Airbnb tries urban planning — and hotels — with 'Samara'

Airbnb is moving beyond home-sharing with a new design firm called Samara.

The new initiative pushes the company into a type of urban planning, with the firm positioned to evaluate declining small towns that could benefit from an Airbnb-sponsored project. Those projects themselves, as Business Insider pointed out, look a lot like hotels or hostels.

The first project is a community center in a small town in Japan. But unlike a typical community center — and like a hotel — it hosts travelers. The building includes a living room, a kitchen and a 16-foot communal dining table, according to FastCo Design, which profiled the project for its launch.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Samara — not to be confused with Sakara, the vegan version of Blue Apron — is envisioned as a way to "revitalize" small towns with Airbnb-sponsored projects.

The project was inspired by a woman who listed her home on Airbnb in a rural part of Japan and unexpectedly created a mini tourism boom.

But so far, Airbnb itself has described Samara in only the vaguest of terms.

"Samara is a design studio that builds on new attitudes towards the trust that we’ve discovered through Airbnb. With that trust, we have the capacity to break through more barriers and in turn allow our community members to better serve each other," Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia wrote in a blog post announcing its launch.

The rest of Gebbia's post describes Samara's effort to create empathy and trust. The post also starts by outlining America's journey toward becoming a consumer economy after World War II.

According to The Verge, partners in the small towns where Airbnb builds future projects in will share the profits in the way a typical Airbnb host does.

The Japan project is currently a concept home, but will be moved to Yoshino, Japan in the long term.

As the Samara website says, "the journey is long."