The future of home sharing is in creating spaces and things that are worth renting out.

It would appear Airbnb has realized that playing an advisory role and shaping city policies is not good enough for the company, is has thus, wrapped up its sleeves and is in the process of shaping the very architecture of the cities themselves.

So as to make this endeavor a reality, according to Airbnb it has designed Samara, an innovation lab that’s been designed to make you rethink the very concepts that revolve around urban planning and architecture.

For Airbnb, the reason for it to foray into this is that, if it can spark new life into small towns, it can not only create “new types of commerce” but also bring about more rentals into areas that are seeing its decline.

Initially Samara will be used to create a communal housing project for the small Japanese town of Yoshino, which is set to open sometime later this year in October. If this project takes off, other small towns could come under Samara’s purview.

Incidentally, Samara is not limited to just urban planning and architecture, it also delves into product designs, software and “economic models.”

ll of this may sound odd for a company whose business model essentially revolves around booking stays for customers at people’s houses.

Airbnb move is however in touch with the tech industry’s trend to tackle larger social and technological issues in order to shape the market. For instance, search engine giant Google’s initiative in autonomous automated vehicles and Facebook’s initiative in the IoT technologies are yet again another examples of the tech industry lending a helping hand in bring about a social change through technological innovation.

Airbnb must have realized that it can only thrive, if there are bustling centres that are inviting enough for you to visit, thus investing in such centres could have a long term benefits.