matter of few years, the unicorns of the sharing economy (i.e. digital start-ups growing into global platforms) successfully combined efficiency with equity and contributed to an exponential development of this sector. Airbnb’s remarkable growth amounting to more than two million properties worldwide is boosting urban destinations and exposing the tourism and hospitality sector to the most radical disruptions since the third industrial revolution. Being both a platform intermediary and accommodation provider, Airbnb has intersected the business logic of an entire value chains, and challenged the operations of commercial accommodation, transport and experience suppliers, as well as the travel trade and self-employed entrepreneurs. Taking equally advantage of the initial public goodwill to support communitarian initiatives, regulatory lacunae, and a precarious workforce, the mavericks of this new economy introduced design interventions to capitalize on individual resources (property or labour) under the misnomers of “sharing” and “collaboration”. Since 2015, both activists and academics have contested the alleged claims of sustainable and morally correct sharing models and demonstrated that the alluring rhetoric of global platforms was merely disguising a fundamentally neoliberalist, profit-extracting business model. For instance, while Airbnb proclaims itself worldwide as a new economic alternative, which helps private hosts to generate supplementary income, an increasing body of research denounces the impacts of its growth. Critics provide compelling evidence for Airbnb’s role in “touristification” and residential displacement processes (Freytag & Bauder, 2018; Guttentag, 2019), disruption in the urban housing markets (Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018) and an overall deterioration of the quality of public space (Roelofsen & Minca, 2018). A growing body of empirical evidence indicates how platform economy businesses are in fact, contributing to a neoliberal economy “on steroids”, and instead of alleviating sociospatial inequalities, they worsen labour precariousness and residential gentrification (Slee, 2015). Such controversies have elevated tourism accommodation rental to a mainstream political issue in larger cities (Aguilera et al., 2019) and subsequently heightened public awareness in tourism exacerbating social and economic controversies.

Media debates assessing the effects of the sharing economy tend to be polarized on one side or another, but academics should delve deeper into both its benefits and controversies. By taking an agnostic position (Dredge & Gyimóthy, 2015); we must empirically investigate diverse manifests, mechanisms and consequences of emergent sharing phenomena. We should also be more sensitive to the uneven geographical spreading of the collaborative economy, and conduct studies beyond urban contexts and global platforms. There is a need to also direct focus on alternative business models driven by hybrid (economic, social and moral) rationales (Dredge & Gyimóthy, 2017) – and to shed light on local, cooperativist and not-for-profit initiatives (Cave & Dredge, 2020; Gyimóthy & Meged, 2018; Richardson, 2015). Such an approach will enable us to develop appropriate terminologies and to make sense of collaborative disruptions through new theoretical, methodological and analytical frameworks.

Consequently, this special issue scopes the diffusion and diverse manifestations of the sharing economy, with the aim to investigate its complex relationship with tourism spaces and stakeholder ecologies. With a focus on the social, spatial and regulative context of sharing economy disruptions, the volume offers six, empirically rich studies of how the sharing economy is transforming tourism destinations, communities, and tourism governance. The contributions vary between diagnostic, analytical and conceptual pieces and scope socio-spatial implications and controversies on multiple levels. Despite the inherent diversity of the papers, they share a joint interest in a longitudinal research approach, which acknowledges the historical context and evolution of sharing economy phenomena over several years. An enduring temporal focus not only grants the identification of development trends and changing attitudes over time, but also paves the ground for prognostic reflections that may lead to a more refined theoretical understanding of the complex effects of the sharing economy.

