Steven Watson | EdgeLab | Research and Scholarship | 19 September 2026
Can a city become more valuable while becoming harder to inhabit? The familiar story is gentrification: investment arrives, wealthier residents move in and poorer residents are displaced. But that sequence can miss slower changes in which homes become visitor accommodation, neighbourhood shops become hospitality businesses and public space is reorganised around temporary use—even when the census does not show wholesale population replacement.
Looking beyond gentrification
Angelo Salento and colleagues examine this problem through Cagliari, Catania and Lecce, three intermediate cities in Southern Italy. Their open-access study argues that urban rent is a better starting point than gentrification. Rent here means the value that can be extracted from land and property as their permitted, profitable or desirable uses change.
The authors distinguish two linked processes. Marginal land rent accompanied twentieth-century expansion, as agricultural and peripheral land became urban. That outward movement helped empty historic centres. Differential rent later emerged through renovation, tourist accommodation and changes of use in already built areas. On this account, today’s tourism-led conversion did not begin from nowhere: earlier development helped create the devalued central spaces in which new profit could be found.
The study uses a convergent mixed-methods design. It combines census and tourism series, property values and rents, affordability calculations, planning documents, direct observation, a survey of 1,514 residents and 57 semi-structured interviews with residents, businesses and institutional or collective actors. The authors integrate these sources around what they call foundational liveability: the income left after essential costs, access to everyday services, and the social infrastructure that enables collective life.
The central empirical claim is that urban uses can be replaced without a clear replacement of residents. Across the cases, short-term accommodation and hospitality expand while stable housing and neighbourhood services contract. The form varies: touristification is emerging in Cagliari, selective in Catania and more systemic in Lecce. Yet the shared pressure appears in rental access, affordability and the changing functions of historic centres.
The study’s strongest contribution
The paper is strongest when it changes what researchers look for. A stable population is not proof that residential life is secure. People may remain while nearby food shops disappear, housing becomes harder for younger households to enter, night-time uses dominate public space and long-term rental options shrink. The proposed indicators—short-term rental concentration, accommodation visibility, hospitality versus neighbourhood retail, and floor area affordable from a local wage—make this argument testable.
The comparison also resists treating smaller cities as incomplete versions of metropolises. The three cases are deliberately different in size, planning history and tourism trajectory. This makes the recurring sequence analytically interesting, while the authors are commendably explicit that the cases are not a statistical sample and set out conditions under which their framework should fail.
Is pressure really consent?
The most provocative claim needs more restraint. Large majorities reported rising property prices and short-term rentals, and roughly half had experienced difficulty finding rental housing. Yet respondents also rated tourism’s vitality and opportunities positively, while support for more rules on short-term rentals remained below the midpoint. The authors call this the “consensual closure” of the rent gap.
That pattern is important, but consent is a demanding interpretation. The article reports the survey size but not enough detail about recruitment, response rates, weighting or the composition of each city sample for a reader to judge representativeness from the paper alone. More importantly, aggregate agreement does not show that the same people who bear the greatest housing costs also reject regulation, or why they do so.
The proposed explanation—that places with few economic alternatives experience tourism as the only available source of vitality—is plausible and supported by interviews. It is not directly tested as a causal relation. Property ownership, work in tourism, age, tenancy, neighbourhood and knowledge of possible regulations could all shape responses. Positive judgement may express constrained acceptance, ambivalence or a preference for targeted measures rather than active consent to continued conversion.
A plausible alternative reading is therefore that residents value tourism and oppose some restrictions while still wanting affordable housing and everyday services. Those positions need not form a coherent political endorsement of the existing rent regime. Individual-level survey analysis and interviews focused on policy trade-offs would help distinguish consent, resignation, divided interests and conditional support.
An AE interpretation: what does urban success renew?
The following is my interpretation, not the authors’ theoretical claim. Autopoietic ecology asks what an activity makes possible next. A city can repeatedly produce rising visitor numbers, renovated property and hospitality income while weakening the capacities required for residents to continue living there. Success in one sequence can therefore depend on depletion elsewhere.
EdgeLab’s political-economy programme examines how burdens move between domains and whether those who encounter them can make them count in later decisions. In these cities, a dwelling becomes an income-generating visitor space; a neighbourhood shop becomes a hospitality service; noise, travel and care burdens move towards permanent residents. The critical question is not only whether these losses are visible. It is whether evidence of them changes licensing, land use, taxation, housing allocation or the protection of essential services.
The AE Concept Guide distinguishes an output from renewal of the capacity that produced it. Applied here, property valorisation may renew the political and material conditions for further valorisation: higher values reward owners, encourage conversion and strengthen resistance to regulation. At the same time, the city’s capacity to support ordinary residence may decline. The paper does not prove this AE account, but its mixed evidence makes the tension unusually visible.
What should policy and research follow?
A useful next study would connect household position to political judgement: who owns property, who rents, who works in tourism, who struggles to find housing, and which measures each person supports. It should also follow specific planning decisions over time. When affordability, service loss or coexistence problems are documented, does the next allocation or rule change?
Policy evaluation should then track more than tourist arrivals, investment and aggregate population. It should ask whether stable housing remains accessible on local wages, whether essential services persist, and whether residents can influence conversions that alter their neighbourhood. Salento and colleagues make a valuable case that cities can lose liveability without a dramatic moment of displacement. The challenge is to ensure that the slow erosion of everyday capacity becomes consequential before only the profitable uses remain.
Reference
Salento, A., Corrado, V., Ebbreo, C., Latronico, V., Podda, A., and Saiu, V. (2026). “Beyond gentrification: urban rent and foundational liveability in Southern European intermediate cities.” Frontiers in Sociology, 11, 1923781. Published 18 September 2026. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1923781. The publisher lists Laura Sartori as editor and Alfonso Valenzuela Aguilera and Guillermo León Moreno Soto as reviewers.
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