‘People as businesses’: Airbnb and urban micro-entrepreneurialism in New York City

Abstract

Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space and Michael Callon’s work on performativity in economics, this article examines the material and discursive practices through which the internet ‘home-sharing’ platform Airbnb has produced new social relations of domestic property. Through a critical examination of the discourses and practices of Airbnb in the popular media, courts of law and public hearings, I argue that internet-based platforms such as Airbnb represent a fundamental reworking of social relations of property based on radically new socio-material assemblages. These assemblages—which have served to further commoditise housing by constructing a new market in short-term rentals—have entailed the disruption of not just the hospitality sector, but of the socio-spatial relations of urban housing. As emerging spaces of domestic entrepreneurialism, short-term rentals have generated their own forms of localised opposition. With the spread of Airbnb transforming the lived spaces of housing across New York City, a discursive struggle has ensued over the meanings of this new form of domestic property. In the popular press, courts of law and the chambers and steps of city halls, the stakes have been nothing less than the means and ends of urban governance itself.