WPS No.40 | Törnberg, P. & Chiappini, L. (2019) | Selling black places on Airbnb: Colonial discourse and the marketing of black communities in New York City
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 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.