“Infrastructures are matter that enables the movement of other matter”, wrote Brian Larkin (2013).
Indeed, being “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space”, we can also piece together the history of the relationship between humanity and materiality through them.
This relationship, far from being merely technical, has, in fact, cultural as well as symbolic implications. This is why infrastructures are a hot topic for anthropology.
Regarding materiality, our era is characterized by a specific kind, where invisible and visible, tangible and intangible properties intermingle. Platforms represent the current shift of infrastructures and establish unprecedented relations between people -of which they become mediators- and between people and space.
During the last few years, with an acceleration after the pandemic, we are witnessing a double process of platformization of infrastructures and infrastructuralization of platforms (Plantin, 2018). This means that while states and urban administrations are delegating the infrastructural implementation to digital enterprises, making city “smarter” and more efficient -in exchange for profit and users’ data-, concurrently, we are becoming more and more dependent on platforms to interact with others and with the space around us. In this sense, platforms, as non-neutral infrastructures -and therefore political-made of this hybrid materiality are ontologically reframing the social reality.
Starting from an ethnographic reflection based in Athens, Greece, this contribution aims to look at AirBnb, a top player in urban transformation in this city, as an infrastructure and to analyze the relationality between space and people it establishes. In this sense, it also aspires to highlight that what is at stake is a general reframing of the city as a logistic space (Cowen, 2014), where the platformization of tourism contributes to dismantling the relations of people and living space as we know it.
