Laboring subjects, domestic aesthetic regimes, and understandings of ephemeral homemaking.
Seminar | 26 – 27 February 2026 | Wageningen University, the Netherlands
* NEW SUBMISSION DATE 8 December *
Short-term rent has become a taken for granted concept in academic and public discourse and is commonly associated with the rise of the platform economy in the urban contexts of the Global North and South in the last two decades. Scholarship in diverse fields and disciplines1 has singled out platforms like Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com and Clickstay for providing new digital infrastructures to develop and sustain a global and large-scale market for temporary rental housing between providers and tenants (often termed “hosts” and respectively “guests” in the marketization of STRs). Short-term and mid-term rent are housing typologies where a property is rented out for days, weeks, or months, with contracts that differ from long-term leases that abide to civil codes for indefinite tenancy. Rents are usually higher and paid nightly, weekly, or monthly, often including services like furniture and housekeeping.
From a political economy perspective, STR housing is increasingly seen as an asset to fixing surplus capital through digitally mediated markets (Cocola-Gant et al. 2021). In such reasoning, the target consumers of STR housing assumedly are voluntarily mobile subjects such as tourists, expats and students who ostensibly have no intention to permanently settle or dwell in places of STR, who are often detached from a nation-bound identity, and who usually have citizenship in a higher-income country. Providers of STR housing, instead, are individuals and buy-to-let investors who capitalize on their housing assets, as well as commercial operators such as professional property managers who manage large portfolios of housing on behalf of investors (ibid.). The consequences of these socio-economic arrangements is a form of property-led accumulation among an increasing number of professionally operating suppliers of STR; a process that shifts housing from long-term to short-term rental markets and reduces housing alternatives for residents. As such, STR is deemed a development that contributes to and exacerbates ongoing housing crises and gentrification, by which long-term tenants are (further) displaced from the places they (wish to) live and work in.
While existing scholarship has done crucial work to associate STR platforms with the production of socio-spatial inequalities, particularly regarding their impact on the affordability and availability of housing, the historical antecedents and contextual nuances of temporary rent are still often neglected. Short-term rental platforms are a multiscalar- and home-making phenomenon that actively shapes the configuration of contemporary domestic spaces (Roelofsen, 2022). These practices engage with complex aspects related to emotions, values, and discourses associated with the concept of home, with particular emphasis on the gendered organisation of everyday life (Roelofsen & Goyette, 2022). Various authors have already highlighted how it reflects a fantasy of being at home worldwide and commodifies homely experiences and atmospheres (Loder, 2021). Further scholarly investigation is urgently needed to explore how short-term rental activities influence individuals’ conceptualisations of home, their inhabitation of diverse spaces, and the organisation of reproductive labour within this context.
This seminar culminates two projects: a post-doctoral project on labour that sustains the short-term rental market (supported by the Wageningen University Graduate School Postdoc Talent Scheme) and a project on digital mediations of home through short-term rental platforms (supported by the British Academy Leverhulme grant). The seminar’s core idea is to bring the debate on short-term rental platforms to the level of labour, the home and the everyday lives of those who inhabit short-term rental dwellings. We aim to investigate how short-term rental platforms play a crucial role in shaping domestic imaginaries and practices of home through processes of datafication, digitally mediating the private sphere. Building on recent feminist interventions and feminist perspectives on digital geographies of home, this seminar therefore seeks to extend critical scholarship on short-term rent to include empirical and theoretical (re)articulations of housing and home that consider:
1) temporary rent and housing as a practice and manifestation of service work and social reproductive labor, and the related labor dynamics involved
2) short-term rental platforms’ and property management agencies’ role in mediating practices and imaginaries of home.
3) historical and contemporary accounts of temporary housing (markets) across different cultural contexts within/beyond legal limits and beyond the urban context
4) experiences of users who (in)voluntarily rely on temporary housing as a social reproduction strategy
The seminar will be held at Wageningen University in Wageningen, the Netherlands. The seminar will be held in different languages: English, Dutch and Spanish, and will be broadcast through videoconferencing software.
Keynote speakers
- Prof Agustín Cocola-Gant, Serra Hunter Distinguished Fellow, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Geography.
- Dr Mathilde Christensen, Lecturer in Human Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, School of Geography and Planning
Abstract submission
Please submit your abstract using the form below.
Limited capacity
While no registration fee applies there is limited attendance capacity. Abstracts will be selected based on their adherence to the seminar’s topic and added contribution.
Timeline
8 December 2025: Abstract submission closes
10 December 2025: Abstract confirmation
10 – 24 December 2025: Registration period
12 January 2026: Seminar programme publication
Organized by
Maartje Roelofsen, Pau Obrador Pons and Dave Loder
CSPS Urbanscapes Cluster
With the support of
the British Academy Leverhulme Small Research Grant, the Wageningen Graduate School Postdoc Talent Grant, and the Centre for Space Place and Society, Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
Emerging scholar Grant
We have a limited number of grants available that will cover accommodation only, specifically for PhD students and emerging scholars. Applicants must submit a paper for the event and indicate their interest in the grant.
References
Cocola-Gant, A., Hof, A., Smigiel, C., & Yrigoy, I. (2021). Short-term rentals as a new urban frontier – evidence from European cities. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 53(7), 1601-1608.
Loder, D. (2021). The aesthetics of digital intimacy: Resisting Airbnb’s datafication of the interior. Interiors, 11(2–3), 282–308.
Roelofsen, M. (2022). Hospitality, home and life in the platform economies of tourism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Roelofsen, M., and Goyette, K. (2021) Second shift 2.0. Intensifying housework in platform urbanism. In Strüber, A. and Bauriedl, S. (eds.) Platformization of Urban Life. Towards a Technocapitalist Transformation of European Cities, pp. 119–134. Transcript Publishing – Columbia University Press
Centre for Space, Place and Society 