Socrates Schouten: Digital cities with a conscience — What does a new government mean for Amsterdam?

Was it because of the ‘fake news’ epidemic that blew over the Atlantic in 2016? The steady conquest of urban life by platform powers like Airbnb and Uber? Or did the shocking news about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica tilt the debate? We can’t be sure — but Amsterdam’s radically different tone of voice on the issue of technology is crystal clear. The coalition agreement signed by Amsterdam’s new governing parties demands a digital economy that is social, privacy-assuring and supportive of urban commons.

In March, Dutch citizens elected new city councils across the country. In Amsterdam, a progressive council was elected, with the green party GroenLinks leading negotiations. After two months of consultations, a leftist four-party coalition presented their vision and programme for the city.

Waag president Marleen Stikker’s smile widens when she scans the document for her cherished topics — digital development and civic agency. The city is learning to recognise the value of ‘city makers’, she concludes. The tech-driven ‘smart city’, on the other hand, is regarded with increasing suspicion in the new proposal. Why should large corporations like Cisco and Google be allowed to turn Amsterdam’s data into a money machine without even lending an ear to the preferences and concerns of its citizens? The new coalition programme’s approach to addressing some of these issues is a welcome turn for the better. As just one token of change, the city officially joins the band of ‘Fearless cities’ spearheaded by Barcelona that by and large seeks to obliterate neoliberalism from public office.

Let’s take a closer look at the new coalition’s programme, “A New Spring and a New Sound” (highlights here, full version here).

Firstly, the city’s digital plans begin with instating a Digital City Agenda, setting out Amsterdam’s vision on cyber security, data sovereignty, digital participation and digital services, complex topics that cannot be solved overnight. Outlining the principles of ‘privacy by design’ and ‘data minimisation’, the programme is both digitally ambitious and insightful. It warrants optimism for Amsterdam as a DECODE pilot city and as a test site for digital identity and data innovation work. Moreover, the city also expresses determination to implement the Tada manifesto, a clear-cut guide for responsible data and technology management.

Secondly, the programme sets out to define the purpose of digital technologies: these should be designed and implemented around the needs of the city, as expressed by its citizens (rather than its ‘consumers’). Thus, the coalition supports the development of platform cooperatives that provide alternatives to platform monopolists like Uber, and steps up its efforts to open up city data in ways that allow for active participation. The coalition also reworks the Amsterdam Economic Board into the “Amsterdam Social and Economic Board”, and vastly expands its digital re-schooling programme aimed at skilling the workforce for the digital (and sustainable) age. The “smart city”, the old tech-driven approach favoured by urban digital policy makers, is nowhere to be found.

On the theme of citizen participation, the programme’s proposals are equally ambitious. Of particular interest is the coalition’s promise to actively support the establishment of new commons (resources that are controlled and managed by the community, for individual and collective benefit) in the areas of ‘energy transition, healthcare, and neighbourhood activities’. (I have discussed the commons in relation to digital social innovation earlier here.) Politically, the idea of the commons has not had much traction until now, but Amsterdam’s support for establishing new commons is a sign of a shift in political discourse. The city of Amsterdam isn’t alone in this: the Belgian city of Ghent recently completed an extensive mapping of commons in 2017, and Barcelona’s minority government led by Barcelona en Comù is working with projects such as D-CENT, Procomuns, DECODE and DSI4EU.

Not coincidentally, the topics of ‘Democratisation’ and the ‘Digital City’ are merged together under one heading in the programme. If we want to prevent the smart city from becoming a digital dystopia, a diversified and intensified urban democratic practice is key. Citizens and communities need to have control of how measuring, tracking and profiling is being done and by who. By developing the democratic or participatory toolbox — including public debate, voting systems, having rights to ‘challenge’ and suggest self-managed alternatives — many digital ills can be avoided. Already the city has reached out to many Amsterdam initiatives that work on democratisation, participation and stronger neighbourhoods to start working on this agenda together. Rutger Groot-Wassink, the responsible Alderman, has also pledged to arrange budgets for communities, commons and intermediaries so that they can share in the design, implementation and execution of these practices, instead of having the administration lead on everything itself.

