Community and Urban Sociology

It’s a Setup: Fathering from the Social and Economic Margins

By Timothy Black and Sky Keyes

The expectation for fathers to be more involved with parenting their children and pitching in at home are higher than ever, yet broad social, political, and economic changes have made it more difficult for low-income men to be fathers. In It’s a Setup, Timothy Black and Sky Keyes ground a moving and intimate narrative in the political and economic circumstances that shape the lives of low-income fathers. Based on 138 life history interviews, they expose the contradiction that while the norms and expectations of father involvement have changed rapidly within a generation, labor force and state support for fathering on the margins has deteriorated. Tracking these life histories, they move us through the lived experiences of job precarity, welfare cuts, punitive child support courts, public housing neglect, and the criminalization of poverty to demonstrate that without transformative systemic change, individual determination is not enough. Fathers on the social and economic margins are setup to fail.

Airbnb, Short-Term Rentals and the Future of Housing

By Lily M. Hoffman, Barbara Schmitter Heisler

How do Airbnb and short-term rentals affect housing and communities? Locating the origins and success of Airbnb in the conditions wrought by the 2008 financial crisis, the authors bring together a diverse body of literature and construct case studies of cities in the US, Australia and Germany to examine the struggles of local authorities to protect their housing and neighborhoods from the increasing professionalization and commercialization of Airbnb.

The book argues that the most disruptive impact of Airbnb and short-term rentals has been on housing and neighborhoods in urban centers where housing markets are stressed. Despite its claims, Airbnb has revealed itself as platform capitalism, incentivizing speculation in residential housing. At the heart of this trajectory is its business model and control over access to data. In a first narrative, the authors discuss how Airbnb has institutionalized short-term rentals, consequently removing long-term rentals, contributing to rising rents and changing neighborhood milieus as visitors replace long-term residents. In a second narrative the authors trace the transformation of short-term rentals into a multibillion-dollar hybrid real estate sector promoting a variety of flexible tenure models. While these models provide more options for owners and investors, they have the potential to undermine housing security and exacerbate housing inequality.

While the overall effects have been similar across countries and cities, depending on housing systems, local response has varied from less restrictive in Australia to increasingly restrictive in the United States and most restrictive in Germany. Although Airbnb has made some concessions, it has not given any city the data needed to efficiently enforce regulations, making for costly externalities. Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to students and scholars in Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Housing and Tourism Studies.

Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy by Rachael A. Woldoff and Robert C. Litchfield

A small but growing group of today’s knowledge workers actively seek a lifestyle of freedom, using technology to perform their jobs, traveling far and wide, and moving as often as they like. These digital nomads have left their local coffee shops behind and now proudly post their “office of the day” photos from exotic locales, but what do their lives really look like?

In Digital Nomads, Rachael Woldoff and Robert Litchfield take readers into an expatriate digital nomad community in Bali, Indonesia to better understand this growing demographic of typically Millennial workers. Through dozens of interviews and several stints living in a digital nomad hub, Woldoff and Litchfield present new answers to classic questions about community, creativity, and work. They further show why digital nomads leave their conventional lives behind, arguing that creative class and Millennial workers, though successful, often feel that their “world class cities” and desirable jobs are anything but paradise. They first follow their transitions into freelancing, entrepreneurship, and remote work, then explain how digital nomads create a fluid but intimate community abroad in the company of like-minded others. Ultimately, Woldoff and Litchfield provide insight into digital nomads’ efforts to live and work in ways that balance freedom, community, and creative fulfillment in the digital age.

A sympathetic yet critical take on this emerging group of workers, Digital Nomads provides a revealing take on the changing nature of work and the problems of the new economy.

Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires by Jacob Lederman

What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those efforts teach us about fast-evolving changes in city planning practices and why so many local officials chase a nearly identical vision of world-class urbanism.

Lederman explores the influence of Northern nongovernmental organizations and multilateral agencies on a prominent city of the global South. Using empirical data, keen observations, and interviews with people ranging from urban planners to street vendors he explores how transnational best practices actually affect the lives of city dwellers. His research also documents the forms of resistance enacted by everyday residents and the tendency of local institutions and social relations to undermine the top-down plans of officials. Most important, Lederman highlights the paradoxes of world-class urbanism: for instance, while the priorities identified by international agencies are expressed through nonmarket values such as sustainability, inclusion, and livability, local officials often use market-centric solutions to pursue them. Further, despite the progressive rhetoric used to describe urban planning goals, in most cases their result has been greater social, economic, and geographic stratification.

Chasing World-Class Urbanism is a much-needed guide to the intersections of culture, ideology, and the realities of twenty-first-century life in a major Latin American city, one that illuminates the tension between technocratic aspirations and lived experience.