The airification of cities: making sense of the impact of peer to peer short term letting on urban functions and economy

This paper explores spatial and economic dynamics arising from the diffusion of short termnletting across Italian cities. The study is based on a vast dataset comprising of all the properties listed on the AirBnB website in 14 cities, during the year 2015. We start by examining the relationship between airbnb´s offer and general tourist flows, and demonstrate a strong correlation between the two in all the cities considered, suggesting that airbnb accommodation is how a well established, integral component of the Italian tourist offer. The core objective of the study is to look into the role of short term letting within the general dynamics of urban capital valorisation, and gain insight on the possible evolution of the urban functions of historic centres. To this purpose we identified urban areas with the highest economic advantage of short-term letting versus traditional long-term residential letting. Our analysis suggests that landlords in the urban cores of art cities may already be moving properties from the residential market to short term letting in great numbers, contributing to the decade-old social desertification and disneyfication of Italian historic centres. This finding is also supported by the surprisingly high proportion of residential units in historic centres listed on airBnB and, among these, the overwhelming predominance of entire homes versus single and private rooms. Such observations also seem to contradict AirBnB Inc.´s narrative regarding the actors that mostly benefit from the platform - reportedly younger tenants struggling with high rents, and families making an extra income. Our results suggest that landlords may be those more interested in the opportunities afforded by the platform, rather than resident tenants. The article concludes with a focus on two cities, Florence and Milan, which display extremely different spatial patterns of short term letting supply and demand, and an interesting relationship between the distribution of airbnb clusters and urban phenomena of different nature, such as gentrification.