Of course, all of this will prove quite challenging. I expect it will take certainly a year before this new way of working will really emerge, and some years of teething problems after that. The same goes for the digital agenda itself. Whereas the coalition agreement discusses digital rights and digital participation in detail, the crossover between digital technologies and other themes is considerably less developed. The city’s vision on digitalisation in issues such as logistics, mobility, crowd management, environmental management, healthcare, and internet infrastructure is yet to be confirmed. However, for the moment we can be pleased with Amsterdam’s progress, and hopeful for the future.

This blog was originally published in June 2018 on Waag.org and updated on November 25.

Header photo: City of Amsterdam (Amsterdam.nl), public domain.

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This article was adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Download your free pdf copy today.

Myriam Bouré: Up until a few years ago, the residents of Loos-en-Gohelle, a small town in rural northwestern France with over 6,000 residents, consumed imported industrial food products despite significant local production. In addition to the negative health impacts of their diet, this practice also hurt the local economy. In 2013, the town government of Loos-en-Gohelle started a project called VITAL as part of an ambitious program to improve the diets of Loos-en-Gohelle residents.

The project was built on an existing initiative called Anges Gardins, run by a local association that has worked on community gardens and food education for years. It is also part of a long-term, comprehensive transition to a diverse, sustainable local economy from one dependent on coal mining — an industry that vanished when the French government closed the region’s coal mines in 1990, in favor of cheaper imports. Food is viewed as a cross-cutting issue, capable of supporting transition in other sectors.

The policy has a two-pronged strategy to meet the goal. First, to stimulate the demand for local, organic food through education, gardening ambassadors, free produce from open food gardens, and more. The town government led by example, by shifting to 100 percent organic food procurement for schools and 15 percent for retirement homes.

Second, to encourage farmers to convert to organic farming and support food distribution. To help achieve this, the town offered farmers free access to land on the condition that they grow organically and that they convert some of their own existing agricultural land to organic as well, thus raising the share of lands grown organically to 10 percent. Terre d’Opale, another local association, coordinates the farmers to ensure diversity of local production and manage distribution. Distribution is handled weekly through a combination of an online store, delivery of food boxes to local collection points, and procurement through catering businesses.

The program has operated successfully for three years. As the program benefits the entire local food ecosystem, including consumers, farmers, food kitchens, and distributors, it continues to grow and serve more and more of the community.

View full policy here (French).

Learn more:

• Report on the VITAL project (French)

​Header image by Loos-en-Gohelle on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Ryan Conway:  The city of Ghent has a fairly long and developed tradition of citizen engagement. Advisory councils and public hearings, which were first introduced in the 1970s, evolved into more comprehensive approaches to community-based planning and led to the creation of a new city department, according to the city of Ghent. By 2003, that department began an “Area Operation” that proactively interacts with neighborhoods in the 25 districts of the city.

This increased focus also produced a new name, the Policy Participation Unit, and includes 20 “neighborhood managers” who engage one or two of the districts and act as brokers between the city and residents to ensure consistent interaction, according to a report titled “Good Practices” published by the European Cultural Foundation in 2016.

The Policy Participation Unit also facilitates a Resident’s Academy, grants for temporary-use projects in underutilized public spaces, neighborhood “Debatcafés” and focus groups, as well as a Neighborhood of the Month program that brings the mayor to each neighborhood for an entire month of interactive discussions.

View full policy here (in Dutch).

Learn more from:

• European Cultural Foundation’s publication on commons and culture

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Cities have been caught in the middle of a clash: they are stuck competing for business investments while, simultaneously, seeking to meet the needs of their inhabitants through access to public goods and social services. For this reason, there is no surprise in seeing two opposite trends growing globally: on the one hand, the commodification of cities — where public spaces are sold to private buyers at the expense of citizens fenced out by these transactions; on the other hand, and likely in reaction to this privatization, there is a growing trend where cities are turning into ecosystems for collaboration, cooperation, and sharing.

Pressure is especially mounting from social movements that are asserting claims to urban governance by invoking a “Right to the City” — a slogan proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book, “Le Droit à la ville.” This can be generally characterized as the collective right of urban inhabitants to have control in the decision making processes concerning public spaces, city resources, and other factors that shape their lives. The “Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto” in Brazil, Reclaim the Streets in the UK, and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey are all examples of this. Yet, the effectiveness of these movements has been limited, due to a lack of conceptual or legal frameworks that could connect their movements and advance their claims to a Right to the City.

In “The City as a Commons,” Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione propose an urban commons framework that provides new ways of seeing and creating the city, itself, as a commons. It is also a valuable way of thinking about how people can exercise their Right to the City. They explain how if collective action of a community is what creates common wealth from a shared resource, then the activities themselves are what creates wealth from the city. This can be a way to grant each person a right to that wealth, and a right to any decision making processes regarding the distribution of that wealth. This is distinct from commoning — a type of governance that is based on self-organized sharing arrangements — which is characterized by the sharing of authority, the sharing of power, and the sharing of control, relying wholly upon collective action and collective accountability. —Ryan T. Conway and Marco Quaglia

1.  Open Source App Loomio Used to Govern 200-person Artist Collective

Gängeviertel Collective emerged in 2009 following the occupation of 12 buildings in the center of Hamburg, Germany, next to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, and Exxon-Mobile. The original motivation for the occupation was to create affordable space for local artists to live and work while saving the historic buildings from development. The collective is governed by a weekly general assembly which every member can attend, and where they can speak out, and vote. However, for more complex decisions requiring detailed preparation, the community uses Loomio, an open-source collective decision-making app created by the Loomio Cooperative. This online tool can quickly and easily take input from all community members and, after adequate feedback collection and deliberation on Loomio, bring the decision back to the main assembly for a final vote. The software was used for decisions about the potential ownership structure of the collective’s housing and remodeling of the main gathering place. —Neal Gorenflo

2. Neighborhood Partnership Network: Empowering Residents to Participate in City Planning

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed longstanding economic and racial inequalities in New Orleans, with low-income people of color having been left most vulnerable to the disaster. Even those who managed to escape the storm returned to find public services had become privatized, their housing demolished by developers, and their access to basic needs almost nonexistent. Amid the chaos, many people self-organized to support and provide mutual aid to each other. From this, the Neighborhood Partnership Network (NPN) emerged to empower residents to take part in city planning. Since 2006, the NPN has connected neighborhoods through regular meetings, a weekly newsletter, and a self-published journal. NPN has held a Capacity College that builds individual and organizational capacity through workshops and classes on topics ranging from stormwater management to filing public records requests. Furthermore, it was a pivotal advocate for pushing through changes to New Orleans’ City Charter, which requires the city to implement “a system for organized and effective neighborhood participation in land-use decisions and other issues that affect quality of life.” —Ryan T. Conway

3.  Club of Gdansk: Cross-Sector Collaboration for Urban Administration and Planning

While the port city of Gdansk in Poland was ravaged by World War II, a majority of its population was either lost or displaced during its many years of heavy conflict. Today, however, the Polish city is a modern and vibrant urban center in eastern Europe. Having only relatively recently caught up with other European cities in terms of economic development, the city looked for ways to improve its quality of life. The city created the Club of Gdansk, an informal think tank for civil society groups and grassroots organizers to collaborate with city leaders to design and develop the Gdansk’s long term strategy. What began as an experiment in enabling bottom-up processes to identify priority issues, eventually became a fixture of the city’s administration. Core to the Club’s civil society and government members is their commitment to a set of values, which includes transparency, self-determination, and “courage to act.” Over the years, the Club of Gdansk has transformed the city and brought about a wave of institutional reorganization supported by the city administration. It has successfully involved tens of thousands of citizens and made them active co-creators of city policies. —Ryan T. Conway

4.  LiquidFeedback: Free and Open-source Civic Engagement Software

E-governance is the state’s use of communication technology to provide information and services to the public. Many cities have successfully implemented such systems to give people access to ongoing policy discussions, provide input on local policies, or even make proposals for official consideration. Though these efforts can enhance civic engagement, the bulk of the digital consultation platforms are proprietary and, therefore, carry a hefty price tag that many cities cannot afford. LiquidFeedback is a collaborative decision making software based in Wunstorf, Germany, that is both free and open-source. That means it is freely available for anyone to install, maintain, and modify — although they may need the help of a computer technologist to put it into place. The Public Software Group in Berlin had initially developed it for use within political parties and community organizations, but in 2015 they scaled it up to expand its application to e-governance. Since then, several cities in Germany and across Europe have incorporated LiquidFeedback into their digital consultation systems. —Ryan T. Conway

These four short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Header photo by Lyndsey Marie on Unsplash

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These are the questions from Laura Flanders’ opening statements at the Transnational Institute’s convening on Transformative Cities in Amsterdam during July 2018.

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Join Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel to play Commonspoly- the resource-access game where we win by working as a community. The event will take place at 18:30 on Monday September 17th, at SUPERMARKT Berlin – (Mehringplatz 9, 10969 Berlin). Sign up though the comment section here or through this Facebook event (yes, we hate Facebook too, but we had to do this short notice)

About Commonspoly

Hi there, we hope you had a safe journey, welcome to Commonspoly’s utopia!

Commonspoly is a free licensed board game that was created to reflect on the possibilities and limits of the commons as a critical discourse towards relevant changes in society, but to do it playfully. This game is an ideal device to introduce commons theories to groups in a pedagogical and enjoyable way. But it’s also great for boring, rainy afternoons!

And another thing, Commonspoly is an attempt to repair a misunderstanding that has lasted for more than a century. Back in 1904 Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord’s Game: a board game to warn about, and hopefully prevent, the dangerous effects of monopolism. Years later she sold the patent to Parker Brothers, who turned the game into the Monopoly we know today: a game that celebrates huge economic accumulation and the bankruptcy of anyone but you.

Commonspoly turns the basic features of the traditional game upside down in an effort to imagine a possible world based on cooperation instead of competition. But is it possible to play a board game where the players have to find ways to work together, not beat each other? Well, the cycles between financial crises are shortening, global unemployment rates are skyrocketing, ice caps are melting, and we all have that hard-to-explain, creepy feeling… In this game, it’s a race against time and every player’s help is more than welcome! It’s not all bad news – we have some powerful, community-based tools to use in this struggle against the apocalypse. Let’s get down to business: we have urban, environmental, health and knowledge-based common goods to preserve!

We are working on a new version, which is going to be available this summer. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions: hello@commonspoly.cc

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This is what is happening in cities globally, but there is a dearth of reporting and analysis of this. This gap is addressed by the important book of Krzysztof Nawratek, who looks at commoning in the city, and how it is overcoming the rule of capital in many different contexts. The book refers to a conservative thinker of the beginning of the 19th century, who was already struggling with the dehumanizing, mechanizing and quantifying effects of the rule of capital in time.

Book of the day: Total Urban Mobilisation. Ernst Jünger and the Post-Capitalist City.

By Krzysztof Nawratek. Palgrave Pivot, 2019.

Description

In this book Krzysztof Nawratek explores the possibility of a post-capitalist city, and in so doing, reclaims and develops the idea of total mobilisation as originally formulated by Ernst Jünger. Nawratek formulates the idea of ‘accumulation of agency’ the ability to act, to replace the logic of capital accumulation as a main driver of urban development. He argues that this ‘accumulation of agency’ operates already in contemporary cities, and should not be seen as essential element of capitalism, but as a conceptual gateway to a post-capitalist world.

• Defines the conditions required to discuss post-capitalism and post-capitalist city models beyond a Marxist intellectual framework

• An innovative approach within urban theory examining the idea (‘project’) of a post-capitalist city from a non-Marxist perspective

• Explains how the logic of accumulation of agency, which operates in contemporary cities, should not be seen as essential element of capitalism, but as a conceptual gateway to a post-capitalist world

• Valuable resource for academics and postgraduate students within disciplines connected to urban issues, in particular human geography, urban planning, architecture and urban design

