The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona

A Reporter at Large

The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona

In the tourist-clogged city, some locals see the service as a pestilence.

By Rebecca MeadApril 22, 2019

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/the-airbnb-invasion-of-barcelona?fbclid=IwAR0uYCECJYyKR_JMOXRcijzdbuG-4LgQXhUf1_MtoDojEJCOYRX3uF7c5tc

Even in residential areas, wheelie suitcases constantly rattle over the cobblestones.Illustration by Javier Jaén

In 1904, the city of Barcelona received a petition for development from Eusebi Güell, an industrialist and a patron of the arts. Güell had bought a tract of land on the flank of Muntanya Pelada, or Bald Mountain, which rises above the plain that extends to the city’s port. Güell had ambitious plans for his hillside property: it was to be designed by Antoni Gaudí, the celebrated architect, with sixty houses set on the bosky grounds. Güell’s business model, which required prospective residents to invest in the project before their houses were constructed, was flawed, and only two were ever built. But the grounds were completed. Serpentine paths twisted up the hillside, and at the center of a spectacular bifurcated staircase there was a fountain in the form of a lizard, its skin composed of mosaic shards in blues and yellows.

The development was sold to the city in 1922, four years after Güell’s death, and became a beloved public park, with the lizard as its icon. In time, Park Güell proved too beloved for its own good, and by 2013 nine million visitors were traipsing through it annually. “The Park has almost stopped being used as a park,” a municipal report noted at the time. It had become, instead, a “tourist place.” That year, in an effort to mitigate the damage and crowding caused by so much foot traffic, the city introduced a fee to access the park’s “monumental core,” which includes Gaudí’s staircase, and also limited the number of tickets sold to eight hundred an hour.

From the local government’s perspective, the change was a success: the year after the restrictions were introduced, the number of visitors fell to 2.3 million. Still, the flow remains constant. When I arrived at Park Güell at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in February—hardly peak season—I couldn’t get in for another two and a half hours. When I finally entered the monumental core, at a cost of ten euros, it was as bustling as Coney Island’s boardwalk on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and Instagramming admirers formed a mob around Gaudí’s lizard.

Park Güell’s shift from a shared public space into a cultural zone occupied almost exclusively by tourists is understood by some worried residents of Barcelona as a story about the prospective fate of the city itself. Albert Arias, a geographer with the local government, told me that he had publicly criticized the selling of tickets as “a very bad solution,” adding, “It is acknowledging a problem by fencing off public space.”

Some twenty million tourists descend annually on Barcelona, which has a population of just 1.6 million people. (New York City receives three times as many visitors but has more than five times as many residents absorbing the influx.) A lot of factors have contributed to the throngs in Barcelona. Policy decisions in Madrid, and in Catalonia, encouraged a boom, and framed it as an economic-survival strategy, especially after the global financial crisis of 2008. City officials successfully sold Barcelona to the international market as an especially fun European destination, with good weather, pretty beaches, lively night life, and just enough in the way of museums and architecture to provide diversion without requiring an onerous cultural itinerary.

External forces have also contributed to what critics have called the “touristification” of the city. The growth of Airbnb and the rise of such budget airlines as Ryanair have coincided with Barcelona’s increasing popularity. When Airbnb was founded, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a decade ago, it marketed itself as a more evolved version of couch surfing, in which youthful travellers used social media to find a free place to crash. Couch surfing was predicated on personal exchange: hosts got to know their guests, with the understanding that one day they might spend a free night at their guests’ home. Airbnb introduced the notion of hosts charging an affordable rate for that place to crash, so that a tourist on a budget could book a bed in the spare room of a local’s home. The company soon raised millions of dollars in venture financing, and its listings and aspirations grew glossier. In 2010, Joe Gebbia, one of the founders, told the Times, “We started by renting out spare rooms in our apartment, but it’s grown to entire apartments, homes, castles, boats, even private islands.” Brian Chesky, another founder, said at the time that he saw no reason that Airbnb, which extracts commission fees from all transactions, should not grow into a billion-dollar company, by enabling people in appealing locations to “monetize their house.” Forbes has valued the company, which is planning to go public, at thirty-eight billion dollars.

