The origins of cross-border institutions date back to the second half of the 1950s, when sub-national authorities across European borders felt the need to establish structured forms of cooperation in order to tackle common problems or to seize shared opportunities for development and for improving the quality of life for border communities. These initiatives were taken up and supported primarily within the Council of Europe, partly as a means of fostering peace following the Second World War. This led to the creation of the first ‘Euroregions’ (the first is traditionally identified as having been established on the border between Germany and the Netherlands by three municipal associations in 1958), followed by the emergence of ‘Working Communities’, generally focused on economic development and covering a wider area. At the same time, in 1972, the Association of European Border Regions (AEBR) was established – the first collegial body representing the interests of border regions.

With the first reform of the Structural Funds (in 1989) and the establishment of a genuine European regional policy, cross-border cooperation was allocated specific funding through the creation of the Interreg programmes.

Since the 1990s, thanks in part to the resources made available under cohesion policies, attempts to institutionalise cross-border and territorial relations have multiplied; it is in this context that the adoption of the EGTC Regulation must be understood; since 2006, this Regulation has sought to provide a ‘ready-to-use’ tool for the establishment of cross-border, transnational and interregional bodies at sub-national level.

EGTCs have grown in importance and become increasingly widespread in recent years, partly due to the ever-greater strategic focus on European territorial cooperation, which has been one of the priority macro-objectives of cohesion policy since 2007. Furthermore, whilst the Covid-19 pandemic has, on the one hand, highlighted the fragility of integration processes at sub-national level, with local and regional border actors finding themselves caught off guard by national border closures often adopted unilaterally and suddenly by Member States; on the other hand, it has also strengthened a coordinated movement of European border regions, which are strongly calling for recognition of their specific status and a greater expansion of cross-border public services. The issue of cross-border cooperation and the instruments dedicated to it is now highly topical and relevant.

As of August 2025 (the latest available update), 91 groups operating within and across the European Union were listed in the official EGTC register (managed by the Committee of the Regions); of these, fourteen include Italian participants. Furthermore, other EGTCs involving Italian entities are currently being established, with processes at various stages of development.

The experiences of EGTCs inevitably share certain common features, given that they are based on the same legal framework. At the same time, however, they also exhibit numerous differences, which can be identified and analysed from various perspectives. These include the specific characteristics of the territories in which they are located, the year of establishment and thus their longevity, the objectives they choose to pursue, the governance models they adopt, the main sources of funding and their projects, the level of integration achieved and experience gained, the level of political and technical involvement, their shared membership of certain Member States, and the possible participation of non-EU territories.

Until now, there has been no in-depth, systematic study of the experiences of EGTCs in Italy that could, on the one hand, help us understand what has been achieved so far through this instrument and what the future prospects are; and, on the other hand, enable the Groups themselves to get to know one another by learning through an exchange of experiences and best practices.

The project “European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation in Italy: Current Status and Policy Recommendations” aims to fill this gap. Funded as part of the ITALIAE2 Project, the project stems from an agreement between the Department of Regional Affairs and Autonomies (DARA) of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, which is responsible for processing applications for authorisation to establish EGTCs and for maintaining the National Register of EGTCs (pursuant to Article 46 of Law No. 88 of 7 July 2009) , and the Institute for Studies on Regional, Federal and Autonomous Systems of the National Research Council (CNR ISSIRFA). To carry out the planned activities, CNR ISSIRFA has chosen to collaborate with two centres of recognised prestige with specific expertise in the field of territorial cooperation: the FULL – Future Urban Legacy Lab at the Polytechnic University of Turin and the Institute for Comparative Federal Studies at EURAC Research.

The activities carried out during the project period (July 2024 – December 2025) can be divided into three categories:

Research activities: the project aimed to examine the EGTC instrument and its practical implementation in Italy, including through a direct survey of the experiences of Italian public bodies in this area;

Support activities: the project provided a platform for existing EGTCs and those in the process of being established to connect with one another and discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by this instrument. Specific support activities were also carried out for a number of EGTCs currently being set up;

Regulatory support activities: the project provided a forum for discussing the European and national regulatory frameworks and proposing that the latter be brought into line with the changes introduced by Regulation 1302/2013.

