Re: Tourists vs. Residents – To Whom Does the City Belong?

Tourists, nightly noise, and more and more vacation rentals – the Amsterdammer Robin Labrijn has had enough. Online vacation rental providers like Wimdu and Airbnb are particularly a thorn in his side: they have radically changed Amsterdam, where whole rows of houses are now illegally rented to tourists. He and his citizens’ action group “Platform 1013” are fighting against the flood of holiday flats and the “touristification” of his neighborhood.

Berlin has similar problems. In that city, however, city officials now try to uncover illegal holiday apartments and get them back on the housing rental market. To the annoyance of Sebastian Olényi: since a law prohibiting the “illegal repurposing of residential housing” took effect, he and his home-sharing club have been fighting for their rights against the strict laws and politics of Berlin.

Local residents or “homesharer – to which does the city belong? And how do tourist flows affect inner cities?

Arte Re: “on holiday” in the neighborhoods of Amsterdam and Berlin.

  • Report
  • Janin Renner, Britta Behrendt, Christoph Pöthke
  • ZDF/Arte
  • 30 Minuten
  • 2017