Currently, one and a half million visitors stay in Airbnbs in Barcelona annually, and although five times as many people book rooms in traditional hotels, the company is influencing what the city feels like, especially for permanent residents. There are almost twenty thousand active Airbnb listings in Barcelona. Even in residential neighborhoods, the sounds of dozens of wheelie suitcases rattling over the cobblestones after an 11 a.m. checkout—and of late-night revellers sampling the bars that have sprung up to cater to them—have become as reliable as the bells of the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s unfinished drip-castle cathedral.

Nearly half the Airbnb properties in Barcelona are entire houses or apartments. The conceit of friendly locals renting out spare rooms has been supplanted by a more mercenary model, in which centuries-old apartment buildings are hollowed out with ersatz hotel rooms. Many properties have been bought specifically as short-term-rental investments, managed by agencies that have dozens of such properties. Especially in coveted areas, Airbnb can drive up rents, as longtime residents sell their apartments to people eager to use them as profit engines. In some places, the transformation has been extreme: in the Gothic Quarter, the resident population has declined by forty-five per cent in the past dozen years.

Lately, owners and agencies have been exploiting a loophole in rental regulations that allows a homeowner to rent out a spare room only occasionally. The loophole is being used to justify a single apartment being divided up into three or four rooms, each with its own lock on the door. These rooms are advertised on Airbnb as separate rentals. A traveller who signs up for one will find himself sharing a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living space with perhaps half a dozen other renters from around the globe, in a de-facto hostel without a host. Reviews on one such apartment, minutes from Park Güell, indicate that some visitors are delighted by its international vibe: “Met people from Japan, China, Hungary and Argentina, all within four days!” Others are less comfortable with the arrangement: “We were concerned when the host told us to pretend to her neighbors that we were her friends visiting and not that we were using Airbnb.”

“And another interesting fact is that they’re not actually fish—they’re mammals.”

Properties used almost exclusively for Airbnb rentals are offered on the company’s Web site with photographs that might have come from a shelter magazine: carefully staged table settings, closeups of fruit bowls. The same neutral, vaguely Scandinavian design can be seen in listings from Bangor to Bangkok. (The critic Kyle Chayka has aptly characterized this aesthetic as “AirSpace.”) The Barcelona Airbnb I stayed in, in the Eixample, an elegant fin-de-siècle district, was typical: stylishly but minimally equipped, with ikea furnishings and a Nespresso machine in the kitchen. There were no signs of regular habitation, which wasn’t a surprise. According to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog site founded by Murray Cox, a Brooklyn-based housing activist, the Eixample apartment, which goes for about two hundred dollars a night, is available to rent three hundred and forty-three days a year. Its owner has five other properties in the city listed on Airbnb.

One neighborhood of Barcelona that has been particularly affected by the phenomenon is the Raval, a section of the old town west of La Rambla, the famed pedestrian thoroughfare. The Raval, which is less than half a mile square, was historically poor and densely populated, its narrow streets lined with tall tenement-style buildings. By the end of the twentieth century, it had become Barcelona’s equivalent of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, associated with drugs, prostitution, and crime. Between the seventies and the nineties, the Raval’s population fell by half, as residents moved to more salubrious neighborhoods. The city then began a program of urban regeneration, using a familiar strategy—designating an area as a cultural zone and constructing museums and academic institutions intended to change its tenor by attracting new visitors and residents. In 1995, a contemporary-art museum opened in the Raval: a stark white building, designed by Richard Meier, which bordered a public plaza. “This is the landmark of the nineties Raval,” Alan Quaglieri Domínguez, a researcher at Rovira i Virgili University, told me. I met him outside the museum one afternoon, for a tour of the Raval.

