Hidden value in the platform’s platform: Airbnb, displacement, and the un‐homing spatialities of emotional labour

Abstract

This paper explores the proliferation of short‐term home rentals (STRs) in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, to consider how contemporary technologies of platform urbanism leverage the human infrastructure of emotional labour as a technique for value production. Bringing theories of emotional labour and gentrification together with recent writing on the spatialities of platforms, I argue that for the production of value and the capture of profit, STR platforms like Airbnb rely on neighbours’ emotional labour of performing home. Because this strategy operates through banal practices in quite ordinary neighbourhood spaces, it hides in plain sight – and yet, for neighbours who find themselves enrolled without remuneration into the productive machinery of platform capitalism, it simultaneously creates feelings of alienation and exhaustion. Drawing on interviews with neighbourhood residents and Airbnb hosts in New Orleans, I show how neighbours’ unremunerated performances of home contribute to their own feelings of displacement in place while simultaneously operating as an apparatus of value production for the platform. Although I focus on the case of Airbnb in New Orleans, this study also broadly demonstrates the invisibilisation of value, the challenges of opting out of the digital economy, and the embodied ways in which relations of platform urbanism can impact the everyday life of people with no formal obligation to platforms themselves.

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