[Okfn-ca] Fwd: [ciresearchers] ‘Smart Cities’ Should Mean ‘Sharing Cities’ / Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren

Thu Oct 2 00:31:57 UTC 2014

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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 
<mailto:HasiruUsiru-noreply at yahoogroups.com>>
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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