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- Convenors:
-
Alexander Koensler
(University of Perugia)
Filippo Zerilli (University of Cagliari)
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- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The rise of "platform capitalism", the new web-based monopolies, increasingly shapes contemporary social relations worldwide. This workshop invites ethnographic contributions of overtourism, gentrification and new forms of activism in light of this global process toward platform monopolies.
Long Abstract:
The impact of digital technologies on cityscapes, rural environments, and communities is one of the most incisive features of contemporary social life. In and beyond Europe, the advent of what has been described as "platform capitalism" (Srnicek 2016) - the rise of multinational corporations based on internet platforms that extract, store, process, and analyse data - is considered the dominant, future form of capital accumulation creating new transnational economic monopolies. While the increasing global inequalities produced by these processes have been highlighted by several social science scholars, their actual implications on given local contexts require further analysis. Ethnography is particularly well situated to document a range of forms of discontent and resistance to this global dynamics and their uneven trajectories. In this workshop we invite scholars to explore some of the implications of platform capitalism, focusing on ethnographies of overtourism, gentrification and new forms of activism. We notably invite contributions which examine emerging forms of mobilisation and ask how these relate to platform monopolies. We also suggest to look at how new forms of activism against overtourism and gentrification intersect with more traditional forms of political activism. Looking behind and beyond the apparent new transparency of digital technologies we propose to discuss contradictions and challenges of platform capitalism from a critical, ethnographic standpoint.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Osvaldo Costantini (Università degli Studi della Campania luigi Vanvitelli)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents the data stemming from an on-going research in Rome (Italy) about migrants and second generations who live in occupied buildings. It aims to read tha practice of squatting in term of "acts of citizenship" (Isin 2008).
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims at presenting the data stemming from an on-going ethnographical research in Rome (Italy) about migrants and second generations who live in occupied buildings. The methodology follows the idea of participatory research, where objects and topics are negotiated with "natives" as much as possible. The people involved in the research are the activists of Blocchi Precari Metropolitani and squatters of four occupied buildings: hotel4stelle, CasalBoccone, Collatina and Anagnina. The last two do not have to do with Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, since they are self-managed by Eritrean refugees and Asylum Seekers that represent the majority of the population inside. This paper would like to show the different stakes for the squatters that most of times depend on different needs, horizon and way to live the urban space. The theoretical aim is to reflect on citizenship as a battlefield (Oliveri 2015), trying to take in the same account both the reflection on the citizenship as a way to create social hierarchies (Mezzadra 2012) and what Isin (2008) defines "act of citizenships": actions based on the right to have rights that challenge the social order by struggles and political activism. This will be done through an anthropological perspective that starts from "native's" point of view: the paper will show how people act in the battlefield of citizenship, stemming from their different stakes, that could be the gender relationships, child education and so on: doing this the paper follows Ong's (2005) suggestion to consider citizenship related to "the materiality of Ethics".
Paula Palanco (University of Oulu)
Paper short abstract:
Based on my findings during my fieldwork in the Camino, this paper focus on how the commodification of the experience (derived from the capitalist logics that govern the touristic activity) affects to the perception of the "authenticity" searched by the pilgrims.
Paper long abstract:
The catholic pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (Spain) is becoming more and more popular amidst many kinds of people. This fact originates a wide array of business opportunities, awakening a growing interest from the tourism industry that, ultimately, is translated into a process of commodification of the "pilgrimage experience". The commodification process is perceived as a source of negative consequences for those people that came to the way as a temporary scape of the capitalist logics that govern their daily lives, being this reflected on their rejection of the tourism and the figure of "the tourist" as opposed to "the pilgrim".
Beatrice Tura (University of Portsmouth)
Paper short abstract:
My project asks how diasporic communities negotiate place and engage with gentrification, focusing on Caribbean and Latin American Londoners in Notting Hill and Elephant and Castle, respectively. It does so through conducting participant observation and participatory visual methods.
