This is the submitted version of the article:
Ferreri, Mara; Sanyal, Romola. «Corporatised enforcement : challenges of
regulating AirBnB and other platform economies». Planning Theory & Practice,
Vol. 20 Núm. 2 (2019). DOI 10.1080/14649357.2019.1599612


This version is avaible at https://ddd.uab.cat/record/213227

under the terms of the           license
Corporatised enforcement: Challenges of regulating AirBnB and other platform economies



Platforms such as AirBnB, Uber, Taskrabbit etc are proliferating across the globe. Their success

and popularity has been based on positioning themselves as companies that offer flexibility to

freelance workers and asset owners and enable them to make ‘a bit of money on the side’. For

their consumers, it is about enhanced and authentic customer experience of ´sharing´, at a lower

cost. While this rhetoric of ‘sharing’ is, at first glance, flexible, inclusive and empowering, on

closer examination it presents myriad contradictions and controversies as soon as the platforms

begin interacting with existing practices and governance infrastructures. As Tom Slee (2016)

amongst others have pointed out, digital platform companies such as AirBnB and Uber openly

disrupt and often disregard local laws governing labor, housing, health, safety, accessibility and

so forth in order to safeguard their for-profit operations. A key manifestation of this is their

reluctance to share data on their platform-mediated economic activities and cooperate with local

authorities who need it in order to enforce local laws and policies, citing confidentiality and

privacy amongst other reasons. In our study of short-term letting in London, for instance, we

noted that local authorities struggled to gain access to corporate data to assess the extent of the

phenomenon, the percentage of entire homes, as well as the overall length, which was necessary

to enforce the 90-day limit on short term lets (Ferreri and Sanyal, 2018; Holman et al., 2018). In

addition, platforms have also been slow to respond to criticisms around discrimination (Edelman,

Luca & Svirsky, 2017), sexual assault1 and other preventable issues. In other words, they have

for a long time reaped the benefits of connecting people to goods and services whilst absolving

themselves of responsibility to manage problems when they arise, and preventing access to

legislators.




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One could argue that part of what drives the success of platform economies is their arrival in a

time of austerity and economic recession in many parts of the world. In many countries in

Europe, such as the United Kingdom, Greece and Spain, public spending has been slashed in the

wake of economic crises and local governments struggle to provide public services to their

citizens. This includes access to affordable housing, affordable public transportation and other

public services. The empowering rhetoric of platform economies of ‘sharing’ and earning ‘a bit

of money on the side’ hides a more insidious practice of undermining labor protection including

minimum wage, pensions, leave and so forth by recasting workers as independent contractors 2.

With AirBnB, the problems are manifold. In addition to violating local laws that disallow or

limit short term lets (Ferreri and Sanyal, 2018; Holman et al., 2018), hosts on AirBnB have been         Comentari [Office1]: Maybe delete?


converting properties into short lets, putting pressure on already limited housing supply and

increasing rental values. Whilst the platform claims that owners are ‘sharing’ their homes with

guests, in reality, it has been shown that a considerable number of ‘hosts’ are letting out entire

homes and even buying additional properties to put on AirBnB, and are thus not earning extra

cash on the side, but rather, finding a convenient way to circumvent local regulations and costs

around hotels and hospitality. This is because property owners and agencies have discovered that

they can generate greater revenue by putting their properties on short term letting than by long

term leases. As a result, in many cases, such as in London (and Barcelona), local authorities have

found that at the neighbourhood level these platforms are directly linked to a diminishing supply

of affordable housing for poorer families. Many of these issues have led to increasing

gentrification in many cities such as Barcelona, and growing disenchantment and protests by

local residents.




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For planners, digital platforms offer a number of different challenges- from affecting the

provision of public goods, to creating enforcement challenges for local authorities at a time when

budgets are being slashed, to attempting to rewrite local regulations. How can local governments

maintain planning powers over the provision of long-term adequate affordable housing with

shrinking financial means, and shrinking availability of units as well? How can they meet their

statutory obligations in the face of opposition, often from national governments who undermine

their efforts in an attempt to woo these platforms (Ferreri and Sanyal, 2018; Holman et al.,

2018)? Perhaps an exploration of the politics of platform economies would expose rifts between

different scales of governance and the rights and obligations embedded within them? There is

also the question of enforcing local regulations: city governments are at the mercy of

corporations to release their data and on devising creative ways to enforce regulations despite

shrinking budgets. In London for example, local governments have to rely on complaints by

local residents and triangulate these with Google earth images and information from the AirBnB

website itself in order to track down particular properties to fine them. This is not feasible for

local governments with limited finances and staff. And while some governments may embrace

platform economies as a convenient and cutting-edge and a sign of a techno-utopian future, to

what extent are these platforms and their emancipatory rhetoric serving as a smokescreen to

enable the state to withdraw further?