This volume covers all these activities and is structured as follows.

Chapter 1 presents a review of the main existing literature on EGTCs at national and international level. In addition to providing an overview of the state of the art in publications that have examined the EGTC experience over the last 20 years, the review served as the starting point for identifying the outstanding issues subsequently addressed in the analysis of EGTCs in Italy. Chapter 2 outlines the current regulatory framework, at European and national level, governing EGTCs and discusses prospects for reform. It also presents aspects of national legislation in certain European countries, particularly those hosting EGTCs with Italian participants. Chapter 3 presents, through a comprehensive set of maps, an overview of EGTCs with Italian participants, described and categorised on the basis of the various elements that characterise them (e.g. Italian/foreign law; year of establishment; type of territorial cooperation; type of participating actors; resources mobilised). The chapter also includes a description of each EGTC and the types of activities carried out. Chapter 4 reports on the research activities carried out. Following a brief methodological introduction, the survey results are presented, organised around four main themes: internal organisation (bodies and decision-making processes; any internal regulations; frequency of meetings, staff management, etc.); funding and resources (sources of funding, with a particular focus on Interreg programmes, and use of resources); external organisation (institutional relations at various levels; relations with the local area; visibility and communication); administrative issues (related to the implementation of activities and the cross-border nature of the bodies). Chapter 5 discusses the potential and challenges of EGTCs in Italy, based on the findings of the analysis. It examines the added value of the EGTC instrument, including in light of the different types and approaches identified, as well as the main limitations and issues arising from its application and any future prospects and potential for improvement. Furthermore, based on the study’s findings, the chapter identifies several key elements to be taken into account when establishing an EGTC. Chapter 6 discusses the operational activities carried out as part of the project, including a series of online seminars (held between May and June 2025) and support activities for training initiatives; the possibility of replicating the adopted model is also discussed. Finally, Chapter 7 sets out a number of conclusions and recommendations for DARA and for the optimal use of the EGTC instrument in the Italian context.

The report is accompanied by two appendices: a checklist setting out the steps required to carry out the preliminary assessment of EGTCs; and an extensive bibliography on European territorial cooperation and EGTCs. The research and support work – and therefore this volume – presents the results of an initial attempt to systematise and share the knowledge accumulated by EGTCs with Italian participants, almost 20 years after the adoption of Regulation 1082/2006. The findings of the research paint a picture of a dynamic and evolving instrument, which has so far enabled very significant results to be achieved and, at the same time, appears not yet to have fully realised its potential. From this perspective, the volume also offers a series of ideas for further study and activities, in which research and support can bolster the effectiveness and usefulness of European territorial cooperation initiatives.

The post EGTC – European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation in Italy appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

Starting from the widespread presence of ground-mounted photovoltaic plants in Italy, the study explores how decommissioning and revamping processes can become an opportunity to rethink the relationship between energy production, landscape, and agricultural systems. Through territorial analyses, GIS-based tools, and design experiments developed in different Italian contexts, the research proposes strategies and spatial models aimed at transforming existing photovoltaic fields into next-generation “solarscapes”, integrating energy production with ecological and landscape objectives.

The work is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between research teams from the Politecnico di Torino, the Politecnico di Milano, and the Università di Torino, combining expertise in architecture, landscape design, and agronomy to develop tools and visions that can support future policies and practices for the transformation of energy landscapes.

The post Designing forms for future solarscapes appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The project was developed in collaboration with the City Council’s Department for Urban Care, Public Green Areas and Riverbanks of the City of Turin and the collaboration between Palazzo Madama and key national partners, who have always been committed to environmental conservation and protection, primarily the Po River Basin Authority (ABDPO) and the Interregional Agency for the Po River (A.I.Po) together with the Po Biosphere Reserves, now united in the UNESCO MaB Po Grande Reserve. Alongside them are Turin-based interpreters, from the Polytechnic University of Turin to the University of Turin and the European Research Institute, who carry out daily research and study of the Po and water in general from different disciplinary perspectives, with the media partnership of Rai Radio3.

