Governing urban platform capitalism. A comparative approach to the contentious politics of short-term rental housing regulation in European cities

This talk will present the methods, approach and results of a collaborative research project and forthcoming Book jointly authored with Thomas Aguilera (Sciences Po Rennes, France) and Francesca Artioli (Université Paris Est-Créteil, France). We compared the politicisation, socio-political conflicts and implementation challenges surrounding the regulation of platform-mediated short-term rental (STR) in 12 European cities (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Prague, Rome, Vienna). Those city governments have, over the past 10 years, developed multiple forms of regulation whose scope, stringency and fields of action differ from city to city. Combining approaches from the comparative sociology of multilevel urban governance, the sociology of public policies, and the political economy of urban capitalism, we seek to explain how and why local governments – faced with the same global phenomenon – have adopted different modes of regulation; what implementation challenges they have faced; and what socio-political effects new STR regulations have had on the political economy of cities. Based on the construction of an index of regulatory intensity, we identified three ‘worlds of STR regulation’ in Europe. We mapped the various stakeholders which have been advocating, or opposing, regulation, to show how social and economic interests have been reconfigured through new coalitions, conflicts and relationships between public authorities, corporate platforms, professional STR organizations, associations of hosts, the hotel industry, residents’ associations and social movements. We pay particular attention to the activities of digital platforms as new urban actors and policy entrepreneurs, and to the subsequent judicialisation and transnational rescaling of local regulatory conflicts at the European Union level.