How Short Term City Visitors Widen Urban Inequality

The Invisible Majority

On any given night in Rome, roughly one in every twelve people sleeping within the city limits does not call the city home. They are tourists in Airbnbs, exchange students in shared apartments, digital nomads on three-month leases, academics on sabbatical, conference attendees, temporary workers. They are, collectively, a shadow population that cities have learned to love for the money they spend and fear for the pressure they exert. But according to a 2022 paper by Barbara Brollo and Filippo Celata in Urban Studies, we have been thinking about these temporary residents all wrong.

The authors argue that short term city visitors are not just a nuisance for locals or a boost for the economy. They are a structural force that reshapes entire cities from the inside out. And the COVID-19 pandemic, which emptied Rome of its temporary population almost overnight, provided a natural experiment that revealed something uncomfortable: the very people cities court most aggressively are also the ones widening the gap between rich and poor neighborhoods.

Brollo and Celata (2022) analyzed data from Airbnb listings, university enrollment records, and census tracts across Rome's 155 urban zones. They compared pre pandemic patterns from 2019 with pandemic-era data from 2020, when tourism collapsed and students fled home. What they found was not just a dip in visitors. It was a map of inequality drawn in real time.

Why a Tourist and a Student Are Not So Different

The Shared DNA of Temporary Populations

Conventional urban research treats tourists, students, and temporary workers as separate species. Tourists get studied under "overtourism." Students get their own literature on "studentification." Digital nomads fall under "transnational gentrification." Each group has its own academic silo, its own policy recommendations, its own moral panic.

Brollo and Celata (2022) argue this segmentation is a mistake. When you look at where these groups actually live and what they do in the city, the boundaries blur. A tourist renting a short term apartment in Trastevere and a graduate student sharing a flat in San Lorenzo are not engaged in fundamentally different urban practices. Both are young, relatively affluent, and mobile. Both cluster in the same central neighborhoods. Both compete for the same housing stock. Both drive up rents and change the character of streetscapes. Both are, from the perspective of the permanent resident, a source of both opportunity and irritation.

The authors call this phenomenon the "short term city" a place where temporary inhabitants are not a fringe presence but a structural component of urban life. In Rome, they estimate that temporary populations accounted for roughly 8 percent of the city's total inhabitants before the pandemic. That is not a rounding error. That is a demographic force.

The Geography of Privilege

Here is where the data gets specific. Brollo and Celata (2022) mapped the distribution of temporary populations across Rome and found a stark pattern. Temporary residents concentrate overwhelmingly in the historic center and in a handful of adjacent neighborhoods. These are the same areas that already have the highest property values, the best public services, and the most cultural amenities.

In the historic center, temporary populations made up more than 30 percent of the total inhabitants in some census tracts. In the outer suburbs, the figure was close to zero. The temporary city does not spread evenly. It colonizes the most desirable real estate.

This matters because temporary residents do not just occupy space. They transform it. They push up housing costs, shift the retail mix toward souvenir shops and chain cafes, and reduce the stock of long term rentals. The permanent residents who get displaced are not the wealthy. They are the working class families, the elderly, the artists, the people who made those neighborhoods interesting in the first place.

The Pandemic as a Natural Experiment

What Happened When the Visitors Vanished

In March 2020, Italy became the first Western country to impose a national lockdown. Tourism stopped. Universities went remote. The temporary population of Rome collapsed.

Brollo and Celata (2022) used this moment as what they call a "natural experiment" to observe what happens when a city's temporary inhabitants suddenly disappear. They compared Airbnb data, student housing patterns, and mobility statistics from 2019 and 2020. The results were revealing.

The number of active Airbnb listings in Rome dropped by roughly 60 percent between March and June 2020. The neighborhoods that had the highest concentration of temporary residents saw the steepest declines in foot traffic, the most shuttered businesses, and the most dramatic drops in rent prices. For a few months, the historic center became quieter, cheaper, and more accessible to permanent residents.

But here is the paradox. The authors found that the pandemic did not reduce sociospatial polarization. It temporarily reversed it in some neighborhoods, but the underlying structure remained intact. The same areas that were most dependent on temporary populations were also the most vulnerable to their absence. When the visitors came back, and they did start coming back by summer 2020, the polarization returned.