Addressing the essential issues of climate change in an exhibition that weaves together a visual narrative developed entirely through the interaction between large-scale painting and photography, illustration, and infographics capable of narrating the Italian landscape in all its complexity and articulation, from the Alps to the sea, the exhibition project focuses on the theme of water and in particular on our Great River, which for millennia has determined the landscape and the life of the population, is a means of communication but also an essential support for agricultural and industrial activities, and explores the consequences and analyzes the potential solutions implemented in the area by the various research and protection agencies of the Po.

652 kilometers long, 141 tributaries, almost 87,000 square kilometers of river basin, 19,850,000 inhabitants, 37% of Italian agricultural production, 55% of the national livestock industry: the Po and the Po Valley, where 40% of the national GDP is produced, constitute one of the areas with the highest concentration of population, industry, and commercial activity in Europe.

This incredible development has been made possible thanks to the historic stability and abundance of Italy’s largest river, which is fed by countless sources and diverse natural processes—mountain springs, snowmelt, glaciers, large lakes, and plains springs—but which have undergone significant change in recent decades, leading to a crisis that is occurring everywhere on a global scale.

Precisely because of its unique characteristics and its wealth of history, historical stratification, and landscapes, the Po—Roman and pagan, Byzantine and Lombard, feudal and ruled by lords, countryside and cities, romantic, agricultural, industrial, touristic, and cinematic—is capable of symbolically and clearly conveying the climate crisis and its effects: the face of the planet is changing more rapidly than it has done in the last millennia, and the role that humans have played in this process has now been proven.

The Change! exhibition aims to describe these changes, offering opportunities to reflect on the crisis and possible scenarios for adapting to it, but also to urge action and awareness: it is time to act.

Change!, curated by Tiziana Caserta, Anna La Ferla, and Giovanni C.F. Villa, is accompanied by a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale, with contributions from scholars at the University of Turin, the University of Bergamo, the Polytechnic University of Turin, the Polytechnic University of Milan, ENEA, Slow Food, Adaptation.it, and Mondoserie.it, among others.

Change! Ieri, oggi, domani. Il Po. (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2024), ISBN 978-88-3665-882-4: 170-179, catalog of the exhibition Change! held at Palazzo Madama, Turin.

The post Strategic river planning. Possible approaches and transformative opportunities for the Turin context appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a major exogenous shock impacting the global tourism industry over the last two years. Given its peculiarity, this paper analyzes one of the most intriguing questions in the Airbnb literature – the pricing of Airbnb listings – while taking advantage of a difference-in-differences methodology, which largely draws on differences in country-level response policies to the pandemic. Relying on a dataset containing weekly information from 130,999 continuously active listings across 27 European countries from 2019 to 2020, this paper firstly investigates the exogenous impact of response policies (proxied by the COVID-19 Stringency Index) on demand and, secondly, accounting for the endogeneity of demand for prices, analyzes pricing responses to demand variations. Results show that: i) increases in the COVID-19 Stringency Index cause significant declines of Airbnb demand; ii) increases in demand cause, on average, increases in Airbnb prices; and iii) the pricing strategy differs between commercial and private hosts.

The post The Pricing of European Airbnb Listings according to Demand Variations appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The post the Future Urban Legacy Lab appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

A relatively new business active within the rental housing market is the so-called home staging. Comparable with an interior design service, home staging means literally to set-up the domestic environment. It gathers a set of professional and non-professional actors involved in the re-furnishing and re-adaptation of the shelter for commercial purposes, enhancing new aesthetic standards. Indeed, this new model is applied and then showcased in the short-term rental market. More than others, Airbnb developed a strict aesthetic-commercial model, a combination of Scandinavian minimal wooden furniture in a white-box-like dwelling that can be summarized in the Danish word hyggelig.

The digital revolution triggered a crucial paradigm shift in terms of actors involved, practices, production of values, and transfer. The digital space is the new space of capital fluctuation, and thus, it is a critical matter when it collides with staple goods such as housing.

How does the tech-mediated market enact a progressive dissolution of the private domestic space into a staged commodity?

