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 its role 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. The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation.

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The article interrogates the concept of the urban in relation to digital platforms designed for citizen-based initiatives and local projects. We must broaden our scope as urban scholars to include this vast undergrowth of ‘other’ platforms and study how they intersect with the social and material fabric of cities. Drawing from media and internet studies, urban sociology, and digital geography, I introduce the novel concept of ‘urban digital platform’ (UDP). I do so theoretically by using a digital geography body of work and the level of abstractness proposed by Bratton (2016), in ‘the stack,’ which are entry points to define any kind of digital platform. While global and for-profit digital platforms exploit density, size, and diversity, extracting resources into a data-driven form of governance and computational production of space. UDPs benefit from the urban as a front to (re)organise citizen-based, mutual-aid initiatives, and solidarity actions. The core of the UDP concept lies in the ambiguity of the role of the urban government, media literacy, and techno-biases as basic requirements for citizens to access the platform, its services, and goods. Those claims are supported by instances and empirical findings of two analysed platforms in Milan and Amsterdam.

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