Today, the area surrounding the museum feels like a grittier version of the sloping plaza leading to the Pompidou Center, in Paris, with skateboarders skimming ramps and walkways. Quaglieri said of the Raval museum, “It’s known more for its façade than its collection.” A terrace café caters to students, tourists, and affluent residents who have recently been drawn to the area. When I visited, a nearby cultural center, which also opened in the nineties, had an exhibit about Stanley Kubrick on display. The true landmark of the contemporary Raval, however, is a billboard that looms over the plaza. Placed there by an activist group, it features an illustration of a “not welcome” mat laid over a puddle of blood, and announces, in Catalan, a list of aggressors to the neighborhood: real-estate speculators, tourist mobs, and Airbnb.

Quaglieri, who is in his late thirties, wore a tweed jacket and a pastel-colored wool scarf as he led me along one of the Raval’s main strips, Carrer de Joaquín Costa. The neighborhood has been a site of political activity since the Spanish Civil War, he explained, and in the first half of the twentieth century it was one of the most densely populated places in Europe. It emptied out in the following decades, but began absorbing a wave of African and Asian immigrants in the nineties. As we walked, we passed halal butchers and stores selling international calling cards. These establishments sat side by side with cocktail bars. The area looked somewhat like the Marais of thirty-five years ago or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section circa 1990: a working-class neighborhood being recast as a site of bohemian charm.

Quaglieri led me down a narrow thoroughfare. “This street was always known among locals as a peculiar one,” he said. Drug dealers had operated on the block, and, for locals, this touch of seediness had made it a humble but relatively affordable place to live. On an Airbnb map, however, the area could be presented as chic: it was close to the best bars and restaurants in the Raval, and it was a ten-minute walk to the Boquería food market, which has been so swamped by visitors that venders have resorted to planting “not a tourist attraction” signs among their unintentionally photogenic displays of fruit and vegetables. “If you put a tourist apartment there, you can rent it quite easily,” Quaglieri went on. “And once there is one, or two, or three, or four, it changes the street.”

Quaglieri’s own apartment building was a few blocks away. Two of its nine apartments, he said, had been listed at one time or another as temporary rentals, including one that had been rented out by two sisters from Romania, both in their twenties. “It was their residential strategy—it was how they could afford the apartment,” he said. Many people advertising properties on Airbnb belong to a generation whose members are accustomed to living with peers. Quaglieri noted that he had often been kept awake by late-night parties conducted in extremely loud Russian or German. Not long ago, when Airbnb guests checked into his building, he knocked on the door and politely reminded them that their hotel was his home. The presence of courtyards at the rear of buildings, typical for the Raval, literally amplifies the noise problem. Once, Quaglieri said, he’d had to get out of bed and go around the block to “infiltrate” a party in an opposite courtyard, in order to ask the visitors to turn the music down.

We continued on to Carrer de la Cera, which is considered the birthplace of the Catalan rumba, and which has long been the center of the city’s Romany population. A handsome building with deep arches and graceful balconies had recently been renovated. A Raval balcony often has a clothesline hung with laundry; Quaglieri noticed a balcony that instead had a small square folding table and two chairs. “This is a classic sign of a tourist apartment,” he said. “I have never seen so many of those as I have done in the past two years.” Such places were being occupied by a transient population, whether their stay lasted three days or three years. As Quaglieri saw it, foreign workers in tech or freelancers in creative industries who temporarily installed themselves in Barcelona, as a life-style choice, before decamping for another alluring city, were not much different from tourists.

Airbnb promises to let visitors “live like a local,” but Quaglieri argues that its users generally have in mind a specific kind of local: someone who lives just as the visitors do back home. This consistent demographic of tourists, interchangeable with one another in their cosmopolitan tastes and habits of consumption, expects to find wherever it goes the café culture of Melbourne, the industrial lighting of Brooklyn, and the Internet speeds of Stockholm. “These people are not looking to live like a working-class family of migrants from Bangladesh,” he said. “They are not looking for that kind of local.”

