Work

The Romantic Anti‐Capitalisms of Short‐Term Rental Hosting

Year: 2023

Type: article

Abstract: This article focuses on how Airbnb hosts in the Boston metro, San Francisco, and Washington, DC respond to legislative short‐term rental (STR) regulations. I trace how hosts justify their multiple STR practices by way of the civic good all while foreclosing a debate about the potential negative effects of their monetisation. I show how hosts displace the displeasing aspects of STRs onto the abstracted category of the “Investor Host”, a stand‐in for foreign investment capital and indifferent corporations. I argue that STR owners replicate what Iyko Day calls “romantic anti‐capitalism”, a mode of critiquing capitalism that valorises the local and concrete uses of capital while displacing capital's destructive effects onto an abstracted and racialised other. I build on Day's theorisation by demonstrating how there are multiple genres of romantic anti‐capitalism that function differently based on a person's structural position within settler‐colonialism.

Source: Antipode

DOI: 10.1111/anti.12938

Author: Nina Medvedeva

Institution: University of Minnesota

Language: English

Topic: Sharing Economy and Platforms

Subfield: Marketing

Field: Business, Management and Accounting

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Sustainable cities and communities, Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Microsoft Research, University of Minnesota, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota