Digital Transition and Urban Transformation – NETURB

The Covid19 crisis has had a profound effect on the city. Digital platforms appear to be the big winners of the pandemic because, above all, they have offered a low-cost support for social, professional, commercial and cultural dynamics that the city could no longer provide. In other words, the digital territory has partly replaced the physical and geographical territory.
Lockdown has accelerated a variety of digital transitions, giving rise to new urban transformations (Florida et al, 2021). The city is becoming more platform-based, and the associated effects are poorly known, poorly measured, or even unknown. Consequently, the redistributive effects but also new economic, social and geographic inequalities that drive these urban transformations are undoubtedly underestimated. The NETurB project aims to remove these unknowns in order to better understand what is at stake between the digitalization of exchanges, inequalities and urban transformations. It is based on two main and original objectives
1) To measure the effects of the platformization of tourism on urban transformations by focusing on two aspects. The change in the commercial offer and the mix of amenities proposed by the cities and the appearance of socio-spatial segregation phenomena and loss of identity of the neighborhoods affected by short term rentals.
2) The consequences of a generalization of remote working on the location choices of workers and companies and therefore on the dynamics of housing market. Is there a shift in value from central cities to peripheral areas?