We crossed the Ronda de Sant Pau, a boulevard that separates the Raval from its more middle-class neighbor Sant Antoni. Quaglieri wanted to show me a café, Federal, which Australian expats had opened a few years ago. We might as well have been in Hackney or the Mission District or anywhere else that hipsters gather: signs, in English, requested that visitors with laptops confine themselves to a large common table, every seat of which was occupied by a young person using the Internet. We ordered drinks: a warm ginger infusion for me, a turmeric latte for Quaglieri. “More and more tourists are looking for things that are generally cosmopolitan,” he said, grimacing as he sipped his inflammation-reducing beverage. Not far away from Federal, Quaglieri told me, the city had proposed creating a “pedestrianized superblock”—an area where car traffic is restricted. Representatives of neighborhood groups had expressed concerns about the proposal, even though it did seem likely to improve their own quality of life. Quaglieri explained the apparent contradiction. “They perceive it as a threat,” he said. “Anything that makes the area more ‘livable’ makes it also more interesting to outsiders. As a result, the local people say, ‘It’s better to do nothing. Otherwise we’re just preparing our neighborhood for this other population.’ ”

Tourism counts for nearly twelve per cent of Barcelona’s economy. But up until the end of the twentieth century Barcelona was seen primarily as an industrial port. Its international profile rose dramatically when it hosted the 1992 Summer Olympics. Among other refurbishments, city planners redeveloped the derelict waterfront and renovated a beach on a spit of land known as the Barceloneta. A new promenade featured a glittering hundred-and-seventy-foot-long stainless-steel sculpture of a fish, by Frank Gehry.

When Airbnb first began offering listings in Barcelona, in 2009, it was in the immediate aftermath of the global financial collapse, and the service was greeted with an almost desperate enthusiasm. Antonio Paolo Russo, a professor of geography at Rovira i Virgili University, told me that signing up with Airbnb brought ready cash to Spanish families struggling with unemployment. By 2010, the city had decided to liberalize the rules governing short-term vacation rentals, and thousands of licenses were soon granted to apartment owners. Over the next four years, the number of licenses in Barcelona quadrupled.

Daniel Pardo, a housing activist in Barcelona, told me that, a decade ago, “talking about tourism as the source of problems was just perceived as crazy.” He added, “It was the official truth that tourism was a good thing, and nobody challenged it.” I met him in a bar in the Gothic Quarter one evening, along with Martí Cusó, another activist in the neighborhood. Pardo, who has thinning hair and a beard, bears a passing resemblance to Lenin; he looked weary, having spent the day fruitlessly challenging a housing eviction. Cusó, who hunched in his chair, wearing a combat jacket, told me that he was a lifelong resident of Barcelona. “I was born inside the first Roman wall, and now I live inside the second one,” he said. But his home town, he said, had become like a theme park—filled with restaurants selling paella, tapas, and sangria, none of which have local origins, but which conform to a generic image of Spain. “Tourism is the face of capitalism in Barcelona,” Cusó said, with resentment. In the building where he lived, two of the nine apartments were short-term rentals, including one whose owner rented it to half a dozen foreign students for six months at a time—at four times the rent he could collect on the ordinary housing market.

The first signs that residents were fed up with tourism came, Pardo and Cusó told me, in the summer of 2014—“the hot summer of the Barceloneta.” In the tiny grid of streets abutting the promenade, there were few hotels, but Airbnb rentals were plentiful. “There was a kind of revolution in the Barceloneta—they were invaded by Airbnb apartments,” Pardo said. (Currently, there are about four hundred listings there.) That August, photographs spread on social media of three young Italian men frolicking in the neighborhood wearing nothing but their watches and goofy grins.

Hundreds of people in the Barceloneta gathered in the streets to protest what the local newspapers called el turismo de borrachera—binge-drinking tourism. Pardo told me, “Most people taking part had never demonstrated before—they just knew they couldn’t stand it anymore. You had tourists who were half naked, people drunk. And the noise—it’s a dense neighborhood, so the noise is heard everywhere.”

