Platform urbanism across scales: Mapping Airbnb, urban renewal and street corridors in Lisbon
This study analyzes the spatial relationship between Airbnb listings and urban renewal permits in Lisbon across multiple scales, demonstrating that while both processes concentrate in the city center, network-based analysis reveals distinct street-level corridors and temporal sequencing that differ from broader planar patterns.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Cities are living organisms that breathe through their streets, but in recent years, a new kind of pressure has begun to reshape how they function. In many historic European cities, two powerful forces have been converging on the same neighborhoods: the rapid growth of short-term rentals, where homes are listed on digital platforms for tourists, and the physical renovation of old buildings, often funded by private investment and public incentives. While city planners and residents have long worried that these two trends might be feeding off each other to push out permanent residents, the exact nature of this relationship has remained blurry. Is it a simple case of every newly renovated building becoming a vacation home? Or is the reality more complex, with different streets and blocks reacting in unique ways? Understanding this dynamic is crucial because the tools used to manage it—zoning laws, inspection rules, and housing protections—often rely on broad neighborhood boundaries that might miss the specific streets where the real action is happening.
A researcher at Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa set out to map this invisible geography in the city of Lisbon. By gathering data on nearly 32,000 active Airbnb listings and over 6,300 official permits for building renovations between 2015 and 2019, the study created a detailed picture of where these two processes were occurring. The researcher did not just count how many listings or permits existed in a general area; instead, they used two different ways of looking at the map. The first method treated the city as a flat surface, smoothing out the data to show broad "hotspots" of activity. The second method, which offered a sharper view, treated the city as a network of connected lines, forcing the data to follow the actual paths of the streets and intersections. This approach allowed the researcher to see not just where the pressure was high, but exactly which corridors and junctions were driving it.
The results revealed that while both Airbnb listings and building renovations were indeed concentrated in the historic center of Lisbon, they did not always occupy the same ground. When viewed from a distance, the city appeared to have one large, unified zone of intense activity in its southern and central districts. However, when the analysis zoomed in to follow the street network, the picture fractured into distinct patterns. In some areas, like the Baixa-Chiado district and the Avenida da Liberdade, the two forces moved in lockstep, with renovations and short-term rentals lining the same connected blocks. In other neighborhoods, such as Bairro Alto and Misericórdia, the two were close neighbors but not quite on top of each other; the renovations might be on one street while the highest concentration of tourist rentals was on the parallel street right next to it.
The study also uncovered areas where one force clearly dominated the other. In the steep, historic hills of Castelo and Alfama, the presence of short-term rentals was overwhelming, far outstripping the number of recent building permits. Conversely, in several residential areas like Alvalade, the city saw a wave of building renovations that did not immediately translate into a surge of tourist listings. This suggested that while renovation often makes a building more attractive for tourism, it does not automatically guarantee that the building will become a vacation rental. The timing also mattered; the data showed that in some places, a wave of renovations would be followed a year or two later by an increase in listings, but this sequence was not a rule that applied to the entire city.
The researcher tested the resilience of these patterns by looking at what happened when the pandemic hit and tourism suddenly stopped. Even as thousands of listings disappeared during the lockdown, the underlying geography did not vanish. When activity began to return, it flowed back into the same central corridors and junctions that had been busy before, rather than spreading out to new areas. This indicated that the spatial structure of the city's tourism economy was deeply rooted in its physical layout and street network, not just in temporary market conditions. The study also confirmed that these findings held true even when looking at official government registration records or weighting the data by the price of the rental, suggesting the patterns were real and not just an artifact of how the data was collected.
Ultimately, the work demonstrates that the way we measure a city changes what we see. A broad, neighborhood-level view might suggest that a whole district is under uniform pressure, but a street-level view reveals that the pressure is actually organized along specific routes and intersections. For city officials, this means that regulations based on general neighborhood ratios might miss the specific streets where enforcement is most needed or where the risk of displacement is highest. The study does not claim that renovation causes tourism, nor does it prove that one always leads to the other. Instead, it provides a clear, repeatable map showing where these two forces repeatedly meet, where they stay apart, and how they are organized along the very streets that define the city's daily life. This level of detail offers a new way to govern urban change, moving from broad assumptions to targeted actions based on the actual flow of the city.
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