ld on the idea of the sharing city, as a way to brand and grow their businesses. From their onset these two companies had access to large investment, which allowed them to leverage network effects and urban clustering through two-sided marketplaces. Unfortunately, this was not done with the best intentions. As RSA researcher Bhrmie Balaram noted on a blog post “as these companies have scaled, they have found it difficult to sustain their initial social value.”
Another study done by Darren Sharp (2017) mentioned how “These commercial sharing platforms continue to disrupt legacy services, raise tensions between private and public sector interests, intensify flexible labor practices, and put pressure on rental vacancy rates.”
In his study, Sharp gives the example of how Airbnb, while embracing the rhetoric of aiming to support the “middle class” used massive amounts of money to mobilise hosts to influence urban regulatory regimes, when facing growing criticism pointing out how commercial home sharing was profoundly impacting housing availability. Over the past 5 years, this phenomena has happened in various urban centres, and a recent example is Lisbon, where raising levels of tourism, led the widespread adoption of Airbnb as a hosting service, which provoked the eviction of massive number of locals living in central Lisbon.
In San Francisco, when facing a similar problem, Airbnb spent over $8 million to defeat the Proposition F, a ballot measure launched in 2015, that would toughen regulation on the short-term rental of residential apartments and homes.
Nicole Derse from 50+1 Strategies who co-led the “No on F” campaign described how that money was used to fund a sophisticated blend of mixed media advertising, door knocking and host activation:
“The campaign had all the modern bells and whistles you’d expect of an effort backed by a Silicon Valley giant. Still, we also ran one of the most aggressive field campaigns San Francisco has ever seen. Over the course of 11 weeks, our staff and volunteers knocked on more than 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 eve