Excerpt

Cities are spatial and temporal entities where elements of this post-capitalist world are already emerging. Commonist initiatives, co-operatives, and various new democratic models of economic and political institutions are thriving in thousands of cities across all continents. We cannot expect, however, the new post-capitalist world to emerge out of a “parliament of mayors” or “network of microcities”, but from a global institutional platform allowing to democratically share benefits and resources, and to accumulate dispersed agency. Following Karatani’s line of thought, the mode of exchange C (global capitalism) triumphed over mode B (national state economic model) because it was able to accumulate agency as an ability to act. Post-capitalism (mode of exchange D) will overcome current global economic systems when its ability to mobilise the power to act is stronger than that of capitalism. Mode B has been dominated by mode C because of its limited scale, but also a limited ability to convert plundered and then distributed resources to fulfil the needs and aspirations of local populations. Global capitalism is not really global; it operates only on the very thin surface of world of life. It is an exploitative regime, syphoning wealth from the poor to the rich. Capital is scared of anything beyond its comprehension, of anything new and unexpected, anything what cannot be easily translated into countable amount of money. Anything that exists beyond its reach is a potential threat.

Cities have the ability to harvest the potential of their residents and infrastructure; they are also a highly interdependent second layer of nature. Residents can operate as mediators between diverse socio-political, spatial, and economic orders, and this is the very reason why cities must not be seen as autonomous zones, but rather, as highly diverse plexuses in global networks and planes. They are polyphonic narratives in a project of the new global All-under-Heaven post-capitalist Empire. When, at the end of his life, Junger writes about the modern world being dominated by technology and capitalism, he “…does not exonerate and does not excuse. To take any stand on solid ground would likely mean a trench or a grave. The true realist, therefore, will leap and look, yet never land anywhere”. Junger does not write about post-capitalist cities, but warns readers that very often, “…technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify power.” Therefore, a post-capitalist city cannot be built as a technological extrapolation of contemporary capitalism, which must be rejected through tactical “…deliberate elusiveness, wrapped in meditative uncertainty”. A post-capitalist city is a forest we can live in and live outside of, a forest we can stroll through. The forest that does not need us to grow. A city of agency is a place where Junger’s anti-alienation strategy is fully realised.

Yves Citton on the Three Aspects of Post-Capitalist Strategies

“First, post-capitalism will not have to be invented from scratch out of nothing. There are already practices, solidarities, post-capitalist relations that have been set up both locally (AMAP – Association for the Maintenance of Peasant Farming -, ZAD, neighborhood associations) and globally (sensitivities and legislations).

Second, post-capitalism is not about breaking up a system that has passed into a future system. The story to be considered is one of a superposition of strata, rather than as a succession of states. Capitalism will remain present as a stratum on which another stratum will unfold, some lineaments of which have already been in place for decades or centuries.

Finally, it is perhaps in the most “advanced” developments of capitalism that one has to find the keys to what will be built on it, and partly against it.”

(translated from the french, https://chronik.fr/yves-citton-post-capitalisme-sera-quen-deja-quen-feront-demain-collectifs-activistes-artivistes.html )

Photo by National Science and Media Museum

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The oceans were the original global commons, shed and navigated for ages. But new technologies have added numerous challenges to sustaining our oceans: offshore oil drilling, deep-sea mining, and overfishing. However, it’s crucial that water, both freshwater and saltwater, remains a commons and held in the public trust, because access to clean and affordable water is a basic human right.

A widespread approach to delivering water to cities consists of establishing a municipal entity, under direct or indirect local governmental control, that collects water dues from all customers (residential as well as businesses). Water rates are determined through a political process, and are intended to provide affordable water supply and sewage treatment while covering the costs. Public water supplies of this kind are often highly successful, especially in countries where there are effective methods to keep local government accountable to its citizens. However, in some cases, municipal water utilities may become inefficient (providing a service of low quality or at high cost) if insufficient incentives are built into the system to ensure that the service is continually upgraded. In extreme cases, municipal utilities may fall seriously behind in provisioning growing cities, or may provide jobs as a form of political patronage.

One type of water distribution, beyond public and private, is a cooperative system, where the distribution system is owned by its customers. The existence of this alternative is too often ignored, but it is by no means rare. For example, in the U.S., there are over 3,000 rural water cooperatives, which were set up since the New Deal in order to cheaply build up and maintain a water supply infrastructure in the rural areas of the country.