These new tactics adopted from the market highlight the shift in contemporary real estate operators’ rhetoric from the concept of housing to the one of living. In this context, the experiential (staged) features of a domestic scene overcome the typical real estate triad of location, location, and location in housing promotion.Drawing on a taxonomy of contemporary experiences, the paper will investigate the mutated concept of standard. Once linked to representativeness and now projected towards representation, the new standard set by home staging allows landlords to maximize value extraction from the short rental market, marginalizing further the real economy of dwellings within the city.

“I think that idea of commodifying your environment or turning everything into a purchasable object, that seems likely to happen”1

Mark is a property manager based in Copenhagen. He entered the business of home-sharing after a shocking and revealing episode. During his first experience as an Airbnb host, Mark realized that his guests used his clothes and the ones of his wife to share videos on social media under the hashtag #weirdsex. Horrified, he installed spy cameras in his house to control his guests during their stays. After a while, he figured out that more and more guests were using his home to act and perform as characters –literally– in the shoes of someone else. Mark reacted drastically. He deleted his real identity from all social media, quit his job, and created several fake host profiles to rent on housing platforms houses sublet by a real estate agency. He bought on a specific website photographic sets of daily life portraits made by professional actors. Then, he set the house as it if was inhabited by the characters portrayed in the pictures –the fake hosts. In an interview released to Beka & Lemoine in their documentary Selling Dreams, Mark stated that he was fulfilling a precise market demand: “They wanted to have another life, another story, to be other characters for few days. […] It’s not fake, it’s true if you believe in it.”²

Notes

1.Bava A., Branzi A., Yu R., Harvey A. T., (2014) “Everything that is solid melts into Airbnb”, Panel, Aribnb Pavillon, https://www.swissinstitute.net/event/panel-everything-that-is-solid-melts-into-airbnb-with-alessandro-bava-andrea-branzi-rachael-yu-and-aaron-taylor-harvey-of-airbnb-hosted-by-airbnb-pavilion-fabrizio-ballabio-alessandro-bava-luis/ [1/06/2020]

2.Beka, I., & Lemoine, L. (2016). Selling Dreams [Documentary]. Beka&Lemoine. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/sellingdreams/189505421 [1/06/2020]

In 1967 Guy Debord wrote The Society of Spectacle, referring to the dominance of the culture of images as a developing form of the concept of alienation, structuring a Marxist critique to the life-pervasive commodification. During the last century, the power of images strengthened at the point to become nowadays the channel in which profit chains can express and reproduce themselves.

The role of images and the production of imaginaries are at the base of the advertisement and consumption process. The rapid rise of new economies, mostly acting in the digital space, allowed a fast and capillary spreading of the culture of image and, consequently, a pervasive process of commodification. In this article, we discuss the role of images as a commodifying tool lead by digital platforms in the housing market. Questioning, how does the tech-mediated market enact a progressive dissolution of the private domestic space into a staged commodity.

Residential property constitutes the first asset class globally in terms of value, representing 60% of the worlds’ wealth, including stocks, bonds, and gold³. This condition resulted from a half a century process, where the real estate market mutually fed itself with the neoliberal state ethos of the property-owning democracy, leading to what Samuel Stein defines the Real Estate State⁴.

In this context, the residential function of housing is subject to its value as an asset. Nevertheless, this dual and contradictory condition is embedded in any commodity since Marx stated the coincidence of the use-value and exchange value of the commodity⁵.

Therefore, trading of housing as a commodity is nothing new, while referring to the commodification of housing refers to the progressive growth of a large part of housing production and consumption aimed only at speculation, not even contemplating inhabitation. As Hellinikon, the massive development project in Athens, where the developers on a total of 260 hectares of development, provided not even a square meter of social housing⁶.

The effects of hyper-commodification⁷ are palpable in major western cities as New York or London, where the scale of investments is such that the housing prices might be unaffordable for the majority of the urban population⁸. Hyper-commodification of housing unfolds in terms of social exclusion and depopulation. Plus, commodification penetrates the multi-layered urban fabric beyond the real estate market. As noted by Forrest and Williams already in the 1980s, “in understanding the full implications of this commodification process, we must begin to comprehend the way these changes penetrate into the very fabric of daily life”⁹. A similar argument is carried out by Randy Martin in his book of 2002 Financialization of Daily Life, in which he highlights how the contemporary economic structure of self-entrepreneurship could modify the financial borders widely, letting them flood into the private sphere.

