Welcome To AirSpace
Welcome To AirSpace
Welcome To AirSpace
1P
Igor is a co-founder of Third Wave.
Strategy consultancy based in Berlin that works with small-scale industrial
manufacturers.
Company in many places across Europe and the US.
Uses foursqaure for food reccomendations.
2P
Foursquare reccomoends the same looking places.
Every coffee place looks the same
3P
Foursquare are producing "a harmonization of tastes" across the world.
It creates you going to the same place all over again.
4P
Technology is shaping the world around us.
Things like social media are doing this as well.
And other apps such as AirBnb
5P
We could call this strange geography created by technology "AirSpace."
Seamless venture from one place to another.
6P
It’s possible to travel all around the world and never leave AirSpace
Well-off travelers like Kevin Lynch, an ad executive who lived in Hong Kong Airbnbs
for three years,
are abandoning permanent houses for digital nomadism.
7P
As the geography of AirSpace spreads, so does a certain sameness
Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport—‘all the same
8P
The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once
the hallmark of hotels and airports,
qualities that led the French anthropologist Marc Augé to define them in 1992
as "non-places," has leaked into the rest of life.
9P
These small pockets of geography grow to resemble one another
As affluent, self-selecting group of people move through spaces linked by
technology
10P
Being accelerated by companies that foster a sense of placelessness
Airbnb is a prominent example.
Even as it markets unique places as consumable goods,
it helps its users travel without actually having to change their environment,
or leave the warm embrace of AirSpace.
11P
Airbnb is a company that allows hosts to rent out unused space of their own homes.
More than 2 million spaces in over 190 countries.
Experience a place like you live there," is the company’s current credo.
It heralds "a world where you can belong anywhere."
12P
By late 2012, it settled into the house-porn format it embraces today, with high-
resolution,
full-bleed images that could have been pulled from the pages of Dwell.
13P
Laurel Schwulst started perusing Airbnb listings across the world
in part to find design inspiration for her own apartment.
"I viewed it almost as Google Street View for inside homes"
The Airbnb experience is supposed to be about real people and authenticity,"
Schwulst says.
"But so many of them were similar."
14P
Prevalence of mass-produced but tasteful furniture, for one
But the similarities went beyond mass-production.
The ideal Airbnb is both unfamiliar and completely recognizable:
It’s funny how you want these really generic things but also want authenticity,
too," Schwulst says.
15P
It offered a vision of possessiveness,
in which visitors consume recognizable symbols rather than encountering unfamiliar
ones:
"The local coffee shop is yours, too."
16P
"You can feel a kind of trend in certain listings.
There’s an International Airbnb Style that’s starting to happen," Harvey continues.
some of it is really a wonderful thing that gives people a sense of comfort and
immediate belonging when they travel, and some of it is a little generic.
17P
Airbnb is evolving toward replicating the hotel
its aesthetic arises from tens of thousands of people making the
same independent decisions rather than a corporate mandate.
something like a Days Inn but more stylish and less obvious —
a generic space hidden behind a seemingly unique facade.
18P
Yet Airbnb would prefer to dispel any association with the non-local.
When I asked Harvey to clarify his definition of International Airbnb Style
a PR rep interjected, and stopped our correspondence short
"Each host and guest will have their own personal thoughts on this phrase."
white or bright accent walls, raw wood, Nespresso machines, Eames chairs,
patterned rugs on bare floors, open shelving, the neutered Scandinavianism of HGTV.
"As long as it doesn’t look cluttered and old." suggests Natascha Folens
19P
International Airbnb Style may be associated with comfort and accessibility,
but it is far from equally accessible to everyone.
started the hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack to highlight experiences of discrimination on
the platform
hosts accepting reservations from an account with a white or anonymous avatar and
denying a dark-skinned one.
study finding that users with stereotypically African-American
names were 16 percent less likely to be accepted by hosts.
20P
Meanwhile, International Airbnb Style continues to reproduce, sometimes by outright
appropriation.
Zoé de Las Cases and Benjamin Dewé, a French interior designer couple,
shocked when they discovered that Airbnb had replicated the design of an apartment
that they listed on the platform
for a meeting room in the company’s San Francisco corporate office
down to a trio of faux-industrial pendant lights, a twee chalkboard,
and a floating shelf full of almost identical art objects
They are branding their company with our life
21P
Bottom says the meeting rooms were the brainchild of Airbnb founders Joe Gebbia and
Brian
Gensler arranged the company’s meeting rooms around an atrium so that,
"when you looked up through the atrium space, it was like looking at little
snapshots of various cities," Bottom says.
All places, in one place. Imagine traveling across continents in a pilgrimage to
the
headquarters of the company that helps you open your house to strangers only to
find yourself — at home.
22P
other startups are creating this globalized sameness-as-a-service in a self-
enclosed package,
a holistic AirSpace lifestyle.
23P
Haid is the founder of Roam, an international "co-living" startup that promises its
users
"Roamers" — the ability to move freely across residences in different countries for
a monthly fee of $2,000
24P
Roam Madrid is in an ornate 19th century building previously owned by the Vatican,
and Ubud is a former boutique hotel.