As digitally-mediated economies are on the rise in cities across the globe, the situation has

enabled the growing influence of digital platform companies on practices of urban regulation

design and enforcement. New forms of “hybrid or cooperative regulation whereby government

and online firms negotiate around rules and their implementation” (Gurran 2018, p.301) are

being proposed as a solution, introducing a significant shift for planning practice. While




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proposals for hybridity, cooperation and negotiation are appealing, there remain unanswered

questions about the power relations at play and the implications for city governments that may

not have the resources or political clout to respond to a corporation, feeding into unprecedented

dependency on IT firms for dealing with urban issues (Kitchin, 2014). As planners, we have to

ask more difficult political questions about the technological, corporatized turn in planning that

is being brought on by platform economies. The de-politicisation of digital platforms and their

implication for urban planning and policy has been going hand in hand with declining public

budgets. In this context, dependency on corporate digital providers for solutions is often driven

by a “desire to make do with the meagre amount of resources available to most cities today”

(Morozov & Bria, 2018, p.19). How could planners work towards a more inclusive model that

includes those that are not benefitting from or are adversely affected by the sharing economy?

Rather than retreating into technophobia, calls have been made for asserting ‘technological

sovereignty’, which has been defined as “citizens’ capacity to have a say and participate in how

the technological infrastructure around them operates and what ends it serves” (Morozov & Bria,

2018, p.22). Working towards technological sovereignty at the urban scale, for instance, would

involve municipal governments demanding different ownership regimes of data generated by

digital platforms, which would help in assessing the extent of platform-mediated uses and

designing enforcement without the need for buying such data from corporate partners.

The possibility for non-extractive uses of digital platform technologies (see also Gurran, 2018) is

not, however, just a matter of regaining sovereignty over data. ‘Data extractivism’ relies on the

corporatisation of a wider digital infrastructure, including knowledge and know-how, which city

governments are unlikely to have or to be able to build on their own. Even if cities were capable

to obtain the data collected by for profit digital platforms, they may find themselves “unable to




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act upon the data without advanced computing infrastructure or access to the original

algorithms” (Morozov and Bria, 2018, p.23). Planning policy tackling the multiple issues raised

by digital platform economies thus requires a much more holistic approach to rethinking and

reclaiming the wider urban digital infrastructure. From some of the cities most affected by the

rise of digital-mediated short term letting, such as Barcelona, calls have been made to think

about a ‘right to the digital city’ as a fundamental component of a wider ´right to the city’ for the

21st Century. Appeals to citizens, however, have already been rapidly incorporated in the

marketing strategy of platform companies such as Airbnb, whose website ‘airbnbcitizen’ collects

news items on positive community impact and public policy collaborations tailored to cities in 26

countries around the globe (see https://www.airbnbcitizen.com/). More work remains to be done

to both decouple citizens from consumers, and city planning from corporate solutions – if we are

to extricate urban policies from the demand of for-profit platform economy giants.



References

Edelman, B.G., Luca, M. & Svirsky, D. (2017). Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy:

Evidence from a Field Experiment. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 9(2), 1–22.



Ferreri, M. & Sanyal, R. (2018). Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated

deregulation in London, Urban Studies, 55(15), 3353–3368.



Gurran, N. (2018). Global Home-Sharing, Local Communities and the Airbnb Debate: A

Planning Research Agenda. Planning Theory & Practice, 19(2), 298–304.




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Holman, N., Mossa, A., & Pani, E., (2018). Planning, value(s) and the market: An analytic for

“what comes next?”. Environment and Plannning A 50(3), 608–626.



Kitchin, R. (2014). The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, 79(1), 1–14.



Morozov, E. & Bria, F. (2018). Rethinking the smart city. Democratizing Urban Technology

(City Series N.5). New York: Rosa Luxemburg Siftung New York Office. Retrieved from

http://www.rosalux-nyc.org



Slee, T. (2016). What’s Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy. New York & London: Or

Books.




1
  Press Association (2017, August 13). Uber failing to report sex attacks by drivers, says Met
police. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com; O'Brien, S.A., Black, N.
Devine, C. & Griffin, D. (2018, April 30). CNN investigation: 103 Uber drivers accused of
sexual assault or abuse. The CNN. Retrieved from https://money.cnn.com
2
  See, for example, the ongoing legal dispute between the company Deliveroo and its workers.




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