The protests in the Barceloneta precipitated greater cohesion among neighborhood groups throughout the city, many of which were concerned about similar problems, such as access to housing and privatization of public space. They began voicing opposition to the pestilence of young visitors who came to Barcelona not to sample the local culture but to enact internationally recognized tropes of partying: going on “limousine pub crawls” or playing beer pong at Flaherty’s Irish Bar, just off La Rambla, as if it were Mardi Gras three hundred and sixty-five days a year. “It’s Magaluf all over again,” a leader of a neighborhood association said at the time. He was referring to a town in Majorca that had become so overrun with intoxicated Britons that the local government was obliged to remind visitors not to defecate in the streets.

By 2017, tourism had risen to the top of a list of Barcelona’s most pressing concerns. According to an annual survey taken by the city, sixty per cent of residents felt that Barcelona had reached or exceeded its capacity to host tourists. Three years earlier, only thirty-five per cent had felt this way. That summer, anti-tourism protesters lined the waterfront, standing knee-deep in the Mediterranean bearing banners reading “this is not a beach resort,” in English, in the face of bikini-clad visitors who were somnolently tanning themselves. Thousands of protesters marched along La Rambla and loudly informed tourists that they were not welcome. Pardo and other activists staged protests against illegal Airbnb apartments by renting them on the site, checking in while using a hidden camera, and then refusing to leave, with the media there as witnesses. They staged an action to expose a landlord who was illegally renting out thirteen apartments in the Ribera neighborhood. After obtaining access to one of the apartments, the activists were about to film themselves reading a manifesto when the manager suddenly came back—and they had to flee. “We forgot to lock the door!” Pardo said, with chagrin. It was the kind of rookie mistake a tourist would make.

It’s easy to see why having your local plaza invaded by naked foreigners could be objectionable when you’re trying to do your grocery shopping. It is less obvious what harm is caused by a new café offering reclaimed-wood trestle tables, free Wi-Fi, and a flat white. In some respects, the growth of Airbnb in Barcelona is not so much a local issue as an example of a global trend in urban gentrification. The Airbnb effect felt in the Raval closely mirrors the transformation in the Amsterdam neighborhood of the Jordaan, a formerly working-class area now filled with bars and boutiques, and in the Venice neighborhood of Giudecca, which used to be off the tourist path but is now studded with rental apartments. Paola Minoia, a geography professor in Helsinki, told me that in Venice it often makes more economic sense to own a rental apartment than to work, since revenues from rentals are taxed at a far lower rate than income. The anti-tourism protests of Barcelona recently spread to Venice, where in a couple of locations the city had installed metal gateways that can be locked when too many visitors show up. Venetians protested the move, calling it a capitulation to the pressure of tourism rather than a solution to it.

In Barcelona, the protests were accompanied by actions from the local government. In 2015, the city elected a left-wing mayor, Ada Colau, in part because she ran on a platform that included taking measures to limit tourism. That year, the city council placed a moratorium on new hotels, and in 2016 Airbnb and another home-sharing platform, HomeAway.com, were each ordered to pay a fine of six hundred thousand euros for having listed unlicensed rentals. (Airbnb appealed the decision, and the case is ongoing.)

Colau, who is up for reëlection in May, has been developing a comprehensive strategy for managing tourism. She commissioned Albert Arias, the scholar who had opposed the introduction of tickets at Park Güell, to explore ways in which government might intervene constructively in the tourism sector, rather than simply letting the marketplace take its course. One significant concern was the effect of Airbnb tourism on Barcelona’s housing market: all those rental apartments had to come from somewhere, and the housing stock for locals was being depleted. In areas with a smaller supply, rents inevitably rose. And Airbnb-filled neighborhoods changed in other ways that made them less hospitable to residents: designer-clothing stores and restaurants flourished while establishments that catered to locals, such as dry cleaners and tailors, shut down. “If you live here, you take a shower, you go for some bread, you go to your workplace, you come back, you buy some fresh fruit,” Arias said. “Maybe once a week, you go to the cinema or have a drink with some friends. But tourists are doing this kind of thing all the time.”

“That escalated and de-escalated quickly.”

