Planning and the So-Called ‘Sharing’ Economy / Can Shared Mobility Deliver Equity?/ The Sharing Economy and the Ongoing Dilemma about How to Plan for Informality/ Regulating Platform Economies in Cities – Disrupting the Disruption?/ Regulatory Combat? How the ‘Sharing Economy’ is Disrupting Planning Practice/ Corporatised Enforcement: Challenges of Regulating AirBnB andOther Platform Economies/ Nurturing a Generative Sharing Economy for Local Public Goods and Service Provision

Abstract

Corporatised enforcement: Challenges of regulating AirBnB and other platform economiesPlatforms such as AirBnB, Uber, Taskrabbit etc are proliferating across the globe.Their success and popularity has been based on positioning themselves as companies that offer flexibility to freelance workers and asset owners and enable them to make 'a bit of money on the side'.For their consumers, it is about enhanced and authentic customer experience of sharing, at a lower cost.While this rhetoric of 'sharing' is, at first glance, flexible, inclusive and empowering, on closer examination it presents myriad contradictions and controversies as soon as the platforms begin interacting with existing practices and governance infrastructures.As Tom Slee (2016) amongst others have pointed out, digital platform companies such as AirBnB and Uber openly disrupt and often disregard local laws governing labor, housing, health, safety, accessibility and so forth in order to safeguard their for-profit operations.A key manifestation of this is their reluctance to share data on their platform-mediated economic activities and cooperate with local authorities who need it in order to enforce local laws and policies, citing confidentiality and privacy amongst other reasons.In our study of short-term letting in London, for instance, we noted that local authorities struggled to gain access to corporate data to assess the extent of the phenomenon, the percentage of entire homes, as well as the overall length, which was necessary to enforce the 90-day limit on short term lets (Ferreri and Sanyal, 2018; Holman et al., 2018).In addition, platforms have also been slow to respond to criticisms around discrimination (Edelman, Luca & Svirsky, 2017), sexual assault 1 and other preventable issues.In other words, they have for a long time reaped the benefits of connecting people to goods and services whilst absolving themselves of responsibility to manage problems when they arise, and preventing access to legislators.