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Digital informalisation: rental housing, platforms, and the management of risk
Mara Ferreri
Housing Studies, 2022
The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on rental housing, our paper unpacks the ways in which new forms of digital management of risk control access and filter populations. In contrast to progressive imaginaries of ‘smart’ technological mediation, practices of algorithmic redlining, biased tenant profiling and the management of risk in private tenancies and in housing welfare both introduce and extend discriminatory and exclusionary housing practices. The paper aims to contribute to research on informal housing in the Global North by examining digital mediation and its governance as key overlooked components of housing geographies beyond North and South dichotomies.
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Planning, Land and Housing in the Digital Data Revolution/The Politics of Digital Transformations of Housing/Digital Innovations, PropTech and Housing – the View from Melbourne/Digital Housing and Renters: Disrupting the Australian Rental Bond System and Tenant Advocacy/Prospects for an Intellige...
Dallas Rogers
Planning Theory & Practice
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Platform labour on the margins and beyond the digital realm: Mapping the landscape of “platform-generated labour” in the digitally mediated short-term rental market
Dimitris Pettas
Digital Geography and Society, 2024
This paper explores the landscape of labour in the platform economy and, more specifically, the ways local economic activities and actors are exposed to pressures of platformisation, building on the case of the Airbnb platform and the digitally-mediated short-term rental (STR) market in Athens. Conceptualising STR networks as infrastructural assemblages and through a qualitative study building on 27 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors, I focus on: tracing the wide range of workers who undertake essential tasks, the employment statuses, compensations and modes of engagement of workers, restrictions and gender-dimensions, as well as the content and attributes of STR-related work. My main argument is built around the notion of ‘platform worker’ and the need to expand it beyond workers that are directly related to the platforms, in order to include the on-site labour force upon which the creation and everyday operation of broader platform ecosystems and related infrastructure are depended.
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The neoliberal tenant dystopia: Digital polyplatform rentierism, the hybridization of platform-based rental markets and financialization of housing
Jorge Sequera
Cities, 2023
Converting residential housing into short-term rentals (STRs), through platforms such as Airbnb, has become a very profitable business, and a tourist-led rentier class has been formed in connection with this activity. However, the pandemic stalled this process and STRs began to be listed on residential rental platforms. Our paper questions whether these STRs have actually returned to the residential market. Our research shows how the pandemic fostered what we term as the emergence of digital polyplatform rentierism through the hybridisation of rental markets. This process amplifies the exchange value of housing and the owners' future expectations of profits, enhancing the opportunities and means for the financialization of housing. For tenants, this model produces a neoliberal tenant dystopia: the supply of rental housing is reduced and the power dynamic between owners and tenants altered, with the former empowered and the latter weakened. Consequently, without stricter public policy to protect the right to housing and the right to live in the city, the platformisation of housing will result in less stable and less affordable rental prices, thereby fostering housing precarity and tenant impoverishment.
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Digital Innovations, PropTech and Housing – the View from Melbourne
Ani Landau-Ward
Planning Theory & Practice, 2019
The collection, digitisation and use of housing information in Australia has increased exponentially in the past decade. This brings significant implications for land and housing law and governance. The move from ‘analogue’ to digital, then to big data and Artificial Intelligence (Ai) not only speeds up existing social, economic and political relations, but fuels new and different dynamics (Kitchin 2014, pp. 19–20) just as innovations such as the printing press or telephone did in the past. As such, emerging digital and informational geographies and politics demand renewed critical attention (Dalton, Taylor, & Thatcher, 2016). As in many other cities, the proliferation of these technologies is occurring in a context of housing crisis where land prices are escalating and producing significant housing unaffordability. The confluence of these factors highlights the importance of examining the urban governance implications of the emergence of what is often termed ‘Prop-Tech’ (Shaw 2018) – new technological applications in real estate. Greater understanding of PropTech is vital to sharpen the legal and policy response to the emergent urban governance aspects of digitisation. In this essay, we present results from an initial scoping study into the proliferation of these technologies in Melbourne, Australia.