Arias’s report, which was issued in 2017, recommends strict enforcement of the prohibition on illegal rentals, and a concerted effort to direct tourism to less popular areas. Arias said that in Barcelona—where some sidewalks are crowded with armies of foreigners on Segways—locals could no longer afford “to think of tourism as a discrete object with clear boundaries.”

Airbnb, aware of the growing hostility toward it, has begun working more closely with local governments. Among other things, it has introduced an online tool that makes it easier for the city to identify hosts who are breaking rental laws. From the company’s perspective, policymakers accustomed to dealing with traditional hospitality operators need to adapt their regulations to the kind of travelling that Airbnb has fostered. Patrick Robinson, the company’s director of public policy for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, told me that Airbnb is not the cause of over-tourism in Barcelona; indeed, by disseminating tourists more widely, the service has helped take the pressure off the city’s central core. But, he acknowledged, “guests who are living cheek by jowl with people who have made their homes there for many years need to engage and behave in an appropriate way.” Robinson said that the platform’s review system, which applies to both guests and hosts, creates an incentive for good behavior—guests who receive consistently bad ratings may find that a subsequent request to rent a property has been rejected. Airbnb has experimented with ads that urge its users to be more considerate. A recent campaign in Amsterdam warned guests, “Please practice selfie-control. These streets get busy!” It also reminded them that “ ‘gracht’ means canal, not garbage bins.”

In places where tourism has so far had less of an impact, and where the local economy is struggling, services such as Airbnb still retain an allure. In Palermo, which, for all its cultural riches, is far less visited than other cities in Italy, the municipal government has partnered with the platform to funnel tourism taxes into neighborhood development projects. Towns in rural Italy are also promoting themselves to visitors: last year, Airbnb began a program intended to encourage tourism in rarely visited villages. Among them are Apricale, a mountaintop settlement in Liguria, and Pisticci, a hamlet in the far south of the country. In such remote places, it is hoped, home-sharing will be accompanied by wealth-sharing. Data-analytics software enables Airbnb to identify parts of the world that are starting to attract interest from visitors, and these destinations are then recommended to other adventurous travellers, through a promotional campaign titled Not Yet Trending. Recent picks include Xiamen, a coastal city in China opposite Taiwan; the Outer Hebrides, in Scotland; and Uzbekistan.

One place that would welcome some of the visitors currently clogging up Barcelona is a tiny municipality in central Italy, not far from Bologna, called Valsamoggia, which I visited in early spring. There, the feeling is simple: the more Airbnb, the better. “Valsamoggia is an authentic place—not like Venice, which is too touristic, and not really Italian,” Federica Govoni, the local council member responsible for tourism, told me as we drove through the area together. The countryside was beautiful: hilly and green, with striking clay cliffs and, Govoni told me, a significant population of wolves. Valsamoggia lacked hotels, she noted, but abandoned farmhouses could easily be converted into lodges for visitors on biking or walking trips, and local residents could rent out spare rooms during truffle-hunting season.

I’d gone to Valsamoggia because it is participating in a pilot program with a startup travel platform called Fairbnb. A coöperative based in Bologna, Fairbnb describes itself as an ethical alternative to its near-namesake. Sito Veracruz, one of the co-founders, a Spaniard who lives in Amsterdam, told me, “Vacation rental is a thing that is not going to disappear—people really enjoy it, and it is here to stay. The question is, How can it be managed in a way that decreases the negative impact and increases the positive?” Hosts on Fairbnb, which is launching in five European cities in June, including Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Bologna, are permitted to advertise only one apartment—their own—in order to prevent the transformation of a family home into a speculative asset managed by a rental agency. The company draws on the logic and appeal of crowdfunding: half of the site’s fifteen-per-cent commission fee is channelled directly into development projects, which are chosen by the owners of the rental properties, the travellers, and the local community. Govoni hoped that Valsamoggia would be receiving some of that funding. “Airbnb is a very good platform for a host, but all the value goes to San Francisco,” she said. “We need to put the value into the town.”

