STCity – The short-term city: digital platforms and spatial (in)justice

 

 

Project data

Funding entiy: Italian Ministry of University and Research

Call: PRIN 2017

Coordinator: UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA “LA SAPIENZA”

UNISI Principal Investigator: Cristina Capineri

Department: Social, political and cognitive sciences

Start date: 01 March 2020 – End date: 01 March 2024

 

Description

The increasing pervasiveness of digital platforms is having a tremendous impact upon cities, which researchers have only begun to explore. Short-term rentals platforms such as Airbnb are at the centre of the debate, if only because of the very visible effects they produce in the most affected neighbourhoods and in terms of housing availability and affordability. Beyond Airbnb, a plethora of digital platforms ubiquitously mediate our relationship with space, whether we use them for tourism, shopping, work, mobility, content sharing, social interaction. The project brings together a transdisciplinary team to explore the differential effects platform capitalism has on places, at different scales, focusing predominantly on Italian cities: the new logics, practices and imaginaries conveyed by online platforms, how those reproduce or alter socio-spatial inequalities, how cities, platform users and inhabitants react to and seek to challenge “Airbnbification” and the new geographies produced through and by the digital. We conduct quantitative meso-analyses, critical mapping and in-depth case studies within a general conceptual framework dealing with, on the one hand, the political economy of digital platforms and, on the other, cultural and critical enquiries of internet-mediated imaginaries and identities.

Project website

 

This project has received funding from Ministry of University and Research (MUR) – PRIN 2017