Regardless of the ownership of a water utility (public, private, or cooperative), a utility may return polluted water to a river or the sea — especially if downriver users are not able to make an impact on decision-making. This points to the need for larger communities to assert their rights to clean water. —Emily Skeehan and Nikolas Kichler

1. Tarun Bharat Sangh: Fostering Community-driven Solutions to Secure Water Access and Rejuvenate Rivers

India makes up around 18 percent of the global population, and yet only has access to 4 percent of the world’s drinkable water resources, according to CNN. Since the 1980s, both rural and urban areas in the country have faced drinking-water shortages and crop failures. This scarcity is exacerbated by river pollution associated with sewage disposal and industrial waste. To address this crisis, in 1985, Rajendra Singh and others formed the local nongovernmental organization Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS, or Young India Organization) in Alvar, a rural district in Rajasthan.

TBS has worked with rural villagers to revive the use of traditional water-harvesting solutions. In particular, they used “johads” (small earthen reservoirs) to harvest rainwater in a way that reduced evaporation losses to substantially replenish local aquifers. People also shifted to organic farming techniques to make more efficient use of water. TBS advocated for these and other methods of water management as a way to bring about a culture of self-sufficiency to local farming communities. The River Arvari Parliament expanded on this objective. Following the revival of the Arvari River in 1990, representatives from the area’s 72 villages formed the transparent, community-driven “river parliament” to maintain the health of the river. To date, Rajasthan communities have created and managed more than 11,000 johads, replenishing more than 250,000 wells. Within 28 years, seven river systems that had been dried up for 80 years have been revived. —Nikolas Kichler

2. Resident Development Committees: Community-led Management Over Local Water Supplies

Among the African nations, Zambia is one of the most rapidly urbanizing countries in the continent. In its capital, Lusaka, 60 percent of the population live in unplanned settlements that are an urban and rural hybrid. This has led to extensive administrative challenges over clean water and public sanitation. In response, the Lusaka Water and Sewage Company, the Lusaka City Council, and various nongovernmental organizations worked together to develop Resident Development Committees (RDCs). The RDCs provide legal entities for local residents to foster cooperation with unplanned neighborhoods, thereby allowing planning, construction, and maintenance of water utilities to become self-organized and co-managed through them. Financial responsibilities, such as fee collection, are also under their jurisdiction. Over time, the RDCs have become the primary managing units for local collective decision-making over water issues, and have sustained a regular flow of information, transparency, and accountability to the communities they represent. Many neighborhoods now have access to a reliable and largely self-sustaining source of clean water. The benefits of RDCs for unplanned communities have been so convincing that formally planned areas are also advocating for the same model. Learn more from the review of Bangalore and Lusaka case studies, a paper on groundwater self-supply in Zambia, and this article on Zambia’s water service gap—Nikolas Kichler

3. depave: Communities Turning Pavement Into Green Public Space

Paved surfaces contribute to stormwater pollution, by directing rainwater with toxic urban pollutants to local streams and rivers. This, in turn, degrades water quality and natural habitats. Since Portland receives a lot of rain, impervious pavements are especially problematic for the city’s stormwater management. Two friends from Portland thought of a straightforward solution to this problem: remove as much impervious pavement as possible. They organized their first official depaving event in 2008. Since then, they formed depave, a nonprofit organization that promotes the removal of pavement from urban areas to address the harmful effects of stormwater runoff, as well as to create green public spaces. depave seeks out groups that are already community-oriented, such as schools and faith-based groups, and encourages them to work together on the same project. depave has coordinated over 50 depaving projects in Portland. Eric Rosewall, depave’s co-founder, reports the organization has depaved more than 12,500 square meters of asphalt since 2008, diverting an estimated 12,000 cubic meters of stormwater from storm drains. Over the years, depave has grown to support depaving across the Portland metro region and beyond, through their depave network training services. —Eric Rosewall (depave) and Adrien Labaeye

These three short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Photo by *SHERWOOD*

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There is a greater interest in creating more resilient cities where residents produce what they need, in order to minimize waste and dependency on industrial-scale food production and retailing. This, combined with individual interest to learn and reconnect with the food system, has given rise to a number of urban and community gardens. This bottom-up movement of urban agriculture is also seeking a structural support by policy makers. Several grassroot communities around the world are finding innovative ways to distribute the surplus food grown or cooked which otherwise would go to waste. —Khushboo Balwani