Such dynamics are recognizable –among others– in the sharing economy’s mechanism, in which companies make profits by financializing everyday life activities or jobs formerly protected by corporations. UberEats monetized cycling, carpooling apps as CarToGo converted motorists in taxi drivers, and TaskRabbit can now sell housekeeping services without any professional or insurance coverage. This marketplace also includes the domestic sphere, as companies of furniture design, property management, and renting complete the full spectrum of commodified aspects of domestic daily life.

3.The real estate market is worth about 217 trillion of US dollars, almost “60 percent of the value of all global assets, with residential real estate comprising 75 percent of the total”. Farha (2018)

4.Stein, 2019.

5.As David Harvey critically analyzed (2018)

6.https://thehellinikon.com/the-vision/. [15/05/2020].

7.Madden and Marcuse, 2016.

8.For New York see Stein 2019. For London see Minton 2017.

9.Forrest and Williams 1984: 1178.

“How to prepare your home for sale…so it sells!”¹⁰

Airbnb –the major short-term rental platform currently available– has revolutionized the hospitality and housing market since its inception in 2009. As for all the Silicon Valley tech companies, the funding and evaluation system of venture capital defines Airbnb’s performance. Nevertheless, disregarding the downturns of the market, what Airbnb introduced was a concept enabling potentially the global commodification of any single housing unit around the world –including tree houses and boats.

It is important to note that in its early days Airbnb was not even conceived as a service for payment, following the example of websites like Craigslist or Couchsurfing, which based their profits on indirect revenue from advertisements and external funding. This highlights how the platform economy is even less attached to the value generated from the use of its products instead of the mass of data that it generates. This reading shared by Nick Srnicek in his book Platform Capitalism,¹¹defines a taxonomy of the different typologies of platforms currently existing. Airbnb falls in the “lean platform” category, as it generates revenue from housing rents without actually owning none of its listings.

The other disruptive innovation introduced by Airbnb is one of the key elements behind the success of most platforms: reputation¹². Every Airbnb host and guest must submit a detailed review, which automatically positions each listing within a specific market. In line with Srnicek’s analysis, the real asset produced by platforms is data. Reputation is in fact built on a critical mass of product-related data: the number of reviews (and visits), the quality of the service and its amenities. The greater the amount of data and the better the reputation, the higher the price will be. A crucial aspect of this phenomenon is that a significant portion of the data used by Airbnb to sell its product consists of photographs of the listings. Unlike the traditional hotel sector, which has codified systems for defining standards — think of the hotel star rating system —, Airbnb relies significantly on the effectiveness of its photographic apparatus¹³.

This fact complexifies the comparative evaluation of two “equivalent” market products greatly, bypassing most of the traditional mantra of real estate: location, location, location.

On the other hand, this element of complexity justifies the massive initial effort of the company to provide free photo shootings to hosts¹⁴, since once collected the interior photos of the listings were not only showing a determined quality, but they sold a “genuine” product. If we take the sales and promotion process of ordinary real estate, we will find a sheer amount of interior renderings realized by professional CGI companies to enable the developer to sell upfront its buildings before completion. These interiors are usually populated by high-end furniture design objects that are present in 3d model libraries of the major digital companies of the industry, which means that these objects are most of the time placeholder objects. In the case of Airbnb, the “reality” of images and their truthfulness is coupled with the quality of the pictures itself and the photo set in general. Differently from the mere descriptive aim of traditional real estate, an Airbnb photo set can include a still life of pottery on a table, a macro of some flowers in the garden, stock images of the neighborhood, or landmarks of the surroundings.

