A very interesting side phenomenon about the sharing economy is how it “touched” and impacted cities in a profound way. Large massive platform like Airbnb are, in a certain way, an immense “facebook” … of every single home in a specific city… fostering a whole new set of values to the “business of hosting”, swiftly moving away from the impersonality of hotels, to the intimacy of the local home. On the other hand, platforms like Uber revolutionized how transport operates in urban centres, enabling a massive amount of private drivers and cars, to compete with established industries such as the taxi one. These 2 big companies produced a uniquely “urban phenomenon” that impacts the city in novel ways. The sharing city!
The city as a sharing city, has been part of the ethos and ideology of the sharing economy from its inception, that we can trace back to a key year, 2008, the year Airbnb was created. One decade ago, the sharing economy was viewed with high hopes and strong doses of idealism. On the wake of the financial crisis, many looked at this new phenomenon in economics, as a possible way of sorting out the problems of traditional capitalism, particularly in terms of its negative impact on the environment and increasing inequality.
From the beginning, the city, became as well an important actor in all the ideology surrounding the sharing economy. The Sharing Cities Network, a project launched by shareable, in 2013, became an important advocate of the idea of the sharing economy applied to cities. The network described itself as a “a grassroots network for sharing innovators to discover together how to create as many sharing cities around the world as fast as possible” and it developed the narrative of the sharing economy as a transformational global movement founded on inclusive sharing and support for the urban commons to address social justice, equity, and sustainability. According to its founders, the sharing cities network “encourages actors to replicate trans-local experiments through face-to-face and digital interactions in multiple cities simultaneously, that connect diverse stakeholders including individuals, community groups, sharing enterprises and local governments. ” (Luna, 2013)
One of its first initiatives was the Sharing Cities MapJam, held between 12–26 October 2013, with a target of mapping the sharing economies of 25 cities supported by local teams . Shareable used its website and newsletter to promote the first MapJams, which were very successful. Following the MapJams success, Shareable ran a crowdfunding campaign and raised $54,000 through small donations from supporters.
Some cities quickly picked up on the attractive narrative of sharing, constructed as a peer to peer movement that looked for alternatives to the usual story of cities depending on centralized government and/or big banks and where hierarchical power was the one who had the power to produce change. Seoul was one of the first cities to embrace this concept, followed by Amsterdam, branded as Europe’s first named sharing city in 2015.
“Europe’s first Sharing City, Amsterdam, has convened a network of ambassadors from the commercial, government and knowledge sectors to develop a program of activities to support the local sharing economy and pilot a range of projects.”Miller 2015
A positive point of the sharing economy, was actually how it triggered the adaptation of its principles to cities, thus setting the ball rolling for the building of a narrative of the city as a sharing space, that would reinvent once again connection and community. In an article written in 2018 by McLaren, D. and Agyeman, about the emergent transformation of cities and regions in the innovative global “Any meaningful concept of Sharing Cities must go beyond the “sharing economy”, and explore approaches that are more cultural than commercial, more political than economic, and that are rooted in a broad understanding of the city as a co-created urban commons.”
The business of “sharing”
Quite paradoxically, big sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber, have bui