Placemaking ‘experiences’ during Covid-19

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which, during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, AirBnb’s successful place-based Experiences product was reimagined as a live online offering, marketed to would-be tourists living under ‘stay at home’ orders. Using online ethnographic and interpretive analysis of these new virtual experiences, we highlight a series of core placemaking strategies employed by hosts of the once in-situ experiences to show how they reemerge as interactive digital placemakers. In doing so, we elucidate how live, multimedia digital experiences become part of an evolution in the creation of ‘placemarkets’ that are now fundamental to both global mobility and globalized commercial exchange in the experience economy. Beyond the technological features used for these placemaking experiences, we find that the experience hosts and their manifold strategies to substantively engage participants – particularly through igniting their senses – are at the crux of digital placemaking; it is the affective labor of the hosts that most contributes to experiencing emplacement.