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Digital mediated short-term rentals in the (post-)pandemic city
Dimitris Pettas, Myrto Dagkouli - Kyriakoglou, Simone Tulumello
Digital Geography and Society, 2022
In this section, we reflect, both empirically and speculatively, on the perspectives for STRs and related digital platforms in the (post-)pandemic city, on the grounds of early signals of change in relation to spatial justice and institutional arrangements. The discussion is opened by Tulumello and Cocola-Gant, who, by investigating the case of Lisbon, Portugal, reflect on the flexible nature of platforms vis-à-vis the (neoliberal) cloud of de-and re-regulation in housing and rental markets, discussing how this intersection allows STRs to adapt and succeed, also during the pandemic. Similarly, Iacovone explores the professionalisation of platform-mediated STRs and their adaptability to increasingly more flexible and malleable requests from the marketdimensions that allow them to successfully outcompete smaller actors. Finally, Pettas and Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, by focusing on the case of Athens, Greece, discuss the ways STRs could be transformed into housing infrastructure for remote workers in connection to the restructuring of the post-pandemic labour market.
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From matchmaking to boundary making: Thinking infrastructures and decentring digital platforms in the sharing economy
Roser Pujadas
Thinking Infrastructures. Research in the Sociology of Organizations https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20190000062017, 2019
While digital platforms tend to be unproblematically presented as the infrastructure of the sharing economy-as matchmakers of supply and demand-, we argue that constituting the boundaries of infrastructures is political and performative, that is, it is implicated in ontological politics, with consequences for the distribution of responsibilities (Latour, 2003; Mol, 1999, 2013; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013). Drawing on an empirical case study of Uber, including an analysis of court cases, we investigate the material-discursive production of digital platforms and their participation in the reconfiguring of the world (Barad, 2007), and we examine how the (in)visibility of the digital infrastructure is mobilized (Larkin, 2013) to this effect. We argue that the representation of Uber as a "digital platform", as "just the technological infrastructure" connecting car drivers with clients, is a political act that attempts to redefine social responsibilities, while obscuring important dimensions of the algorithmic infrastructure that regulates this socioeconomic practice. We also show how some of these (in)visibilities become exposed in court, and some of the boundaries reshaped, with implications for the constitution of objects, subjects and their responsibilities. Thus, while thinking infrastructures do play a role in regulating and shaping practice through algorithms, it could be otherwise. Thinking infrastructures relationally decentres digital platforms and encourages us to study them as part of ongoing and contested entanglements in practice.
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Planning and the So-Called ‘Sharing’ Economy / Can Shared Mobility Deliver Equity?/ The Sharing Economy and the Ongoing Dilemma about How to Plan for Informality/ Regulating Platform Economies in Cities – Disrupting the Disruption?/ Regulatory Combat? How the ‘Sharing Economy’ is Disrupting Plann...
Renia Ehrenfeucht
Planning Theory & Practice, 2019
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Thinking infrastructures and decentering digital platforms in the sharing economy: from matchmaking to boundary making
Roser Pujadas
2019
While digital platforms tend to be unproblematically presented as the infrastructure of the sharing economy – as matchmakers of supply and demand – the authors argue that constituting the boundaries of infrastructures is political and performative, that is, it is implicated in ontological politics, with consequences for the distribution of responsibilities (Latour, 2003; Mol, 1999, 2013; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013). Drawing on an empirical case study of Uber, including an analysis of court cases, the authors investigate the material-discursive production of digital platforms and their participation in the reconfiguring of the world (Barad, 2007), and examine how the (in)visibility of the digital infrastructure is mobilized (Larkin, 2013) to this effect. The authors argue that the representation of Uber as a “digital platform,” as “just the technological infrastructure” connecting car drivers with clients, is a political act that attempts to redefine social responsibilities, while obscur...
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No children, no DSS, no students: online adverts and “property guardianship”
Caroline Hunter
Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law
Purpose Those seeking a new place to live – especially in the private rented sector – now head online to do so. The platforms they use and adverts they see are an important source of information about the properties they will occupy and how their owners’ seek to project them. This paper aims to argue for the importance of property adverts as a source of data, using “property guardianship” to illustrate the value in the approach. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on an analysis of 503 advertisements published on SpareRoom.co.uk – a leading property search engine – in July 2018. Findings The authors put forward four key areas of findings. The first two look at legal understanding, dealing with the context, the advertisement provides for eventual occupation (the “process of construction”) and any indications they provide of legal elements of occupation (“diagnostics”). The final two deal with the broader positioning of the sector, analysing the practice of excluding prospecti...
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