Such practices of value extraction led to the creation of a parallel universe of new professionals and services. Within the users of Airbnb, many are the companies or society that manage a large number of properties offering a range of services addressed to the reservation and the guest stay. From the more practical automated check-in check-out, luggage storage, and transfer from airport to the leisured experiences, and catering services. Many are also the services offered to hosts as the complete management of the properties at all stages, from the online management to the cleaning services, professional photographs, and consultancy. Some of these companies, indeed, propose an advisory service for the housing renewal in order to increase the market appeal, from the website of Dimorra Hospitality, a Napolitan property manager society, “we turn your normal home into a safe source of income.”¹⁵

This practice is called home staging, and it is used to carry out projects of modernization or renovation of housing units in order to have higher profits both in the sale or rental. From its denomination, it is evident the willingness to set up a stage for commercial purposes. The practice of home staging is not just house renewal, but more emulation of new aesthetic standards and formal rules conformed to the taste of the global market.

According to an Italian association of home stagers (APHSI), with a home staging renewal, the selling times decrease to about 2/3, and the selling price has a reduction of just 4% compared with the 14% of the traditional selling. The costs of this service, still according to APHSI, is around 1000 euro for an 80 square meters apartment with minor interventions (painting, tidying, photoshoot, and advertisement)¹⁶. The costs grow with significant adjustments, like renovation works and furniture purchasing.

Home staging first appeared in the United States during the 1970s, intending to reduce sales times and avoid future discounts on the final price. This practice, even at the time, was nothing new than a small renovation, but the way in which it was promoted and structured, marked another notch in the ecology of housing commodification, reproducing and simplifying existing practices.

10.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVf6_rHnE2E [1/06/2020]

11.Srnicek, 2017

12.https://www.wired.co.uk/article/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy. [15/05/2020]

13.Further reputational systems introduced by the company are represented by the SuperHost awarding system, and by the verified prime locations for which the company reserved in 2018 the Airbnb Plus section.

14.Gallagher 2018

15.https://www.dimorra.it. [15/05/2020]

16.https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/home-staging-cosi-casa-si–vende-piu-fretta-e-senza-sconti-AEKdp5eF%20[1/06/2020]

17.Barbara Schwarz holds around a dozen of trademarks related to home staging including The Creator of Home Staging®

18.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVf6_rHnE2E [1/06/2020]

Figure 1. Video stills of Barb Schwarz promotional video “How To Prepare Your Home For Sale…So it Sells”!

Today this practice is present both in the sales and rental market. In particular, this service quickly expanded its popularity to the short-term rental sector due to the facilitated possibility of profit maximization with minimal effort. Indeed, the recognizable fortune of the practice of home staging has been noted (by all odds) by Airbnb. Meridith Baer, one of the leading home stagers in the United States, wrote for the blog of Airbnb, an article in which recommends ten simple tips to improve the house set up and so to “help get more guests and keep them happy.”¹⁹From the list, it can be read some functional elements as the hotel-like equipped bathroom and the bedroom with the sitting area; to the application of more ephemeral elements, as flowers, color painting walls or doors, mirrors, and lights.

A typical style is recognizable within Airbnb listings, as highlighted by a research project from AMO presented at the Architecture Triennale of Oslo in 2016, which collected a series of examples from Airbnb listings around the globe where such style is particularly evident. With a series of iconic photographs, they build a taxonomy where the living elements (parquet, wooden tables, white light, and designer furnishings) became the standardized components of staged commodities.

Through the years, this practice became more structured, and within the platform market, the actors became more professionalized. Nowadays, the market of Airbnb is in the hands of the so-called multi-properties hosts –hosts that manage multiple properties– these can be real societies, property managers, other platforms, real estate firms, and even construction firms. In Rome, in 2019, 18% of the hosts own more than three properties accounting for 53% of the stock.²⁰ Those societies propose several additional services to the guests and to the house owners (sometimes these societies are the owner themselves), including home staging.

Across the globe, these companies manage and stage houses to make them profitable assets, letting them flow eventually into the vacation rental market. Some of them, as Homm (owning around 200 properties in Greece), propose in their offers from the renovation of the apartment “use only product of top quality and high-end product brands,”²¹ to the complete reconstruction from scratch, owning two condo buildings in central Athens. They also propose advisory to the resident permit program Golden Visa; this European program consists of obtaining a 5-year residency permit for non-EU citizens by investing a given amount of money in several assets, including residential property²². Societies as Homm in Athens or Tamea International in Lisbon propose a full package from the sells of the property to the management of it in the case in which the owners want a return on the investment by renting out the property, possibly in the short-term rental market to the benefit of the flexibility and a maximum profit; in these cases, the houses sold are already fully furnished staged commodities ready to enter the rental market.