1. League of Urban Canners: Stewarding Urban Orchards

Planting an urban fruit tree is more than a lifetime commitment — it is an intergenerational civic responsibility. Each summer, in Greater Boston, a huge amount of backyard fruit falls to the ground and sidewalk, where it rots and creates a mess. Property owners and municipalities are often pressured to remove these “nuisances,” while many urban residents are struggling to access local and organic food sources. The League of Urban Canners has developed a network of individuals to map, harvest, preserve, and share this otherwise wasted fruit. They make agreements with property owners to share the work of fruit harvesting and preserving, as well as tree and arbor pruning. The preserved fruits are shared between property owners (10 percent), preservers (70 percent), and harvesters (20 percent). Each season the completely volunteer-run enterprise harvests and preserves about 5,000 pounds of fruit from a database of more than 300 trees and arbors. Myriad acts of cooperation sustain this urban commons, in which harvesters, property owners, preservers, and eaters learn to share responsibility, resources, and care for each other and their urban environment. —Oona Morrow

2. Restaurant Day (‘Ravintolapäivä’): Fostering Cross-cultural Gatherings Through Shared Meals

In big cities, people of many different cultures live in close proximity. However, there often aren’t enough chances for them to intermingle and experience the diverse traditions within their city. In an effort to bring people together and foster cross cultural interaction, local organizers in Helsinki, Finland, created “Ravintolapäivä,” or Restaurant Day. Initiated in 2011, it began as a food carnival where anyone with a passion for food was encouraged to run a “restaurant” in their private home or in public spaces for a single day. Even though the pop-up restaurants charge money for the meals, the emphasis is not on profit, but rather on community teamwork and cultural exchange. During the event, Helsinki is transformed by hundreds of these informal restaurants serving a wide range of cuisines in this city-wide street festival. The event is put on through distributed organization — individual volunteer restaurateurs are responsible for finding a location, managing the menu and invitations, and setting the meal prices. Now, Restaurant Day has become a global movement, with over 27,000 pop-up restaurants having served over 3 million community members across 75 countries. —Khushboo Balwani

3. Kitchen Share: A Sustainable Community Resource for Home Cooks

Kitchen appliances can be superfluous uses of money and cupboard space, especially for city residents with tight budgets and small homes. Yet interest in healthy eating is growing. More people are trying out unusual food preparation techniques, which can require unique appliances. Kitchen Share, launched in 2012, is a kitchen tool-lending library for home cooks in Portland, Oregon. It enables community members to borrow a wide variety of kitchen appliances such as dehydrators, mixers, and juicers. Members can check out over 400 items online using affordable lending library software from myTurn. With two locations in Portland, Kitchen Share helps residents save money, learn new skills from neighbors, and reduce their environmental footprint. As a nonprofit community resource for home cooks, Kitchen Share only asks for a one-time donation upon joining, providing affordable access to otherwise expensive and bulky items while building a more resource-efficient city. Learn about starting a lending library with this toolkit.—Marion Weymes

These three short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by Artur Rutkowski on Unsplash

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Nithin Coca, Shareable: So what does the concept civic economy mean to you?

Eguchi Shintaro, co-author of “Civic Economy in Japan”: It is based on the real meaning of “economy.” If you look at the etymology of the Greek word, it represents a community that actually is sustainable and generates and regenerates what it has from its resources.

In the concept of civic economy, civilization or people is the focus of economy. This is the focus of my research. Civic economy is originally a concept in introduced in Europe, but there has been this idea in Japan for centuries too to heighten and advance civilization through the economy, and as a byproduct this can also be a sharing economy.

Civic economy is basically where individuals share what they have — skills, knowledge, services — to develop the economy of a certain area. The original meaning is basically a community of cooperation… a community that is sustainable, that generates its own resources.

Can you tell me about the history of sharing or civic economy in Japan? What is the underpinning of sharing in Japanese society?

In Edo era, there were ideas and functions that were held by small organizations that were early version of banks. This is where people in communities pitch in and pool money to invest, and have that money held in cases. For example, [if] someone had a fire and lost everything, they might loan that money for them to rebuilt their lives. Or sometimes, they would give that money. This is a system of mutual help, beginning of cooperativism in Japan. Because it is related to civil economy, I am recently getting more interested in cooperativism.