The Ambivalence of Dependence

The pandemic exposed a tension that cities rarely acknowledge. Temporary populations are both a gain and a burden. They bring money, but they also bring pressure. They make neighborhoods vibrant, but they also make them unaffordable. Cities market themselves to tourists and students, then complain about overtourism and studentification.

Brollo and Celata (2022) argue that this ambivalence is not a contradiction. It is a feature of how short term cities work. Temporary inhabitants are a source of both hard changes like rising rents and shifting demographics, and soft changes like changing noise levels and street culture. Cities want the benefits without the costs, but the two are inseparable.

What This Means for Inequality

The Polarization Mechanism

The central claim of Brollo and Celata (2022) is that temporary populations are a driver of sociospatial polarization at the whole city scale. This is not just about gentrification in a few hip neighborhoods. It is about a structural shift that widens the gap between the city's winners and losers.

Here is how the mechanism works. Temporary residents concentrate in already advantaged areas. Their presence drives up costs in those areas, pushing out lower income permanent residents. Those displaced residents move to cheaper, more peripheral neighborhoods, which then become more crowded and less well served. Meanwhile, the advantaged areas become even more exclusive, catering to a transient population that has no long term stake in the community.

The result is not just inequality. It is polarization. The gap between the richest and poorest neighborhoods grows, and the middle ground shrinks. The short term city does not just displace people. It re organizes the entire urban fabric around the needs of the temporary.

The Numbers Tell the Story

The authors do not provide a single headline statistic, but the pattern is clear from their data. In Rome's historic center, the share of temporary residents in some zones exceeded 30 percent. In the outer suburbs, it was below 1 percent. The correlation between temporary population density and socioeconomic indicators like income, education level, and property value was strong and positive.

This means that the neighborhoods that already had the most resources were also the ones attracting the most temporary residents. The neighborhoods that needed investment and stability were getting neither. The short term city was not just reflecting existing inequality. It was amplifying it.

What the Research Does Not Prove

This is a study of Rome, not of every city. The authors are careful to note that their findings are context specific. Rome has a particularly large historic center, a strong tourism economy, and a rigid housing market. Other cities may show different patterns.

The study also does not prove causation in the strict sense. It shows a strong correlation between temporary population density and sociospatial polarization, but it cannot rule out the possibility that both are driven by some third factor, like a city's overall economic trajectory. The pandemic natural experiment helps, but it is not a controlled trial.

And the paper does not address the question of what to do about all this. Brollo and Celata (2022) are diagnosticians, not policymakers. They identify the problem but do not prescribe solutions. That is a job for city planners, housing advocates, and elected officials.

Why This Changes the Conversation

The conventional wisdom on temporary populations is that they are a problem of scale. Too many tourists, too many students, too many short term rentals. The solution, the thinking goes, is to cap numbers, regulate platforms, and spread visitors out.

Brollo and Celata (2022) suggest something more troubling. The problem is not just the number of temporary residents. It is the way they concentrate in space and the way that concentration interacts with existing inequality. Even if you capped the total number of tourists in Rome, you would still have the polarization problem if those tourists all stayed in the same few neighborhoods.

This reframes the policy debate. It is not enough to regulate Airbnb or build more student housing. You have to ask who gets access to the city's most desirable spaces, and for how long. The short term city is not just a housing issue. It is a spatial justice issue.

What This Actually Means

Four Takeaways

• ▸Cities need to track temporary populations as carefully as they track permanent ones. Most cities have no idea how many temporary residents they have at any given time, let alone where they live. Without data, policy is blind.

• ▸Neighborhood level regulation matters more than citywide caps. If temporary populations cluster in a few zones, then those zones need targeted policies, like restrictions on short term rentals or requirements for long term leases. A citywide cap will not fix a neighborhood level problem.

• ▸The benefits of temporary populations are not evenly distributed. The money tourists spend goes mostly to the neighborhoods they visit. The costs of their presence, like higher rents and crowded streets, are also concentrated. Cities need to find ways to redistribute the benefits, for example through taxes that fund affordable housing in peripheral neighborhoods.

• ▸The pandemic showed that cities are more dependent on temporary populations than they realize. But it also showed that dependence is a choice. Cities can design policies that reduce their vulnerability to the whims of transient populations. Or they can keep chasing the short term dollar and accept the polarization that comes with it.

The short term city is not going away. But it does not have to be a machine for producing inequality. The question is whether cities are willing to look at the data, acknowledge the trade offs, and make different choices.