Paper long abstract:
My thesis sustains that gentrification is lived as a diversity of experiences which have to do with place, public space and the everyday. For this reason, the overarching query is supported by three objectives: exploring processes of place-making through paying attention to participants' practices of visibility - understood as making and manifesting presence - , analyzing what they feel about the visions of place proposed by area developers, and finally, assessing their response to the changing urban landscape by considering acts of both collectively organized and intimate/informal resistance in public space.
The notion of the visual, running implicitly though the three objectives, is stretched through sensory ethnography as to account for those practices of visibility pertaining to different bodily experiences related to place and power. These have become manifest to me through paying attention to stage practices, conducting walking (or transect) and photo-elicitation interviews (through which I found that the visual opens the conversation to a multiplicity of embodied experiences).
What emerges thus far is that gentrification is not experienced as an all-encompassing "monster", but that responses to it are varied and that people may welcome some aspects of it and reject other interchangeably over time. In terms of negotiating, and navigating through, the changes to the landscape the two cases presented similarities, although different mannerisms. These include: artistic expression, through performances of traditional music, theater acts or street parades, community work and organizing, and finally, the tracing of personal routes aimed at deciding one's own experience/mapping of place.
Mengqi Wang (Duke Kunshan University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the contentious encounters between property listing websites seeking to connect home buyers to sellers directly and real estate brokers, who view themselves as the agents creating the market rather than mere intermediaries, at the urban fringe of Nanjing.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2015, China's biggest property listing website, Soufang, launched an online platform to directly connect home buyers to sellers.Its vision was to eliminate intermediaries, such as brokers, in property transactions and reform the property market with "the utmost transparency and efficiency." The website based its ambition on the claim that brokers inhibited the free flow of information in an otherwise more equitable market. To buyers, it aimed to replace commissions, which had been calculated at varied percentages of the property price and paid to the brokers, with a standardized "assistant fee" payable to the website only if one chose an elective service. In contrast,at the urban fringe of east Nanjing where I conducted twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, brokers mainly relied on cultivated inter-personal networks to share information of the local property market.For years they had been using property listing websites mainly to draw in new clients to expand their own networks. This paper documents the contentious encounter and negotiation between Soufang, its technology and personnel,and the local brokers.I pay particular attention to how the realtors resist, negotiate, and appropriate Soufang's platform to sustain and transform the market assemblage they are embedded in.
Daniel Paiva (Universidade de Lisboa) Inigo Sanchez-Fuarros (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC))
Paper short abstract:
Drawing upon a study of the platform-based touristification of Lisbon, we present the concept of collateral atmospheres to describe the affective spacetimes that emerge in the margins of designed atmospheres. The study included a series of interviews with leaders of local residents' associations.
Paper long abstract:
The city centre of Lisbon went through a profound process of urban transformation in the last decade. The increase in tourism demand has been the main driver of these changes, and digital platforms such as Booking, AirBnB and TripAdvisor have facilitated and promoted the conversion of the housing, retail and nightlife offer for tourist consumption. The emergence of a touristic city centre has led to a proliferation of festive events which often appropriate public space, generating conflicts between residents and city users. Simultaneously, the increase in airport and cruise ship traffic has generated complaints by local residents who are concerned with the effect of noise and pollution in their health and well-being.
With this in mind, this paper presents the notion of collateral atmospheres to conceptualize the diverse affective spacetimes that emerge in the margins of designed atmospheres. While research on urban atmospheres has highlighted the role of the senses in the affective experience of the city, and a significant part of this literature has been devoted to the techniques of surveillance and control of urban spaces through atmospheric design, there is more to know about how designed atmospheres can expand, mutate, or deteriorate.
We draw upon a series of interviews with leaders of local residents' associations to show that the affective atmospheres of the touristic city exceed their spaces and times, generating differentiated affective bodily states in this process.
Federico Prestileo (University of Milano Bicocca)
Paper short abstract:
The sharing economy is having increasing importance in the mediterranean sea area. Palermo, with its peculiar position, has in Airbnb the main actor of this new era based on platform capitalism. This work aims to present how this player is concentrating income in specific parts of the city.
