Keynote at the SMARTDEST Horizon-2020 conference

Sharing Space

SMARTDEST has been an EU-funded H2020 research project that brought together 11 universities and 1 innovation center from seven European and Mediterranean countries. “The project has aimed to develop innovative solutions in the face of the conflicts and externalities produced by tourism-related mobilities in cities. SMARTDEST has informed the design of alternative policy options for creating more socially inclusive places in the age of mobilities. The Final Project event, the SMARTDEST conference, took place in Barcelona on the 15 and 16 of September 2023, and brought together over a 100 scholars and practitioners in the realm of tourism and urban planning.

During this event, I delivered a keynote, titled Transnational mobilities and the contentious dynamics of homemaking in the tourist city. Who gets to live in cities and for what purposes has long been the subject of heated political and academic debate. In these conversations, tourism has been singled out as a key agitator that has further threatened the availability of housing as a basic human right; a right that should ideally secure the stability and security of social, emotional, and economic life. Often stigmatised in these debates are digital platforms such as Airbnb, which have facilitated a flourishing market whereby residential housing is commodified and temporarily rented out to visitors, such as tourists, digital nomads, expats, and other mobile subjects. This development has come at the expense of the availability and affordability of long-term housing for residents who have often been gradually or forcefully displaced and moved outside the city or at its margins. These include residents that paradoxically have made and continue to make a living by labouring in the tourism and hospitality sector. Discussions about those who should be prioritized to live in the city tend to identify two distinct social groups; those who are usually typified as either sedentary, ‘local’ and exploited and those who are de-situated, cosmopolitan, and privileged. Other key subjects in these debates have been vilified or victimized dependent on the classed positions that they occupy in capitalist societies. Examples are property owners, speculators, landlords, venture capitalists and related others who control the means of housing exploitation and whose profits come at the expense of the opposite (working) classes.

Together with Prof. Antonio Paolo Russo during the keynote presentation

The keynote address aimed to problematize these arguments by shedding light on the contentious politics and dynamics of home within the context of short-term rental economies in urban tourist destinations. It asked what it means to make home in tourist cities that are challenged by issues such as housing precarity, labour exploitation, health crises and the externalities of tourism mobilities. It elicited the contradictory relations between subjects that have sustained a sense of homeliness and local identity in these urban economies, serving touring and sedentary populations alike. Departing from any binary dualistic analytical framework the keynote offered a situated and embodied account of the politics of home in urban tourism. It foregrounded the overlapping identities of those who work to ‘make home’ for and with mobile subjects such as tourists and how such affirmative practices may still be productive of ethical relationalities and transformative forms of becoming.

The book of proceedings of the SMARTDEST Conference can be found here.

Many thanks to Antonio Paolo Russo and