Hidden value in the platform’s platform

Airbnb, displacement, and the un‐homing spatialities of emotional labour

Bibliographic Data

ID8963102
AuthorsIan Spangler (0000-0002-8395-8120, Department of Geography University of Kentucky Lexington KY USA, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume45
Issue3
Pages575-588
Publication date2019-12-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12367
OpenAlexW2995760190
LanguageEN
Citations received31
References cited64

This paper explores the proliferation of short‐term home rentals (STRs) in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, to consider how contemporary technologies of platform urbanism leverage the human infrastructure of emotional labour as a technique for value production. Bringing theories of emotional labour and gentrification together with recent writing on the spatialities of platforms, I argue that for the production of value and the capture of profit, STR platforms like Airbnb rely on neighbours’ emotional labour of performing home. Because this strategy operates through banal practices in quite ordinary neighbourhood spaces, it hides in plain sight – and yet, for neighbours who find themselves enrolled without remuneration into the productive machinery of platform capitalism, it simultaneously creates feelings of alienation and exhaustion. Drawing on interviews with neighbourhood residents and Airbnb hosts in New Orleans, I show how neighbours’ unremunerated performances of home contribute to their own feelings of displacement in place while simultaneously operating as an apparatus of value production for the platform. Although I focus on the case of Airbnb in New Orleans, this study also broadly demonstrates the invisibilisation of value, the challenges of opting out of the digital economy, and the embodied ways in which relations of platform urbanism can impact the everyday life of people with no formal obligation to platforms themselves

Aesthetics · Alienation · Capitalism · Economic growth · Economics · Gentrification · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Urbanism · Architecture · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Sharing Economy and Platforms

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