Paper long abstract:
In the last ten years, the platform economy player AirBnB became the most important platform for accommodation in the tourism sector. As already analyzed from different scholars and researchers (Allen, 2015; Stabrowski, 2017), the role of this key actor in the sharing economy landscape is not anymore just a mediator between tenants and tourists, but it can be considered a sort of international real estate agent, which is able to bargain with local institutions, national governments and international organizations.
The main goal of the paper is to show that Palermo is not different from any other touristic location in the world, and Airbnb presence in the city is growing every year in terms of generated income and number of new hosts. At first sight, this could be considered as a positive factor for the touristic sector, thanks to the image of sharing economy and the idea of wellness redistribution linked with it. But thanks to a deeper analysis of Airbnb hosts in the city, and in particular about property type, host owners organization, and hosts’ position in the city, the paper shows how the platform capitalism declination through tourism is creating a monopoly both in term of actors and parts of the city, with these lasts that have to face touristification or marginalization processes in relation to their position (del Romero Renau, 2018; Gurran & Phibbs, 2017; LADEST, 2018; Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018).
Alexandra D'Angelo (University of Turin)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of the proposed paper is to show how the advent of a natural disaster often becomes an extraordinary market opportunity for accelerated development and resource redistribution dynamics, able to lead to touristification and gentrification processes.
Paper long abstract:
Disaster Research studies have often shown that the results of a natural disaster can flow into dynamics of accelerated processes of resource extraction and/or unequal distribution of collective resources. In fact, according to the «Disaster Capitalism» perspective (Alexander, 2010; Klein, 2007), fear and disorder arising from a natural disaster can become an extraordinary market opportunity. In this way, the territories affected by a disaster can assume the dramatic role of a blank sheet on which entrepreneurs and investors can apply radical measures of social and economic engineering (Klein, 2007). It is through this strategy that, following a socio-natural disaster, large portions of coastal regions are handed over to powerful entrepreneurs who build luxury tourist villages; in the same way, entire urban districts become the scene for an urban redevelopment process that replaces social housing with modern and upper-class buildings (Gotham & Greenberg, 2014). This paper aims to connect theories and practices of both Platform Capitalism and Disaster Capitalism, with particular attention to the forms of resistance and responses that emerge from them. This connection will be presented through the lens of Environmental Justice, both on a theoretical and empirical level, and supported by the mapping tool of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (www.ejatlas.org). The latter is a project that brings together academics and activists aiming to show and enlighten the multiple and heterogeneous existing forms of resistance to the enhancement of Nature (Leonardi, 2017) and to multiple attempts to keep collective resources at the margins of marketing processes (Escobar, 2008).
Piotr Goldstein (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks on ‘repertoires of activism’ ranging from public protest to informal or even individual engagement, in cities which used to be very cosmopolitan but are not anymore: cosmo-poleis turned into mono-poleis. It asks how gentrification, tourism and new immigrations influence how the past cosmopolitan activism is remembered and used.
Paper long abstract:
Nowadays, many people in Europe would like their cities to become less ethnically diverse than they are. Narratives against ethnic diversity, but also those which defend it, are heavily influenced by civic activism in its broad range of political standpoints and incarnations (from informal groups through NGOs to mass protest). But what happens when urban diversity really decreases? While academics, media and citizens argue on benefits and threats of the new ‘super-diversities’, little attention has been paid to what happens when cities become less ethnically varied. Similarly, little is known regarding the impact ethnic diversity has on activism. Finally, the role of migrants / ethnic minorities as (grassroots) political actors has been largely overlooked. This paper is the first step into a new multi-sited (visual) ethnography project which asks: what is the role of the decrease of ethnic diversity for repertoires of grassroots activism? And also: what is the interplay between the gentrification on the one hand and new immigrations on the other hand on how the past cosmopolitan activism is remembered and (re)enacted.