an 300,000 doors, made some 300,000 phone calls and had over 120,000 conversations with real voters. We got more than 2,000 small businesses to oppose Prop. F. In fact, our Airbnb hosts took the lead in this campaign, hosting house parties, organizing their friends and neighbors, and leading dozens of earned media events.”
If these big companies, largely funded by venture capital, have the big money to venture into such tactics, the other side of the story, is that it is finally coming to mainstream consciousness how they should be considered asas researcher Bhrmie Balaram, 2016 calls them, and how deeply they rely on the network effect to scale. The interesting point Balaram raises is that the novelty brought by these companies is how they are so dependent on their users (both consumers and workers) and how they need to endow them with a certain kind of power. Consumers and users, have more power then they know!
Things are changing, and the pace of change is quicker than ever. In just one decade, iconic sharing economy companies such as Airbnb and Uber gained negative attention as being networked monopoly platforms (just as facebook and google…) hoovering up our data with no competition in front of them, whatsoever. People thus are becoming more more aware of the steps that should be taken to oppose this.
The City as A Space For Real Sharing
Regardless of all the criticism outlaid previously, the merit of the sharing economy is how it set the discourse, desire (and the materialization!) of the city as a place of real sharing. One important for the sharing city, in Neil Gorenflo, from Shareable, who set out to describe the 11 principles for sharing cities, which include solidarity, systems thinking, empathy, distributed architecture.
It seems that the possibility of an alternative sharing economy story… and REAL sharing city, has finally emerged. New and more inclusive forms of sharing that support the urban commons through community gardens, tool libraries, repair cafes and platform co-operatives are arising everyday. In a post published by the P2P foundation, Darren Sharp defines how sharing cities are about creating pathways for participation that recognise the City as Commons give everyone in the community the opportunity to enjoy access to common goods and create new forms of shared value, knowledge, and prosperity. And he tells us about the importance of this kind of vision as an alternative to the “the top-down, technologically deterministic vision of the future we so often hear about in discussions of Smart Cities and the Internet of Things – – a vision , he states, “dominated by sensor networks, data mining and myriad opportunities for corporate and government surveillance.”
A good example of how this new trend in sharing cities is gaining momentum is Christchurch, a city in New Zealand, where in the aftermath of an earthquake in 2011, an experiment in urban regeneration is being done. Another example is the Agrocité in the suburbs of Paris.
The discourse of sharing will definitely shape our cities in novel ways, so long we are attentive to the excesses of big companies acting under the same “sharing” umbrella, and we dare to act to find fairer alternatives.
Maria Fonseca is the Editor and Infographic Artist for IntelligentHQ. She is also a thought leader writing about social innovation, sharing economy, social business, and the commons. Aside her work for IntelligentHQ, Maria Fonseca is a visual artist and filmmaker that has exhibited widely in international events such as Manifesta 5, Sao Paulo Biennial, Photo Espana, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Joshibi University and many others. She concluded her PhD on essayistic filmmaking , taken at University of Westminster in London and is preparing her post doc that will explore the links between creativity and the sharing economy.