The 'sharing economy' has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un-or underutilised assets with those seeking to rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of 'sharing', the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic activities are having profound impacts on urban environments as they disrupt traditional forms of hospitality, transport, service industry and housing. While critical debates have focused on the challenges that sharing economy activities bring to existing labour and economic practices, it is necessary to acknowledge that they also have increasingly significant impacts on planning policy and urban governance. Using the case of Airbnb in London, this article looks at how these sharing or platform economy companies are involved in encouraging governments to change existing regulations, in this case by deregulating short-term letting. This has important implications for planning enforcement. We examine how the challenges around obtaining data to enforce new regulations are being addressed by local councils who struggle to balance corporate interests with public good. Finally, we address proposals for using algorithms and big data as means of urban governance and argue that the schism between regulation and enforcement is opening up new digitally mediated spaces of informal practices in cities.

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As fewer refugees move into formal camps, what kinds of non-camp spaces are emerging and how does that challenge the ways in which we understand the management and politics of refuge? This paper seeks to shed light on this question through an analysis of informal settlements in Lebanon. The Syrian crisis has displaced millions of people, most of whom have moved into neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. The Lebanese government, faced with a longer history of Palestinian camps and their militarization has refused to allow the establishment of official refugee camps for Syrians. As a result of this 'no camp' policy, Syrians are forced to either live in private rented accommodation in towns and cities throughout the country, or in informal settlements (ISes) built on private, often agricultural land. These informal settlements are built and developed through a complex assemblage of humanitarianism, hospitality, security, economic and political considerations. In this paper, I look at the physical and social spaces of informal settlements in the Bekaa Valley, Eastern Lebanon, examining how differential access to aid, support, security and tacit recognition by the state has led to variations amongst them. In doing so, I expose how an informalized response to the crisis through a system of deregulation is enabling refugee spaces to emerge that are visible, yet unrecognized, flexible, yet precarious. These spaces destabilize the city/camp dichotomy by drawing together elements of both. In engaging with debates on informality, the paper contributes to a growing critical literature on refugee geographies and seeks to expand beyond the reductive narratives of refugee camps, thereby offering insights into refugee futures in increasingly uncertain times.

There has been resurgence in interest in both popular media and academic research on refugees as subjects of incarceration in camps and as a growing population in cities. While the urbanization of refugees is not new, it has become a growing concern for policy‐makers, aid agencies and scholars as the numbers of refugees moving to cities have accelerated. There has been debate over the urbanity of camps due to protracted refugee crises and increasingly, there is recognition that despite the efforts of host governments, self‐ settlement of refugees is taking place in cities. The two issues therefore make the city an important framework to interrogate the spaces of refugees. This paper attempts to show the complexity of refugee politics and socializing in camps and in cities by showing a variety of refugee spaces and practices in different parts of the world and using urban debates‐particularly urban informality to draw links between refugee spaces and cities. The aim is to debunk universalizing myths about refugees and refugee camps as subjects and spaces of bare life and bio‐politics alone. Instead it draws parallels between the urban poor and refugees to offer a perspective on the close and complex relationship cities, refugee spaces and their residents have with each other.

Managing through Ad Hoc Measures : Syrian Refugees and Legal Geographies in Lebanon This paper explores how the ad hoc and uneven implementation and enforcement of policies in the context of the Global South particularly in situations of large-scale refugee crises creates forms of waiting and precarity amongst refugees. This exploration is initiated by questions about how states in the Global South manage mass displacements of people whilst adhering to the principles of non-refoulement , a customary international law forbidding countries from forcibly returning refugees to conditions that may endanger their lives. How is this complicated in situations where states are not party to the Refugee convention and where refugee crises become protracted? How does this then lead to immobilizing refugees and compelling them to wait? I focus on the practices of the Lebanese state in response to the Syrian refugee crisis that has continued on from 2011. Lebanon has changed its regulations and decisions towards the large number of Syrians living in the country over the course of the crisis whilst adhering to the principle of nonrefoulement. However, the policies enacted by the government are arbitrarily implemented and enforced at different scales of governance creating legal anxieties and immobilities for Syrians in the country. I draw on the work of critical legal and political geographers to argue that the ad hoc nature of the law, creates a fragmented landscape of mobility for Syrians, exacerbating conditions of precarity and poverty and, importantly, colonizing their futures.