During the past decade, digital platforms like Airbnb and Uber have enabled the development of a new generation of entrepreneurs in tourism and mobility. The mediation of services through digital platforms was initially presented as a form of a sharing economy led by non-professional providers, but it has grown into a new form of capitalist speculation. This special issue presents theoretical and empirical perspectives on platform-mediated tourism by focusing on Airbnb, which is the most notable digital platform specialising in short-term property rental. The case studies included in this issue show that the impacts of short-term renting on neighbourhoods, residents and tourism operators are uneven, but increasingly significant. The authors explore issues of social justice in terms of residents’ quality of life, working conditions, the housing market, urban structure, and the morality of operators who navigate through normative loopholes. They also examine the governance challenges caused by the inadequacy of existing legal frameworks to better regulate platform-mediated activities, and the reactions generated by social movements and city governments. With the outbreak of Covid-19, networks of cities are taking action against platforms to regain their control over data that is needed to regulate platform-mediated tourism services.

There have been two types of scholarly discussion on city branding. On the one hand, city branding has been conceptualised as a differentiation strategy of entrepreneurial cities involved in interspatial competition. On the other hand, researchers have recently emphasised the need to pay attention to increasingly pervasive and transformative forms of city branding, including branding as an urban policy and a form of planning. Drawing on a case study carried out in Helsinki, Finland, this article connects these two approaches by analysing Helsinki’s recent city branding endeavour in the context of the qualitative transformation of the entrepreneurial city. The article shows how city branding highlights and constitutes the city as an entrepreneurial platform and enabler bound up by the extended entrepreneurialisation of society.

Developing the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of urban environments is challenging due to the complex and interconnected nature of the context and objectives. In order to be successful in this challenging environment, professionals working in the urban development arena should have a holistic understanding of the different pillars of sustainable development, as well as various competencies and skills. This paper looks at sustainable urban development (SUD) from the perspective of the skills and competencies required and identifies effective pedagogic practices that could help educate future professionals. In particular, we explore interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning, reflective thinking, and experiential learning, which are needed for understanding various aspects of a complex phenomenon, collaborating with professionals from different fields and coming up with novel and constructive ways of solving complex problems. We first examine these through reviewing and analyzing relevant literature on education for sustainable development, with a focus on SUD. Then, we explore the application of these approaches in practice by describing and analyzing a newly introduced degree program at Tampere University, Finland.

The proliferation of Airbnb listings has been studied in major tourist cities, but much less is known about the phenomenon in Nordic cities. In this paper we have examined the situation in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, which has been largely unexplored in the research literature. Using our situated knowledge as an entry point, this study is based on geostatistical analysis, qualitative analysis of Airbnb listings, thematic conversations with experts and analysis of public discourses through media, to illustrate how Airbnb listings are distributed within the city and what perceptions and responses this phenomenon is generating. In the study, we challenge the public narrative that portrays short-term renting of homes in Helsinki as a form of sharing economy, as opposed to more destructive developments in major European tourist cities.

The current trend of higher education for sustainable urban development links with parallel developments in urban governance and environmental pedagogy. Many programs and policies identify cities and citizens as key drivers of change for sustainable futures, however scholarly work on the related pedagogies is lacking. These endeavors are clearly present in the Tampere city-region, Finland. Supported by national educational and city-regional strategies, the city is promoting sustainable lifestyles and infrastructures by means of multistakeholder governance including citizen participation and sustainability education. This paper analyzes, as a case study of transdisciplinary sustainability education, a collaboration between Tampere University, a skateboarding high school, and the Hiedanranta urban district developed as a real-life laboratory of sustainable urban development. We explore the pedagogical dimensions of the collaboration by drawing from the theoretical perspective of ‘positive recognition’ and conceiving the Hiedanranta skatescape—a socio-physical entity formed around skateboarding—as a ‘boundary object’. The paper suggests urban environments act as boundary objects that enable productive collaboration between various actors when informed by pedagogies of positive recognition. In conclusion, we propose that the value of this approach, binding together multistakeholder governance and transdisciplinary learning, lies in its capacity to encourage novel forms of sustainable agency.