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Selling black places on Airbnb: Colonial discourse and the marketing of black communities in New York City

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  • Petter Törnberg

    (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands)

  • Letizia Chiappini

Abstract

Airbnb has recently become a growing topic of both concern and interest for urban researchers, policymakers, and activists. Previous research has emphasized Airbnb’s economic impact and its role as a driver of residential gentrification, but Airbnb also fosters place entrepreneurs, geared to extract value from a global symbolic economy by marketing the urban frontier to a transnational middle class. This emphasizes the cultural impact of Airbnb on cities, and its power of symbolizing and communicating who belongs in specific places, responding to questions of class, gender, and ethnicity—and thereby potentially driving cultural displacement. Coming from this perspective, this paper uses computational critical discourse analysis to study how white and black hosts market black-majority neighborhoods in New York City on Airbnb, and how guests describe their consumption experience. The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation.

Suggested Citation

  • Petter Törnberg & Letizia Chiappini, 2020. "Selling black places on Airbnb: Colonial discourse and the marketing of black communities in New York City," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(3), pages 553-572, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:52:y:2020:i:3:p:553-572
    DOI: 10.1177/0308518X19886321
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Agustin Cocola-Gant & Angela Hof & Christian Smigiel & Ismael Yrigoy, 2021. "Short-term rentals as a new urban frontier – evidence from European cities," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(7), pages 1601-1608, October.
    2. Karen Chapple & Ate Poorthuis & Matthew Zook & Eva Phillips, 2022. "Monitoring streets through tweets: Using user-generated geographic information to predict gentrification and displacement," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 49(2), pages 704-721, February.
    3. Letizia Chiappini, 2020. "The Urban Digital Platform: Instances from Milan and Amsterdam," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 5(4), pages 277-288.
    4. Gilchrist, Kate & Maier, George, 2022. "Women who host: an intersectional critique of rentier capitalism on AirBnB," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 113677, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    5. Maj Grasten & Leonard Seabrooke & Duncan Wigan, 2023. "Legal affordances in global wealth chains: How platform firms use legal and spatial scaling," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(4), pages 1062-1079, June.
    6. George Maier & Kate R. Gilchrist, 2022. "Women who host: An intersectional critique of rentier capitalism on AirBnB," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(3), pages 817-829, May.

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