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Paper short abstract

Using Cape Town, this paper argues that Airbnb produces urban space through geospatial data, rankings, and platform governance. Rather than democratizing tourism, it concentrates value in affluent white neighborhoods and reworks postcolonial territorial regulation through digital infrastructuring.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines whether Airbnb in Cape Town expands economic participation or reinforces long-standing urban inequality. Airbnb’s business and governance model relies on organizing accommodation through location, data, and the unequal visibility of neighborhoods, creating a core infrastructure for new global tourism flows. The paper argues that Airbnb uses this infrastructuring power to reshape the city, both territorially and through the changing organization and valuation of place. To demonstrate this, it combines policy analysis with five years of market data and spatial mapping of listing hotspots, patterns of host concentration, and the growing dominance of professional operators across the city.

The findings show that both Cape Town and national authorities helped create a favorable environment for Airbnb’s expansion through new forms of regulatory cooperation, policy accommodation, and data sharing. At the same time, the platform market became increasingly professionalized. Between 2019 and 2024, the share of professional multi-listings increased from, while amateur listings make up a small minority of the market. Spatial analysis further shows that listings and hotspot areas are heavily concentrated in affluent neighborhoods historically reserved for the white minority under apartheid. In contrast, the Cape Flats and other marginalized areas remain largely excluded from Airbnb’s digital marketplace. As a result, rather than distributing tourism opportunity evenly across the city, Airbnb appears to reproduce older spatial hierarchies while channeling new tourism value into already advantaged urban areas and reinforcing existing social and economic inequalities over time.