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Airbnb Humanitarianism in the Mediterranean
Abstract
As part of its global Open Homes initiative, in 2017 Airbnb partnered with a Greek NGO called “Safe Today” (ST) to establish a process for Airbnb hosts in Greece to offer free shelter to asylum seekers and other migrants in need of temporary emergency housing, a large number of whom have traveled to Greece from the Middle East. It soon became clear that few local Airbnb hosts were willing to host migrants for free. Committed to upholding the Open Homes vision despite its failure to gain popular support among hosts, Airbnb opted to subsidize this offer of emergency housing itself by granting ST travel vouchers covering the expense of ST staff booking Airbnbs on behalf of those needing the housing, for up to three weeks at a time. ST became authorized to select Airbnb listings as well as which migrants receive Open Homes emergency housing. Over the course of two years of operation, ST has developed certain patterns in executing the Open Homes system. This paper considers two of them: One, ST staff tend to choose women fleeing sexual assault, often within their own displaced communities within Greece. And two, ST staff tend to choose geographically distant, usually more upscale neighborhoods and apartments that are, in the words of one interlocutor, “modern but low tech,” “nice, but not so luxurious that it will make leaving the apartment difficult at the end of the three weeks.” Based in fieldwork on Airbnb in Greece since 2017, this paper asks: what do these dynamics and decisions tell us about how care is being defined at the intersection of austerity governance, humanitarian assistance and the so-called sharing economy in the Mediterranean? How is the fact that hospitality for refugees is triply mediated—through the Airbnb platform, through an NGO, and through property owners and/or amateur or professional Airbnb hosts who may not own the properties—shaping the nature and temporalities of refugee housing? And how does the fact that guests in this hospitality context are survivors of sexual assault figure in the formulation of this version of care?
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Mediterranean Countries
Sub Area
Mediterranean Studies