Airbnb: A New Way of Housing Between Individual Experience and Collective Narration

Abstract

The chapter is dedicated to Airbnb. As Joe Gebbia (co-founder of Airbnb) recently declared, Airbnb is more and more interested in investigating the new way of living and the current transformations of private spaces. Their presence at the last House of Vision exhibition in Japan shows that they can really change our idea of domestic space in the future. The paper then focuses on the changes affecting the housing paradigm, more and more called upon to face the challenge of a shared and collaborative use: today the concept of hospitality, going beyond the traditional offer, also involves the domestic sphere and rethinks it in terms of extroversion and accessibility as well as like an episode of a collective storytelling. In such a framework, Airbnb represents a successful compromise between the search for cosiness and sociality, between preserving one’s own identity and opening to the other, but especially a possible transformative engine for a collaborative economy that does not only mean exchange of services, while directly involving the users in the building of a new social contract between people.