Three articles discuss commercial accommodation rental platforms through a range of methodical approaches. Czeslaw Adamiak’s diagnostic piece draws on large-scale regional datasets (comprising web scraped data and tourism arrival statistics) to assess the spatial distribution of Airbnb-rentals on the regional level in five Nordic countries. By juxtaposing the platform’s growth dynamic with that of commercial accommodation sector as well as the stock of secondary homes, he identifies distinct spatial variations between destinations at different evolutionary stages in their life cycle. His study demonstrates that commercial peer accommodation rental is demand-driven, and follows the distribution patterns of commercial accommodation, which confirms the findings of other economic geographers (Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019; Sans & Quaglieri, 2016; Strommen-Bakhtiar & Vinogradov, 2020). The density of Airbnb listings and the intensity of bookings is highest (in absolute terms) in already consolidated Nordic destinations and further aggravates extant economic asymmetries between over- and undervisited areas. This implies that capital regions, popular coastal areas, archipelagos, and ski resorts already boasting with high tourist volumes are exposed to even higher concentration of short stay visitors that may eventually lead to overtourism. However, Adamiak also provides compelling evidence to illustrate how Airbnb accelerated the evolution of destinations in early growth phases (Faroe islands and Greenland), by filling a supply gap in less visited areas. His work is an important milestone to understand the disruptive (and even phase-shifting) role of peer rental in Nordic destination evolution, as it acknowledges the co-constitutive effects of different types of accommodation supply and changes in tourist demand.

Two, city-level papers discussing the changing public sentiment against Airbnb finely complement Adamiak’s regional comparisons. Salla Jokela and Paola Minoia presents a robust case study on the “Airbnbzation” of Helsinki. By combining geostatistical analysis with qualitative methods, they map district-level differences of the platform’s spatial uptake, being most spectacular in rejuvenated working-class areas. The authors use observations and interviews to illustrate how the reduction of the residential stock in Kallio, Kamppi and Punavori districts goes hand in hand with a palpable transformation of public spaces (becoming less intimate and more commercial). These results resonate Ioannides et al.’s (2019) findings from Utrecht’s hip multi-ethnic neighbourhood, Lombok, suggesting that neobohemian residential areas (or localhoods) close to the city centre are particularly attractive for urban peer rental. Jokela and Minoia also discuss the sluggishness of regulative responses to Airbnb, which can be accounted to both a liberal policy context that has emphasized deregulation, but also to a more downplayed presence of the Finnish capital in international debates and comparative reports on Airbnb.

Helsinki’s placid attitudes stand in stark contrast to a burgeoning movement of local protests and resistance against tourism in the Mediterranean. A few cities, such as Venice, Dubrovnik and Barcelona have become mediatized icons as the victims of “overtourism”, often coupled with recurring stories of anti-tourism attitudes and movements in international media. Although the seeds of exponential tourism growth were sown by boosterist development policies in the 1990s, many of these stories imply that peer-to-peer rental platforms are to be blamed for tourism getting out of control. With images of cities besieged by mass tourism, news sites and social media play a significant role in circulating counter-narratives against Airbnb’s rhetoric, but ultimately, also in intensifying division and discontent towards tourism. Lluís Garay, Soledad Morales Pérez and Julie Wilson chronicles how short-term accommodation platforms in the Catalan capital have become the target of an escalating social and increasingly politicized conflict. Their longitudinal geospatial mapping of Airbnb’s growth is embedded in a broader evolutionary analysis (Sanz Ibañez et al., 2017) of Barcelona’s tourism development trajectory between 2015 and 2018 and highlight three critical moments marking key turning points in public sentiment concerning tourism. Furthermore, they also contribute with a quantitative content analysis of Twitter messages diffused by activist-influencers, platform lobbies, and politicians discussing the Airbnb effect in Barcelona. Garay and his colleagues unveil how Twitter conversations reflect enduring controversies regarding tourism-induced displacement and citizen rights to public spaces and aptly demonstrate the dynamics of digital protest movements. By doing so, they draw attention to social media platforms as an emergent political arena and provide empirical justification to Aguilera et al.’s (2019) observations on how protest movements are shaping contemporary public policy. Protest movements mobilize larger volumes of digitally active “clicktivists”, capable of generating considerable noise in the virtual domain, and thus proved to be effective in putting pressure on absent tourism governance and instigate radical interventions towards tourism degrowth. By identifying the drivers and accelerators in digital resistance movements, this paper also echoes the dynamics of the Political Market Square model (Larson & Wikström, 2001), which assigns strong power positions to certain stakeholders. Such stakeholders include influential “digital choreographers” (techpol nerds and prominent Twitter profiles), who play a central role in devising and coordinating spectacular protest campaigns to harvest international attention.

