Airbnb, the most ubiquitous of the many online short-term rental platforms offering residential homes to tourists, has infiltrated local neighbourhoods and housing markets throughout the world. It has also divided policy-makers and communities over whether tourism in residential homes is a benign example of the so-called ‘sharing’ economy or a malignant practice which destroys neighbourhoods. These differing positions reflect alternative and changing notions of ‘home’ within wider processes of financialisation and platform capitalism. This paper examines these themes with reference to stakeholder statements solicited in response to government inquiries on how to regulate short-term rental housing in Australia.

The popularity of short-term letting (STL) platforms like Airbnb has created housing and planning challenges for cities worldwide, including the potential impact of STL on the quality of life of nearby residents and communities. Underpinning this concern is an inherent tension in urban living between the rights and interests of individual residents, and the collective rights and interests of neighbours. Through interviews with Australian Airbnb hosts, this paper examines how STL hosts navigate this tension, including how they frame their property rights, how they seek to minimise their impact on neighbours, and how they perceive the role of regulation in balancing individual and community rights. In doing so the paper contributes to both theory and policy debates about urban property rights and how ‘compact city’ planning orthodoxies are reshaping the lived experience of urban residents worldwide.

Supporters of short-term rental (STR) platforms state that STRs represent a small fraction of the housing market of major cities, and therefore have little impact on rents. However, there is emerging evidence that suggests that STRs have highly localised impacts. In this article, we use the natural experiment of the pause in tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight the impact of a decrease in STR listings on rental markets in the case study city of Hobart, Australia. We find that rental affordability has improved in Hobart’s STR-dense suburbs with the increased vacancies from the underutilised STR properties. These results provide evidence of the impact of STRs on local housing markets when analysed from a finer scale than the whole of city approach. The focus on local housing markets help local communities and city governments build an argument for the impact of STRs on tight housing markets.

Most cities in major agglomerations in Europe started to address the rise of short-term accommodation rentals by introducing regulation designed to protect the local housing stock. The momentum behind the widespread introduction of such regulations can be attributed to qualitative and quantitative factors. This article examines selected fields related to short-term rentals in order to uncover the (structural) triggers or conditions that are necessary and sufficient for municipalities to initiate the regulation of their housing market. The study is based on the systematic examination of the effects of those triggers and their combinations using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). With this method, we explore the implementation or non-implementation of regulation on a sample of major German cities. The results suggest a universal set of conditions covering three central fields: housing market situation, accommodation market conditions and tourism accommodation demand.

Notwithstanding the positive impacts of short-term rentals (STRs), it is often their negative effects that have been raising pressing questions for urban planners and public policy-makers, including changes in housing dynamics, conflicts between residents and visitors, tourism gentrification phenomena, unfair competition practices, and tax evasion, among other externalities. Because of this, short-term rental regulation has become an important item on the political agenda of municipalities that live daily with these issues. In order to contribute to a better understanding of STR regulatory approaches, this paper investigates how Lisbon (Portugal) has been responding to the effects attributed to STRs. It can be concluded that the main negative impact of STR in Lisbon is its effects on the housing prices increase and that the main STR regulation measure is focused on zoning: definition of zones for the application of differentiated STR rules and management.

In recent years, the Evaluation Department of the Council of Europe Development Bank has conducted a series of independent evaluations of CEB-financed operations in the social housing sector targeting special vulnerable groups. Building on evaluation evidence and experience, two strategic issues are presented: the high level of complexity of such operations and the various facets of their sustainability. This paper underlines the significant learning and accountability potential of evaluations of social housing operations. At the same time, it underscores the added value of a holistic approach to evaluation, in the face of a simplistic, but currently predominant, output-oriented focus during monitoring.

Editorial

The popularity of public gardening in post-Soviet countries has arisen quite recently along with the penetration of neoliberal ideas. Public gardening not only visually improves the environment, but it also creates a range of public spaces and “other” places in which urban citizens can come together; eventually it could help to enhance the image of distressed neighbourhoods. Such community initiatives can be divided into sanctioned intervention and unauthorised intervention (“commoning”); unauthorised intervention is when residents are displeased with their surroundings and attempt to improve their environment in their own way. This paper explores the limitations of the practices of commoning as a source of regeneration and compares its cultural dimensions. In this paper I discuss the initial results of an ongoing research project focused on the expectations of people involved in these forms of participation. During this process, the differing typical understandings and perceptions of urban gardening in public and semi-public spaces will be applied.

Community gardening has become a new phenomenon in Slovakia. The evolution of community gardens has been enhanced thanks to the various motivations of the people involved: to grow and share fresh and healthy vegetables in unused urban spaces adjacent to their homes, to build a sense of community and strengthen social relations, to use and cultivate vacant urban space and to contribute to a more sustainable urban environment. This paper discusses the case of community gardening in the medium-sized city of Banská Bystrica in Slovakia. It analyses the growing popularity of community gardening as a result of the emergence of grassroots activism, a sign indicating the development of civil society. Using an ethnographic approach of participant observation and interviews, this paper also looks at community gardening as a non-political collective action addressing broader global issues.

The post-Soviet period has been witness to a rather difficult process of establishing a new socio-economic and political system in Uzbekistan. The housing question was significantly resolved within the U.S.S.R., while currently the issue of housing has become exacerbated mainly due to the privatisation of the existing housing stock. However, as more young people now enter adulthood, the need for affordable housing once again comes to the forefront in Uzbekistan - namely in Tashkent, a place attracting the youth from all other regions. This research paper focuses on one of the housing solutions in the Tashkent Region: particularly the reconstruction of summer houses, or dachas, into permanent homes for year-round living. The findings are based on several observations from the field and expert interviews with local dacha residents during the summers of 2015 and 2016. The revival of a traditional lifestyle, combined with the modernisation and “Euro-style” of Uzbek houses, represents a case of “indigenous modernities”.

The article examines ideological and institutional role of the “greening” policy in the Soviet urban planning practice of 1920-1930s. Relying on the example of the socialist city of Uralmash in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) the author traces how the idea of the “green city” affected the development of the urban settlement in terms of its functional mechanism and symbolic transformation. By analyzing the logic of the Uralmash “green” policy and its main narratives he argues that successful improvement of the post-Soviet green zones depends not so much on the new urban city-planning initiatives as on the new symbols and meanings that could give a clear vision of these spaces in the current social and cultural context.