But they share a basic structure: "a shared kitchen, even-sized private bedrooms,
all have private bathrooms.
The communal areas always have a really nice co-working space,
always have high-end physical networking gear," Haid says.
25P
Roam guarantees that you can cook in the same kitchen
and sit in the same chair under the same light anywhere in the world.
the company is betting that this experience is now what we prefer to constructing
our own unique spaces.
a professional nomadic community," says David Cornthwaite,
a self-identified adventurer and blogger who was one of the first residents at Roam
Ubud.
"We had an almost full house, 24 rooms," he says. "It was a perfect space.
26P
Aesthetic homogeneity is a product that users are coming to demand, and tech
investors are catching on.
It’s not like you’re at a Holiday Inn that’s the exact same everywhere,
but there’s a feeling of familiarity even in the midst of diversity
Collaborative Fund, which invested in Roam. "I can stay in other people’s homes
with them,
eat apples they got from their own farmer’s market."
27P
desirable places should be both specific enough to be interesting and
generic enough to be as convenient as possible, consumed quickly and easily
equal parts authentic and expendable
"people are always, and never, at home."
If we can be equally at home everywhere, as Roam and Airbnb suggest,
doesn’t that mean we are also at home nowhere?
The next question is, do we mind?
28P
But the anesthetized aesthetic of International Airbnb Style is the symptom of a
deeper condition, I think.
29P
Why is AirSpace happening?
One answer is that the internet and its progeny — Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram,
Airbnb
is to us today what television was in the last century, with "a certain ability to
transmit
and receive and then apply layers of affection and longing and doubt,"
a global grid of 1.6 billion:
Facebook’s population of monthly active users,
all acting and interacting more or less within the same space,
learning to see and feel and want the same things.
30P
The connective emotional grid of social media platforms is what drives the
impression of AirSpace.
If taste is globalized, then the logical endpoint is a world in which aesthetic
diversity decreases.
It resembles a kind of gentrification:
so economically similar urban areas around the world might increasingly
resemble each other and become interchangeable.
31P
aesthetic gentrification… divides the new world map in the light of a softer post-
Cold War prejudice:
the fashionable and the unfashionable world."
You either belong to the AirSpace class or you don’t.
32P
Rochelle Short was an Airbnb Superhost in Seattle
(the designation requires many guests, high response rates, and perfect reviews).
She started on the platform in 2013 and became a kind of guru for hosts through her
blog,
Letting People In. But she stopped hosting this year, as Airbnb itself has in a way
become gentrified.
33P
"I think the demographic started to change," Short says.
Airbnb felt like a true social experiment,
"pioneering new territory, attracting people who were open-minded, easy-going,
became the vanilla tourist who wanted the Super 8 motel experience.
I don’t like these travelers as much as the earlier days."
34P
Airbnb moved from passively shaping the spaces users inhabit, to changing the way
they travel
by creating in-app guidebooks that will provide Foursquare-like recommendations
Just this week, the company also announced Samara, an in-house design and
engineering studio that will
"pioneer services for connection, commerce, and social change within and around the
expanding Airbnb community,"
35P
the geography it creates, limits experiences of difference in the service
of comforting a particular demographic ("the vanilla tourist")
It is a "hallucination of the normal," as Koolhaas writes.
if you do not fit within its predefined structures as an effective user, you must
be doing something wrong.
36P
consequences is depersonalization, in the psychiatric sense:
"a state in which one loses all sense of identity."
It’s hard to identify with something so empty at its core.
37P
The first is finding "the advantages of blankness," as Koolhaas writes,
becoming connoisseurs of "the color variations in the fluorescent lighting of an
office building just before sunset,
the subtleties of the slightly different whites of an illuminated sign at night."
Kanyi Maqubela, the Roam investor, sees meaning in the generic from an unexpected
source.
"If you go to Catholic church in most parts of the world, the mass is going to feel
like the mass.
There is still a sense of unity,"
"We’re starting to enter the world where these private companies have some of that
magic to them,
the notion of feeling at home across time zones in any country."
38P
While it would be impossible to stop the spread of the generic style
like trying to stop all hotels from looking the same
there are still steps to consider against the imperfect frictionlessness of the
territory it occupies.
This could come in the form of legislation that resists the spread of services like
Airbnb
or a simple personal choice to become more invested in the local than the mobile
to opt for the flawed community bed & breakfast rather than the temporary,
immaculate apartment.
Seeking out difference is important, particularly when technology makes it so easy
to avoid doing so.
39P
Left unchecked, there is a kind of nightmare version of AirSpace that could spread
room by room,
It’s already there, if you look for it.
There are blank white lofts with subway-tile bathrooms, modular furniture, wall-
mounted TVs, high-speed internet,
and wide, viewless windows in every city, whether it’s downtown Madrid; Nørrebro,
Copenhagen; or Gulou, Beijing.
you can head out to their favorite coffee shops, bars, or workspaces, which will be
instantly recognizable
because they look just like the apartment that you’re living in.
You will probably enjoy it. You might think, ‘This is nice, I am comfortable.’
And then you can move on to the next one, only a click away.