The January 2023 "Universities at the Met" seminar will be held at New Scotland Yard (Ground Floor) at 5pm on the 11th January 2023. The event is expected to conclude at 7pm.
The event is open to all.

If you would like to attend in person, please ensure you bring photographic ID in the same name as the ticket booking and select an "in person attendance" ticket.

If you would like to join via Teams, please select that ticket type and we will send you a link 24 hours before the event, and another reminder 5 minutes before the event.

### The Impact of Airbnb Lettings on Crime in London: The Promise and Perils of the Sharing Economy

Professor David Kirk (University of Oxford)

Airbnb is active in over 100,000 cities worldwide, with more than 2 million visitors on any given night. Since its launch, four million different Airbnb hosts have welcomed more than 1 billion guest arrivals. In London, 20% of households rent out all or part of their home at some point in a given year via short-term lettings, and in some districts more than 10% of dwellings are actively listed on Airbnb. Despite this phenomenal growth, little is known about the repercussions for neighbourhood cohesion or crime rates. In this presentation, David Kirk will examine the effect of the growth of Airbnb’s short-term letting activity in London on a variety of crime types.

### Gangs, Public Housing, Bombs and Knives

Carmen Villa-Llera (Metropolitan Police Service and University of Warwick)

Carmen will present research on the spatial distribution of local street gangs operating in London in the 1990-2015 period. She shows that post-WW2 high-rise buildings are much more likely to become gang areas. To resolve the potential reverse causality between gang presence and public housing, she uses the London bombing Blitz of 1940-42 as a shock to urban development which led to differential concentrations of public housing.