While I was in Valsamoggia, I visited one tumbledown property—a barn, a farmhouse, and a collection of ramshackle stone buildings—whose owner, Paola Larger, has for the past two decades worked as a hiking guide and a hotel manager in the Dolomites. Having discovered Valsamoggia on a trip to visit friends, she had decided to relocate there. Her intention was to live alongside her guests, with the old barn serving as a space for meetings or retreats. “This will be like the village square,” she said, as we picked our way through a rubble-filled forecourt. The site was spectacular, with views over the mountains down to the valley below, though Larger told me that the views would soon be obscured by foliage. “It is like you are in a green bubble,” she said. She had some other ideas for maintaining serenity, such as installing a sauna on the mountainside. “Of course, you have to get the right guests,” she told me. “It’s not for everyone.”

Veracruz said that the home-sharing movement had fallen victim to the tragedy of the commons. An individual apartment dweller might flourish for a while by renting out his spare room on Airbnb, but if his landlord decided that it would be more profitable to turn the entire building into tourist accommodations, he would find himself kicked out when his lease was up. This trend is palpable in Bologna, which is home to one of Italy’s oldest universities, and where students make up more than a fifth of the old city’s residents. Until recently, it was easy to find an inexpensive apartment there; now apartments formerly occupied by students are being turned into tourist rentals. There are currently more than thirty-five hundred listings in the city.

In Bologna, I met an Airbnb host named Mauro Bigi, a personable environmental consultant in his thirties. Five years ago, he and his partner started renting out a room in their apartment, partly to make some extra money but also as a way to meet new people. “We thought maybe two or three people a year would stay,” he said. Instead, the room is now rented out an average of three nights a week. “You meet so many people, and after a few hours they are a friend,” Bigi said. He looked forward to being able to list his apartment on Fairbnb, not least because Airbnb’s algorithm had started pushing him to rent his apartment for a price so low that it no longer made economic sense for him to do so. Airbnb, he went on, encouraged a kind of professionalization of hosting—such as offering twenty-four-hour check-in—that he was unwilling to engage in. “That is not my philosophy,” he said. “I want to meet people and show them the city.”

Bigi and his partner travelled a lot, staying in Airbnb apartments themselves, and often looking up locals they had hosted in Bologna. He knew that some Bolognese saw increased tourism as a blight. “Bologna has two million tourists a year, but if you talk to people the perception is that we are invaded by tourists, like Venice,” he said. “It is visible here because it is new.” Bigi felt that, so far, at least, the commodification of his domesticity had been a good thing. He had lived alongside people from different cultures, and he had learned to adapt as a host; he now put a kettle in the room for Chinese visitors, who appreciated such an amenity. Being an Airbnb host had offered him a useful lesson in mutual understanding, he thought, even if the people he was understanding were people very like himself. The goal was finding the proper balance. “We don’t want fake cities where only tourists live,” Bigi said. “We are residents, and we want to promote our city, not transform it.”

After talking with Bigi, I checked in to my Airbnb: an older couple’s spare bedroom, equipped with an enormous antique wardrobe and high shuttered windows. One of my hosts met me at the door wearing a blue blazer, having made the old-fashioned gesture of dressing up to greet a guest, even one who was paying a hundred and twenty dollars a night. My suitcase safely stowed, I went out for a walk through the handsomely colonnaded streets of the city, and soon arrived at the base of what I had recently learned was its best-known landmark, a pair of twelfth-century brick towers. The smaller one, known as the Garisenda, leans at a vertiginous four-degree angle—a tilt as great as that of its better-known cousin in Pisa. The Bologna towers are on a busy intersection, and were being ignored by all passersby, with not a single tourist posing for a photograph while pretending to hold the Garisenda up. I snapped a picture—I’d never even heard of the leaning tower of Bologna before—but moved on quickly. The street was filled with bustling locals on their way home from work, and the last thing I wanted was to get in the way. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 29, 2019, issue, with the headline “Airbnb Moves In.”

Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch.”Read more »