Abstract deadline: 01 October 2024
Manuscript deadline: 01 December 2024
This special issue of Regional Studies aims to draw together the range of research relating to short-term rental accommodation (STRA) regulation and policy in diverse global settings. It has now been a decade since STRA platforms such as Airbnb emerged as a major topic of interest both for urban and regional researchers and for local policymakers. In this time frame, local (and sometimes supralocal) governments around the world have experimented with a diverse set of regulatory approaches, ranging from outright bans to fine-grained spatial or usage-based targets. The Covid pandemic, meanwhile, upended the trajectory of STRA markets in both large cities and smaller towns, and—via a seemingly durable upward shock to remote work arrangements—provoked a shift towards longer-duration “medium-term rentals” which are now both a rapidly growing segment of the STR market and a regulatory blindspot in many jurisdictions.
The special issue will synthesise and showcase cutting-edge research on STRA regulation and its spatial impacts from researchers in geography, regional studies, planning, economics, regional science, sociology, and tourism, or any cognate discipline. The guest editors are open to both qualitative and quantitative contributions focusing on how the rapid introduction of platform-mediated short-term rental accommodation has affected, or been affected by, regulation in cities and regions. Successful contributions may offer theoretically grounded case studies of STRA regulatory interventions, multi-site comparative analyses, examples of researcher-policymaker collaborations, or other creative and novel approaches to the STRA regulation-research interface. Authors of abstracts selected by the guest editors based on goodness-of-fit will be invited to submit a full manuscript. Full manuscripts will go through the journal’s standard peer-review process. A subset of accepted manuscripts will be included in the Policy Debates section of Regional Studies.
Submission Instructions
Interested authors should email an abstract of 250 words to the guest editors at t.sigler@uq.edu.au and david.wachsmuth@mcgill.ca by the 1st of October.