[Okfn-ca] Fwd: [ciresearchers] ‘Smart Cities’ Should Mean ‘Sharing Cities’ / Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren
Diane Mercier
diane.mercier at gmail.com
Thu Oct 2 00:31:57 UTC 2014
PVI
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Sujet : [ciresearchers] ‘Smart Cities’ Should Mean ‘Sharing Cities’ /
Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren
Date : Wed, 1 Oct 2014 10:29:54 -0400
De : davidicus <bigbluearth at gmail.com>
Répondre à : ciresearchers at vancouvercommunity.net, davidicus
<bigbluearth at gmail.com>
Pour : ciresearchers <ciresearchers at vancouvercommunity.net>
Copie à : michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com>, Horelli Liisa
<liisa.horelli at aalto.fi>
Of possible interest to CI folks; and also related to our upcoming
Special Edition on Urban Planning and Community Informatics.
~david
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From: *Vinay Baindur yanivbin at gmail.com <mailto:yanivbin at gmail.com>
[HasiruUsiru]* <HasiruUsiru-noreply at yahoogroups.com
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Date: 30 September 2014 05:45
Subject: [HasiruUsiru] ‘Smart Cities’ Should Mean ‘Sharing Cities’
Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren
http://time.com/3446050/smart-cities-should-mean-sharing-cities/
‘Smart Cities’ Should Mean ‘Sharing Cities’
* Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren
<http://time.com/author/julia-agyeman-and-duncan-mclaren/>
Sept. 29, 2014
Medellin, ColombiaMedellín, ColombiaChristian Heeb—Getty Images
When mayors and developers focus on technology rather than people,
smart quickly becomes stupid
MOREThese days every city claims to be a “smart” city, or is becoming
one, with heavy investments in modern information and computing
technology to attract businesses and make the city competitive.
POPULAR AMONG SUBSCRIBERS*But when mayors and developers focus on
technology rather than people, smart quickly becomes stupid, threatening
to exacerbate inequality and undermine the social cooperation essential
to successful cities. After researching leading cities around the world,
we’ve concluded that truly smart cities will be those that deploy modern
technology in building a new urban commons to support communal sharing.*
In London too, smart-city thinking is socially dumb. Here the problem is
epitomized by Tech City in the Shoreditch district. Intended as a hub
for tech innovation, it has turned into anannex
<http://www.shareable.net/blog/why-startup-urbanism-will-fail-us>of the
London financial complex, dominated by Google, Cisco, McKinsey, and
Intel. The artists, designers, and startups that began the process of
regeneration in Shoreditch have been displaced by “commercial
gentrification.” Just up the road in Tottenham, the rebranding of
warehouses as ‘artistic quarters’ hasdisplaced
<http://thecolumn.net/2014/02/08/the-tragic-birth-of-an-artists-village/>low-rent
communities in favor of bankers and financial speculation.In India,
Dholera is one of 24 new smart cities planned in order to accommodate
the country’s rapidly expanding population. The planned city has cleared
most approvals, but is stalled with the coastal zone regulatory
commission, probably because of the predicted engineering challenges and
expenses of a site on salt flats with a high risk of flooding
<http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/apr/17/india-smart-city-dholera-flood-farmers-investors>.
Moreover, villagers and small-scale subsistence farmers, who inhabit the
proposed site and fear eviction from their land and livelihoods, have
been staging peaceful protests with support from a grassroots land
rights movement.
Demographic, economic and cultural forces are bringing humanity together
in large (and growing) urban regions, particularly in the global South.
The physical nature of urban space demands—and in some ways,
facilitates—sharing: of resources, infrastructures, goods, services,
experiences and capabilities. Today, population density and highly
networked physical space are converging with new digital technologies to
drive sharing in cities—particularly in novel forms online.
