Place-based displacement: Touristification and neighborhood change

Relying on extensive fieldwork, in this paper I give voice to long-term residents in the city center of Barcelona, Spain, and explore how they feel about the tourism-led transformation of the place in which they live. I found that the alteration of the place causes the breaking down of emotional and material attachments that people have with the area and, in turn, the process leads to feelings of expulsion and mental distress. Therefore, I discuss the concept of place-based displacement within the context of touristification, and suggest that housing market disruptions caused by tourism and short-term rentals are insufficient in understanding why communities resist and oppose the penetration of tourism in their places. Drawing on the conceptualization of displacement as suggested by gentrification scholars and from contributions regarding the psychology of place, the paper argues that, regardless of whether spatial dislocation takes place, touristification disintegrates the places people belong to and rely on for their daily lives, which therefore leads communities to experience disruptions to their mental health as well as feelings of dispossession, anger, and frustration.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tourism, simulacra and architectural reconstruction: selling an idealised past

info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The Political Economy of Housing Investment in the Short‐Term Rental Market: Insights from Urban Portugal

Short-term rentals (STRs) emerged as holiday accommodations, disrupting the hospitality industry in the decade before COVID-19. Mainstream explanations for their growth revolved around digital tourism platforms like Airbnb as market disruptors and the sharing economy rationale. At the same time, critical scholars explored the capitalisation of greater rent gaps in urban central locations. However, these explanations are insufficient to explain the growth of STRs. We supplement them by building bridges between the urban political economy and the geographies of financialisation through the cases of Lisbon and Porto before the pandemic. The paper focuses on tourism-induced housing investment, taking a closer look at the profile of investors in association with STR property managers in the context of the late-entrepreneurial urban regime. We conclude that tourism development has allowed opportunities for housing financialisation through STR professionalisation, enhancing the allocation of interest-bearing capital in tourism-oriented real estate.Los alquileres de corta duración (STRs en sus siglas en inglés) surgieron como alojamientos vacacionales, revolucionando la industria turística en la década anterior al Covid-19. Las principales explicaciones sobre su irrupción apuntan a que las plataformas de turismo digital, como Airbnb, alteraron el mercado a través de la lógica de la economía colaborativa, mientras que voces críticas también han explorado la capitalización de brechas de renta más amplias en áreas urbanas centrales. Sin embargo, estas explicaciones son insuficientes para comprender el rápido crecimiento de esta tipología de alojamiento. Aquí se complementan tales ideas mediante la articulación entre la economía política urbana y las geografías de la financiarización a través de los casos de Lisboa y Oporto antes de la pandemia. El artículo se centra en la inversión inmobiliaria inducida por el turismo, examinando el perfil de los inversores privados en conjunción con las empresas de gestión de propiedades para alquiler turístico en el contexto del urbanismo empresarial tardío. Así, concluimos que el desarrollo turístico reciente ha ampliado el horizonte de financiarización de la vivienda gracias a la profesionalización del alquiler vacacional, maximizando los beneficios del capital invertido en bienes inmobiliarios para uso turístico.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Airbnb, buy-to-let investment and tourism-driven displacement: a case study in Lisbon

Through detailed empirical analysis of a central area of Lisbon, the paper explores whether short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb channel investment in residential real estate and the way in which the local community is affected by the proliferation of apartments rented to visitors. Between 2015 and 2017 we conducted fine-grained fieldwork in the historical neighborhood of Alfama and identified both the producers and socio-spatial consequences of short-term rentals. Our research did not find evidence of a sharing economy. Rather, it found a process of buy-to-let investment in which different players make profits from rents and displace residents with tourists. The paper develops two main arguments: first, we suggest that Airbnb acts as an instrument that contributes to the financialization of housing. Compared to the traditional rental market, short-term rentals offer a number of benefits that enhance market efficiency for property owners, making them increasingly attractive for both local and global investors. We found that the suppliers of short-term rentals are primarily investors that use housing as an asset to store capital. The main advantage of the short-term rental market for investors is that while they can make profits by renting properties to visitors they can also sell them tenant-free at any moment. Second, Airbnb gives way to a hyper-flexible rental market that for tenants implies increasing insecurity and displacement concerns. We portray Airbnb as an example of buy-to-let gentrification that is experienced by residents as a process of social injustice.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Platformization of Student Housing and the Rise of Mid‐Term Rentals. The Case of Uniplaces in Lisbon

The most common approach to student housing has been articulated by studentification literature. Furthermore, authors have highlighted how student demand attracts institutional investors to develop Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA). In this paper, we complement these approaches with a conceptualization of how digital platforms have restructured the supply of student rooms in houses of multiple occupation. Relying on business and software understandings of platforms, we first explore the case of Uniplaces in Lisbon, a platform that has imitated the Airbnb model and today is present in more than 130 cities in various countries. Second, we depict Uniplaces within a landscape of mid-term rental platforms that cater for different profiles of mobile populations, who stay in destinations for a short- or mid-term period of time. We conclude with a discussion about the potential of this market to further advance processes of transnational gentrification and weaken the position of tenants.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

A non-dispersive approach for a Raman gas sensor

Although Raman spectroscopy is widely used on solids and liquids, its application on gaseous samples is far less commonplace due to technical issues related to dealing with very weak signals over a strong background. A demonstration of a possible approach for a simple, noninvasive Raman-based gas detector is presented and evaluated. This setup is meant to perform nitrogen and oxygen gas concentration measurements through Raman scattering working with optical filters instead of the traditional spectrograph and a lighting-grade 532 nm diode-pumped solid state laser as the pumping source. An industrial-grade CMOS camera is used as the detector, taking full advantage of the low noise and spatial resolution of this device. The system has been tested for both oxygen and nitrogen in a gas flow cell. Nitrogen measurement in a glass vial is reported in order to demonstrate and show some of the advantages that could be obtained with the use of an imaging detector instead of a single pixel one. The reported measurements show that even without using a dispersion spectrometer, this approach enables an indicative, noninvasive gas detection through glass vials with significant rejection of the elastic scattering contribution