19.https://blog.atairbnb.com/attract-guests-10-simple-tips-home-staging-expert-meridith-baer/. [15/05/2020]

20.Data acquired by AirDNA

21.https://www.homm.gr/en/about/. [1/06/2020]

22.This program is present in almost every European Country, the investment for a real estate could variate from the 300.000 € in Portugal, 250.000 € in Greece to the 500.000 € in Spain.

23.https://stayaltido.com/blog/stylingyourvacationrental

24.https://blog.sonder.com/design/introducing-sonder-backgrounds-for-your-next-zoom-meeting/

“A standard that the commodity has lived up to by turning the whole planet into a single world market”²⁵

The monopoly of Airbnb on the short-term rental market prompted an exponential growth of profitable investments on listings by larger economic enterprises than individuals or families. From a platform devoted to stimulate micro gains for households with a spare room to rent, in a decade Airbnb became a marketplace for high yield investments, involving more and more professionals from the real estate and the building industry.

In this light, these mutations happened across the full spectrum of the hospitality industry. In the post-war globalized world, hotel chains built a wide range of options for the growing middle-classes, setting new standards for aesthetics, comfort, and ultimately for life –the ritual of the modern vacation trip. The revolutionary concept introduced by Airbnb is that the main value of its product profits by the opposite of standardization, as each listing is related to the identity of its host.

Nevertheless, as Airbnb market was set in terms of mass consumption some standards started to emerge globally. Striking similarities between the average two-bedroom flat listing rose from Moscow to New York. Home staging found a mainstream “genre” for its plays, and Ikea contributed greatly as the set designer:

“In some ways the generic Ikea home is almost invisible. It’s repetition. It’s predictability. Its sameness across the globe makes it immaterial. It becomes a predictable nexus from which you choose to explore the city. It, in itself, is not an experience. It’s just the baseline allowing you to sleep. That’s appealing to me because then it is sort of like – what is the minimum investment we can make to see the world? Or to facilitate other people seeing the world? Ikea definitely provides that.”²⁶

Hyggelig is the Danish word describing the kind of aesthetic standard pursued by most of Airbnb listings. The term refers simultaneously to the quality of a domestic space of being nice, and pleasant, and cozy, and comfortable²⁷. It’s interesting to note how a word initially referred to an atmosphere and experiential features was later attached to physical objects constructing an imaginary built upon marketability and profitability.

The domestic space of hyggelig could be related to the urban space of Airspace, a notion introduced by some urban geographers referring to the spatializations of sharing economy –including Airbnb– with their mix of comfort, hisperish minimalism and photogenic corners, where human coexistence is efficiently regulated in time by algorithms²⁸.

In order to respond to the demand of an authentic experience promoted by Airbnb –Belong anywhere– the practice of home staging provided the tools to combine standardized comfort with marks of personalization.

Once viewed as a whole, the images of staged listings appear to have the twofold characteristic of being generic and unique at the same time. The hyggelig of the white box with wooden minimal furniture unit is marked by signs of local culture here and there. The motto of Airbnb “belong everywhere” unfolds in the paradox of the simultaneous persistence of the comfort of commercial hospitality combined with the uniqueness of lived-in homes decorated with local touches.

Diving into the staged interiors reveals how the typical rooms of the modern functional house are subject to slight changes to fulfill this double condition. As this may not be perceivable at first sight, a closer look unveils a slight myopia. A generous kitchen actually equipped with few freebies for coffee and tea making, a bathroom full of towels and some free shampoos but with no sign of cleaning devices, or a living room without a TV filled with posters on the wall showing landmarks of the hosting location. These examples may represent a caricature of the staged home, but they reveal the quintessential aspect of home staging. The emptiest space is filled with the bare minimum necessary objects to provide comfort, while the decorative (low cost) apparatus adds value to the listing in its marketing virtual phase –while having a marginal role during the real experience.

25.Debord 1970: 19.

