Digital Nomads Across the Globe: Housing, Planning, and Sustainable Future

Platform capitalism is catalyzing profound transformations in the global socio-spatial order, reconfiguring how we live, work, and inhabit space in the digital era. Dominated by powerful technological conglomerates — such as GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), NATU (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber), BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi), and gig-economy actors like Glovo or Deliveroo — this model is fostering new forms of mobility, consumption, and labor that are reshaping cities and regions across diverse geographies.

A salient illustration of these transformations is the global diffusion of digital nomadism, a phenomenon enabled by remote work infrastructures and accelerated by the normalization of hybrid and mobile work arrangements. Far from being merely a lifestyle trend, digital nomadism has become a structural element in the spatial dynamics of global capitalism. Its emergence as a mobile class — often affiliated with global North privileges — is generating visible pressures on housing markets, infrastructures, and cultural ecosystems, particularly in regions that were already vulnerable due to tourism-driven gentrification, studentification, or retirement migration.

Across multiple urban and non-urban contexts — from Southeast Asia and Central America to Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Global South’s burgeoning digital hubs — the arrival of digital nomads has added a new layer of complexity to long-standing urban challenges. These include widening inequalities in housing access, the commodification of local cultures, and the reorientation of public policy toward attracting transnational elites, often at the expense of local residents.

Municipal strategies to attract digital nomads, frequently framed as innovation-driven or post-pandemic recovery measures, tend to reproduce the logics of urban entrepreneurialism — privileging short-term capital flows and international visibility over long-term affordability and social sustainability. As digital nomads relocate from global cities to smaller towns, rural enclaves, and formerly peripheral areas, a new wave of spatial restructuring is underway. This phenomenon is not only altering demographic compositions but also accelerating the commodification of everyday life in territories previously unexposed to global mobile elites.

Rather than being a neutral or benign form of mobility, digital nomadism must be critically examined as part of a broader assemblage of platform-mediated urbanism, where mobility, privilege, and dispossession are unevenly distributed. The challenge for sociological inquiry is not simply to document these shifts, but to theorize the interplay between digital infrastructures, neoliberal urban policies, and the reterritorialization of class and labor in the 21st century.

Portugal offers a compelling case study within this broader landscape. Over the last decade, the country has witnessed a confluence of transnational dynamics that have dramatically restructured its housing markets and urban environments. The exponential growth of tourism, the influx of international students, the settlement of foreign pensioners and remote workers, and favorable fiscal regimes for expatriates have all contributed to rising rents, displacement, and the redefinition of public space — particularly in cities like Lisbon and Porto.

Lisbon, in particular, has become emblematic of these tensions: a site where digital nomadism, short-term rentals, and speculative investment intersect, generating exclusionary effects for long-term residents. Despite these challenges, urban policy has often leaned toward promotional strategies — facilitating visa programs, tax incentives, and branding campaigns to attract digital workers. Porto, following a similar trajectory, launched in late 2024 a campaign to court digital nomads despite already facing critical housing shortages.

More recently, there has been a noticeable shift as digital nomads increasingly move beyond major urban centers, relocating to smaller cities and rural regions in Portugal’s interior. This emerging trend not only diffuses the socio-economic impacts of global mobility into new geographies but also intensifies the pressure on fragile local infrastructures and housing systems. These shifts call for urgent critical reflection on the implications of platform capitalism not only for global cities but for peripheral and semi-peripheral spaces often imagined as escapes from its logics — yet increasingly central to its expansion.

This conference therefore aims to bring together academics at any level of their careers (MA students, PhD students, postdocs and tenured academics) to discuss the following issues:

How has the significant arrival of digital nomads to urban and non-urban territories worldwide involved dramatic changes in local housing markets?   

How are local/regional institutions from the different urban and non-urban territories across the globe adapting spatial/regional planning tools to respond to the range of challenges posed by these new incomers? 

What future scenarios are expected regarding the evolution of housing and planning at local and regional level in face of the significant arrival of digital nomads in many urban and non-urban territories from the Global North, South and East? 
 

Oral presentations may be theoretical, methodological and/or empirical. In the latter case, presentations of preliminary findings of ongoing research as well as presentations of final findings of already finalized research are welcome.

Venues

The conference will be held on 12-13th November 2025 at “Colégio Almada Negreiros”, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, NOVA University Lisbon (Campolide Campus, nearby Lisbon city center). The conference will include social activities (conference dinner) and field visits, including a night field visit in the “temporary” nightlife area of the Websummit attendees to discuss in situ the spatial and social impact of these ‘temporary’ events in the nightlife areas of Lisbon. This night fieldwork will be organized by LXNIGHTS Research Group in partnership with the International Night Studies Network.
Submissions

Abstracts, up to 500 words, and 5 keywords, should be written in English. The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday, July 4, and the notification of acceptance will be made before July 31. Abstracts should be sent through the following form: https://bit.ly/42Ftc69 Publication opportunities

Following the conference, the organizers will invite participants to submit their proposal for a special issue (in English) to be published in the Portuguese journal Forum Sociológico (DOAJ) in 2026. Contact

For any questions regarding abstract submission or about the conference, please email: Dr. Jordi Nofre (jnofre@fcsh.unl.pt). Supported by

Conference supported by NOVA University Lisbon & NOMADIC MSCA Staff Exchange Project (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101183165)