Temporary populations and sociospatial polarisation in the short-term city

Abstract

Temporary populations – tourists, temporary stayers, non-resident students – constitute a substantial share of many cities’ inhabitants. Their implications are normally the object of separate research, about over tourism, studentification, transnational gentrification. When viewed from the perspective of the sociospatial relations those populations have in and with the city, many similarities emerge in their urban practices, socio economic characteristics, locational and housing preferences. The paper aims to contribute to recent attempts to avoid traditional categorisations and investigate jointly how the inflow of temporary inhabitants produces effects at the urban and sub-urban scales. The COVID-19 pandemic will then be used as a natural experiment to estimate how they distribute in the city of Rome, Italy, which is crucial to a better understanding of their impact. Temporary populations, we argue, are a very visible source of both hard and soft urban changes, and a major driver of not only neighbourhood change but sociospatial polarisation at the whole city scale. The pandemic also offers an occasion to see how dependent cities are on temporary inhabitants and to reflect upon the ambivalence in how they see those populations as either a gain or a burden, something they struggle to attract or as a source of tensions and opposition.