26.https://www.swissinstitute.net/event/panel-everything-that-is-solid-melts-into-airbnb-with-alessandro-bava-andrea-branzi-rachael-yu-and-aaron-taylor-harvey-of-airbnb-hosted-by-airbnb-pavilion-fabrizio-ballabio-alessandro-bava-luis/. [3/06/2020]

27.The word is an extension of the Danish word Hygge. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hygge [01/06/2020]

28.Pavoni and Brighenti (2017)

References

Beka, I., & Lemoine, L. (2016). Selling Dreams [Documentary]. Beka&Lemoine.

Debord, G. (1970). The society of the spectacle (Reprint). Black & Red.

Farha (2018). Report of the special rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and on the right to non-discrimination in this context. United Nations Human Rights Council.

Forrest, R., & Williams, P. (1984). Commodification and Housing: Emerging Issues and Contradictions. Environment and Planning, 16(9), 1163–1180.

Gallagher, L. (2018). The Airbnb story: Inside the company disrupting the world.

Iago Lestegás, João Seixas, & Rubén-Camilo Lois-González. (2019). Commodifying Lisbon: A Study on the Spatial Concentration of Short-Term Rentals. Social Sciences, 8, 2.

Harvey, D. (2018). The limits to capital. Verso.

Maak, N. (2015). Living complex: From zombie city to the new communal. Hirmer.

Madden, D. J., & Marcuse, P. (2016). In defense of housing: The politics of crisis. Verso.

Martin, R. (2002). Financialization of daily life. Temple University Press.

Minton (2017). Big Capital. Who Is London For?. Penguin.

Oslo Architecture Triennale, Casanovas Blanco, L. A., Galan, I. G., Mínguez Carrasco, C., Navarrete Llopis, A., & Otero Verzier, M. (Eds.). (2016). After belonging: The objects, spaces, and territories of the ways we stay in transit. Lars Müller Publishers.

Pavoni and Brighenti (2017). Airspacing the City – Where Technophysics meets Atmoculture. AZimuth, V, 10.

Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.

Stein, S. (2019). Capital city: Gentrification and the real estate state. Verso.

..

The post Poseur Real Estate appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The interdisciplinary and international summer school “TRANS-forming industrial legacy. Spatial and economical models of re-USE” has been conceived and organized by the China Room research group and the FULL interdisciplinary research center (Politecnico di Torino). It involved the active co-participation of teachers, tutors and students of the School of Architecture, Environmental Science School, Department of Leadership and Organization Management of the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning of Technion Israel Institute of Technology. The goal was the construction of spatial and economic models concerning the sustainable reuse of urban industrial legacies.

The educational and applied research program (carried out through the “research by design” method) explored during the summer school is based on two assumptions:

1. the activity of production (industry) is a significant mechanism for the transformation of the contemporary city. In our reasoning, every sector, both manufacturing and services, will be taken into consideration;

• identify the spatial transformations due to the change of the productive activities;

• test methodologies to measure and represent the characteristics and transformations of production in the urban environment;

• clarify the role of industrial legacy in the change of production and its relations with urban transformations at different scales.

2. the current relationship between city and production is connected to the legacies of the past, whether they are evaluated as positive or not.

Starting from these two considerations, the interdisciplinary scientific and educational program built interactions and synergies by addressing the following issues and objectives: • understand how production has changed and what are the current relationships between production and city (both in morphological features and in socio-economic variables);

The set of these objectives has been pursued during the summer school by interweaving theoretical-methodological research with an applied “research by design” activity settled for students with different backgrounds, in which economic models, production managerial and architectural, construction, technological and infrastructural solutions were experimented together, within urban transformation. The training activities of the summer school were divided into theoretical frontal lessons, tutoring activities and sites visits, as subject of the design survey. Starting from the analysis of renowned examples of urban industrial legacy, participants progressively built a design toolkit (in organizational, architectural, urban, construction, environmental and economic sustainability terms) which higlights future scenarios for the former ThyssenKrupp area in Torino, while the theoretical contributions provided by international professors from different scientific and disciplinary sectors aimed at setting up a methodological framework of scientific investigation.

The post TRANS-USE appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.

The post Italy is in the Air(bnb) appeared first on FULL | the Future Urban Legacy Lab.