Abstract
This article explores how “home” is performed in the emerging sharing economies of tourism, drawing on the example of Airbnb in Sofia, Bulgaria. Based on an (auto)ethnographic approach, this article analyses the sometimes contested ways in which both hosts and guests engage in the everyday embodied practices of home-making. In doing so, it challenges Airbnb’s essentialized idea of home as a site of belonging, “authenticity” or “localness”. It also shows how the political and historical specificities, as well as the materialities of people’s homes significantly shape the ways in which ordinary practices of homemaking play out and consequently affect feelings of (un)homeliness as part of the Airbnb experience. By using performance theory as an analytical framework, this article seeks to contribute to a critical understanding of the contemporary geographies of home in relation to the global sharing economies of tourism, one that is attuned to openness, interrelatedness, and a constant mode of becoming.
Highlights
In the past decade, tourism has witnessed the rise of a “sharing economy”, a digitally based economy that putatively grants “consumers” temporary access to each other’s “under-utilized” assets (Frenken & Schor 2017)
Most of my hosts live in a one-family apartment, which were built between the 1960s and 1980s. These apartments were marked by a single coherent architectural style, a result of the socialist regime’s embrace of a specific strand of modernist architecture in a context based on anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeoisie ideologies and driven by the political objective to provide everyone with a home (Hirt 2006)
This is to say that the new sharing economy is not merely about the experiences and the evolving relations between hosts and guests: with renting out home come new divisions of labour, new value-generating activities and materialities, and revalorization of social relations that have long existed within the household
Summary
Roelofsen, M. (2018) Performing “home” in the sharing economies of tourism: the Airbnb experience in Sofia, Bulgaria. (2018) Performing “home” in the sharing economies of tourism: the Airbnb experience in Sofia, Bulgaria. This article explores how “home” is performed in the emerging sharing economies of tourism, drawing on the example of Airbnb in Sofia, Bulgaria. Based on an (auto)ethnographic approach, this article analyses the sometimes contested ways in which both hosts and guests engage in the everyday embodied practices of home-making. In doing so, it challenges Airbnb’s essentialized idea of home as a site of belonging, “authenticity” or “localness”. By using performance theory as an analytical framework, this article seeks to contribute to a critical understanding of the contemporary geographies of home in relation to the global sharing economies of tourism, one that is attuned to openness, interrelatedness, and a constant mode of becoming
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