A dimensão espacial da atuação da Airbnb na cidade do Rio de Janeiro: articulações entre Geografia, Turismo e Inovações disruptivas na primeira metade do Século XXI.

Abstract

How fantastic it would be if, based on the technological advances that mark the contemporary world, the social structures markedly based on the exacerbation of consumerism and extreme individualism, resulting from the global centrality of neoliberalism as a way of life, were undermined by new connections based on the collectivization of goods and social and environmental sustainability. In this new world, digital technologies would support the development of sharing as a new modus operandis of economic relations, which would be characterized by the intensive use of digital tools to break with the previously hegemonic logic. In the society of disruptive innovations, the main characteristic of innovative companies – startups – would be their potential to completely disrupt the existing social and economic foundations. The impacts would be perceived locally and globally due to the high reach of the companies that operate in the virtual world, but also due to the incentive to new consumption patterns. As this optimistic version of the performance of digital sharing platforms is subject to much criticism, we intend to assess the level of disruption that Airbnb, one of the main companies associated with the so-called sharing economy, causes in the spatial organization of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the main leisure tourist destination in the country. For the development of the research, we proposed to work with a quali-quantitative analysis of the supply and use data of the properties listed on the platform for the city of Rio de Janeiro. To theoretically support the thesis, multidisciplinary literature reviews were developed, with emphasis on research in Informatics, Economics, Law and Human Sciences, with emphasis on Geography, focusing on the main themes associated with the development of the company: the intensive use of new technologies, disruptive innovation, the sharing economy, platform capitalism and the regulation of services linked to applications. The main method of analysis works with the search for a series of contradictions in the relationship between discourse and reality so that, from the opposition of data, facts and discourse, we can understand the company's performance in a more coherent way with reality. These elements bring us closer to a theoretically critical and philosophically dialectical research. The results point to a certain divergence between the corporate discourse and the spatial organization resulting from Airbnb performance in Rio de Janeiro, repeating a pattern already observed in other tourist destinations that, despite the promises of spatial dispersion in the offer of beds, repeats the model of territorialization concentrated in the traditional tourist areas of the main destinations.