l 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 build 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 th