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Abstract
Despite the growing importance of urban centers and their ability to provide the scale, proximity, amenities, and specializations to incubate disruptive innovations such as short-term vacation rentals (STVRs), little tourism research has conceptualized the potential positive and negative impacts STVRs have across the urban landscape. With this gap in mind, this research conceptualizes and unpacks the potential positive and negative environmental, economic, and social impacts of STVRs through three main articles. Chapter two presents an interdisciplinary framework, which utilizes residents attitudes as an indicator for successful sustainable urban system development. Ensuring the inclusion of residents perceptions of tourism development has long been recognized as vital to sustainable tourism development. While researchers have begun to explore residents perceptions of Short-term Vacation Rental (STVRs) from both qualitative and quantitiave approaches, there is still a need for strong theoretical underpinnings to support this growing body of research. Chapter three addresses this gap through applying a theoretical perspective that combines Social Exchange Theory and Webers Theory of Formal and Substantive Rationality to assess resident attitudes towards STVRs in the city of Savannah, GA. While Short Term Vacation Rental (STVR) research is increasingly cognizant of various stakeholders impacted by the growth of STVRs, one stakeholder remains unstudied for their potential contribution to the amelioration of negative STVR impacts the resident STVR host. Resident STVR hosts are more than just entrepreneurs. They possess a fluid identity informed by their roles as residents and STVR hosts in their community. With this fluid identity in mind, Chapter four offers qualitative techniques to explore a tripartite of STVR identities within the City of Savannah, GA: the STVR host, the resident host, and the host as a sustainable entrepreneur. Research finds evidence of all three identities across STVR hosts in this study. Through the lens of the entrepreneurial identity, this study finds that STVR hosts possess a range of formal and substantive motivations. Moreover, extrinsic motivations exist within a spectrum of lifestyle subsidization to subsistence.