Unfortunately, “sharing” is often too narrowly conceived as being
primarily about economic transactions. The poster-children of the
sharing economy are being co-opted by the interests of venture capital
and its insatiable demands for rapid growth and high-value
exit-strategies. Taskrabbit, started to make it easier for neighbors to
help each other out with errands and chores, is becoming a glorified
temping agency leaving its participants in the same precarious boat as
those on zero-hours contracts. Uber, in theory a ride-sharing company
helping cut congestion, is turning into a luxury taxi company serving
the global footloose elite. Lending Club is losing sight of its social
purpose in providing peer-to-peer loans for those otherwise excluded, or
at risk of predatory money-sharks; instead it seems to be focusing on
venture loans for entrepreneurs. Airbnb, the couch-surfing website
designed to personalise travel, overlooks the growing use of its
platform by landlords buying up property for the purpose, and thus
enabling gentrification.
In all too many cities, economic divisions are being widened and social
capital destroyed due to the notion that only a competitive, wired city
can survive in the cut-throat global market. This is just one of the
harmful outcomes of the political ideology of neo-liberalism, the market
fundamentalism that has gripped Western politics for the last three
decades. The problem is not just a failure of participation — as
citizens remain excluded from decision-making — but of imagination, as
politicians refuse to intervene in markets except at the behest of
corporate capital.
Yet there is a better way of using modern technologies to create more
just, inclusive and environmentally efficient economies and societies.
Humans are natural sharers. Traditional, old-fashioned face-to-face
sharing still happens in communities everywhere, but it has largely
broken down in modern cities in the face of commercialization of the
public realm, and of rapid, destabilizing economic and technological
change. All this has dissolved trust, as we spend more time working and
hide from our neighbors behind our security locks and alarm systems.
Even so, new opportunities for collaboration and sharing are arising at
the intersection of urban space and cyberspace. Kiva City is providing
interest free loans to local social businesses. Freecycle is diverting
thousands of tons of functional but unwanted things from landfill.
Repair cafes, which bring together people with repair skills and those
in need of help, are springing up in hundreds of cities. Garden sharing
schemes like Landshare are doing the same for gardeners. Shared public
Bus Rapid Transit systems are transforming cities like Medellín in
Colombia by providing previously marginalized communities with access to
jobs and facilities. Such communally inspired sharing is transforming
norms and cultures.
New opportunities for sharing create new opportunities to enhance trust
and rebuild social capital. But commercial sharing is also creating new
spaces in which commercial interests can force workers into casual
contracts, privatize public services and drive up land values and rents
through gentrification. In these ways the emerging sharing economy can
deepen both social and spatial inequalities and deliver injustice. City
leaders need to support and emphasize communal models of sharing that
build solidarity and spread trust. Sharing systems designed around
equity and justice will naturally shift cultural values and norms
towards trust and collaboration. This can deliver a further dividend, as
increased trust increases social investment in public goods and the
public realm.
Sharing establishes a precondition and motivation for collective
political debate. The same measures that enable sharing online, also—if
civil liberties are properly protected—enable collective politics online
and create venues for healthy debate. In recent years, the intersections
of cyberspace and urban space have spawned shared protest movements and
efforts at political transformation in countries as diverse as Iceland,
Tunisia, Spain, Egypt and the U.S. The Occupy movement and its
precursors—such as Spain’s Indignadas—are only harbingers of the coming
age of shared politics.
‘Sharing the whole city’ should become the guiding purpose of the future
city. This offers a radically different vision compared with a global
race to the bottom to attract footloose investment capital. It redefines
what ‘smart cities’ of the future might really mean—harnessing smart
technology to an agenda of sharing and solidarity, rather than the dumb
approaches of competition, enclosure and division.
/Julian Agyeman is a professor of urban and environmental policy and
planning at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He tweets at
@julianagyeman <https://twitter.com/julianagyeman>. Duncan McLaren is a
freelance researcher and consultant, with long experience in the
environmental non-profit sector. He tweets at @mclaren_erc
<https://twitter.com/mclaren_erc>. Their book, /Sharing Cities/, will be
published by MIT Press in fall 2015./
/This article was originally written for Zócalo Public Square
<http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/>. /
__._,_.___
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Posted by: Vinay Baindur <yanivbin at gmail.com <mailto:yanivbin at gmail.com>>
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