During the past decade, digital platforms like Airbnb and Uber have enabled the development of a new generation of entrepreneurs in tourism and mobility. The mediation of services through digital platforms was initially presented as a form of a sharing economy led by non-professional providers, but it has grown into a new form of capitalist speculation. This special issue presents theoretical and empirical perspectives on platform-mediated tourism by focusing on Airbnb, which is the most notable digital platform specialising in short-term property rental. The case studies included in this issue show that the impacts of short-term renting on neighbourhoods, residents and tourism operators are uneven, but increasingly significant. The authors explore issues of social justice in terms of residents' quality of life, working conditions, the housing market, urban structure, and the morality of operators who navigate through normative loopholes. They also examine the governance challenges caused by the inadequacy of existing legal frameworks to better regulate platform-mediated activities, and the reactions generated by social movements and city governments. With the outbreak of Covid-19, networks of cities are taking action against platforms to regain their control over data that is needed to regulate platform-mediated tourism services.

Abstract. Tourist destination promoters compose visual images and arrange them in brochures in order to communicate a coherent and attractive story. In a changing socioeconomic and political context, the city officials of Helsinki recognized a need for systematic promotion in the 1950s. In this article I examine 127 images published in ten tourism brochures produced by the Excursion Section of the Sport and Excursion Office of Helsinki between 1954 and 1963. The data‐driven, content‐analytical study shows how the images served a political identity project aimed at creating a sense of national solidarity among the Finns and to show international audiences that Finland is a modern nation. As a means of gaining acceptance in the West, support of citizenship education included emphasis on national symbols and signs of well‐being and visualization of urban tourism.

There have been two types of scholarly discussion on city branding. On the one hand, city branding has been conceptualised as a differentiation strategy of entrepreneurial cities involved in interspatial competition. On the other hand, researchers have recently emphasised the need to pay attention to increasingly pervasive and transformative forms of city branding, including branding as an urban policy and a form of planning. Drawing on a case study carried out in Helsinki, Finland, this article connects these two approaches by analysing Helsinki’s recent city branding endeavour in the context of the qualitative transformation of the entrepreneurial city. The article shows how city branding highlights and constitutes the city as an entrepreneurial platform and enabler bound up by the extended entrepreneurialisation of society.

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The proliferation of Airbnb listings has been studied in major tourist cities, but much less is known about the phenomenon in Nordic cities. In this paper we have examined the situation in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, which has been largely unexplored in the research literature. Using our situated knowledge as an entry point, this study is based on geostatistical analysis, qualitative analysis of Airbnb listings, thematic conversations with experts and analysis of public discourses through media, to illustrate how Airbnb listings are distributed within the city and what perceptions and responses this phenomenon is generating. In the study, we challenge the public narrative that portrays short-term renting of homes in Helsinki as a form of sharing economy, as opposed to more destructive developments in major European tourist cities.