Without doubt, the extant literature on the sharing economy is dominated by the study of few global platforms and extractive business models. Airbnb, owing to its sheer size has taken centre stage in debates on the spatial effects of the sharing economy in tourism destinations and directed research interest to depict multi-scalar implications and challenges for incumbents, housing markets, local communities and regulative approaches. This special issue attempts to repair this imbalance by also drawing attention to other collaborative manifests and less researched dimensions. María Casado-Díaz, Ana Casado-Díaz and Gijsbert Hoogendoorn presents a conceptual piece on the home exchange phenomenon, as non-monetized peer accommodation sharing alternative, which received a new momentum through more interactive web-based platforms. Departing from an extensive literature review that combines research on second homes, alternative consumption and sustainability, Casado-Díaz and her colleagues formulates a comprehensive research agenda with eight unresolved gaps pertaining to economic, socio-psychological and spatial dimensions of non-commercial peer exchanges in tourism. Their paper can be considered as a roadmap for interdisciplinary research endeavours that may inspire future studies to delve into uncharted territories of sharing economy.

One of those less travelled research avenues concerns alterations of place representations and stories delivered by a new generation of micro-entrepreneurs in the sharing economy. Malin Zillinger and Jan Henrik Nilsson present a comparative study of the free guided tour phenomenon conducted in four Northern European capital cities, demonstrating a homogenization of storytelling practices across Berlin, Copenhagen, Warsaw and Tallinn. Apart from briefly explaining the business model (an opportunistic pop-up venture in public space that capitalizes on the density of purchase power), they also point at critical aspects of free tour guide workers. Firstly, they belong to the precarious labour force of the sharing economy, with no regulated work conditions or union protection. Second, they observe interesting differences in recruitment procedures. While most destinations recruit guides among expats with a transnational background, who justify their legitimacy as non-native guides through their cosmopolitan status, other destinations only recruit native guides, but with an extensive travel experience and entertaining skills. Subsequently the paper delves into a critical discussion of how free guided tours are transforming local history interpretation through glocalized storytelling practices tailored to international visitors. Zillinger and Nilsson asserts that free guided tours are controversial innovations that not only disrupt local authorized guides and tour suppliers, but also contribute to a “glocalized homogenization of European urban cultures” and reignite debates about who has the right to tell the stories and memories of a place.

In stark contrast with the commercial model of free guided tours, Kristina Lindström presents a cooperative peer hospitality model, developed in West Sweden. The “Meet the Locals” initiative facilitates unmediated, authentic encounters between private Swedish hosts and guests, and has been quickly adopted as a progressive poster child by Visit Sweden. The paper excellently showcases the extant challenges but also the potentials of more equitable and sustainable business models that do not fit well into existing regulatory frames. Lindström chronicles the difficulties and ambivalence of public governance organizations in embracing and promoting alternative sharing phenomena. Destination management organizations (DMOs), who were originally conceived to pursue economic growth through tourism, must increasingly comply with sustainability imperatives, which are at odds with their traditional mission and tasks. Informed by evolutionary economic geography theory, Lindström’s longitudinal study follows the struggle of a West Swedish DMO breaking free from history and institutionalize more holistic tourism governance practices through co-creative regional capacity building.

Conclusions

The compilation of articles in this special issue demonstrates multi-scalar disruptions and place contestations fuelled by diverse manifestations of the sharing economy. Each piece provides empirically rich and methodically diverse analyses of how the sharing economy is transforming Nordic tourism and hospitality suppliers, housing markets, communities, consumers and tourism governance. The articles respond to extant research gaps by delving into hitherto ignored geographical or sectorial contexts of the sharing economy as well as divergent policy responses. Second, they bring in consolidated conceptual frameworks from evolutionary geography, social movements, social entrepreneurship and the second home literature to analyse the variegated impacts and ambivalences triggered by sharing phenomena. Third, the contributions experiment with novel and mixed methodological approaches that combine quantitative, digital and geospatial analysis with qualitative observations and analysis. Taken together, the special issue paves the way towards a more balanced conceptual understanding of distinct social, economic and spatial patterns characterizing contested tourism spaces in the collaborative economy.

Disclosure statement

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