Then, the sense of commons was stronger than sharing. For instance in a village, there might be a well that a community uses together, or cooperative housing, or families taking care of each other’s children. Within that small community, it was complete. From our perspective, it is sharing, but at that time, the sense of personal ownership was not so strong. It was much stronger to have a sense of commons.

What happened to these systems?

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan went through modernization. This meant the sense of capitalism and individualism has gotten stronger, so there is a sense of having individual resources. That’s why individuals and family unit has gotten much stronger. The idea of capitalism meant companies promoted the sales of appliances, and meant household owned things, and that’s when the idea of personal ownership was introduced.

What about the growing attention on rural economies in Japan. Can sharing help revitalize those economies?

During Japan’s bubble economy era, the economy boomed, and major cities became bigger and bigger, and basically have extracted from rural areas, which have declined in population and their economies declined too.

Today, the population is still declining in rural areas, and that’s why there are very few businesses willing to move to rural areas, and in rural areas they don’t see any venture capital. Young people are leaving these areas to look for jobs in big cities, and then they make money and send some money back. Gradually, rural area is becoming more elderly, and there is more aging population.

There is a danger of small towns or small cities maybe disappearing entirely. As far as local governments go, they need to stabilize their economy. And so, within the community, they have few resources, which are getting fewer and fewer. In rural areas … local governments haven’t put many efforts in building more entrepreneurs in their areas, so the sharing economy is one way for rural governments to create and generate funds for their own communities.

What is behind the more recent resurgence in interest in sharing or civic economy in Japan?

The Great Kobe Earthquake, and other disasters in Japan were important milestones. When there is a huge natural or social disaster, people learned that it was impossible to sustain or survive all on their own. That’s when the idea of mutual help was reintroduced and got stronger. Along with that, the Japanese economy stagnated, so this is when the idea of cooperation re-emerged.

The Great East Japan Earthquake is also an important point when the idea of mutual help got stronger. In other countries, there is a strong interest in cooperativism, and in Japan, there is a need to review and look at cooperativism again. Of course the basis of that is because it is very democratic. It’s not from the point of view of the study of the economy, it is also from how you can democratically operate,so it’s important to study it.

Can you tell me about civic economy projects that are representative of the potential for sharing to revitalize the economy?

One example is a Toyo-oka, Kinosaki Onsen in Hyogo Prefecture. It is a hot springs (onsen) town. It’s a very famous town because there is a novel written by a famous Japanese author, about 100 years ago. They rely on tourism.

In the past few years, there is a movement to create some projects to keep culture and people in the city. The project is launched by the local government, with one project, Books in Onsen started by onsen inn owners who had a union already. It’s like an Artists in Residence program, they invite artists to stay in this area and create something. In exchange for free residence, artists are supposed to open their studios, when they are rehearsing or creating, to residents, so they can come and watch what they do. Or they have to provide workshops for children. Kids can also use these facilities to create their own pieces of art. … For local residents, they see in the books and stories names of places that are very familiar to them, so in that way, it’s promoting literature, creation, and it supports tourism, because of the fans who want to come and get these books. They have already sold 100,000 copies. And many Japanese media have picked up these stories too.

Another example is Hagiso, in the eastern part of Tokyo, an area which has a lot of old buildings. It’s a building which used to be an apartment and which is 60 years old that was renovated to have a cafe, gallery, and shop.

In this neighborhood, Hagiso is in the middle and functions as a front desk, and you might have lodging in an old Japanese farmhouse, where you can stay. For bath, they will give a ticket to another facility which is a hot spring bath. If they want to eat dinner, they will get a list of restaurants in the neighborhood for them to pick. They can rent a bike. Since this is an old neighborhood, we have facilities where they have cultural experiences like a tea ceremony. So this is a system that was created in the neighborhood, and economy itself it pulls and is shared by institutions in the neighborhood. Small businesses getting together to mutually generate business and help create and sustain the local economy.

What do you see as the future for sharing?

There have been a lot of efforts to increase start-up companies, or educate entrepreneurs in local areas, starting in the late 2000s. Amidst that, there are sharing businesses build on sharing economy concepts, particularly using IT. This is chance, to see how IT technology can be used to help society. But of course, that does not mean that IT literacy is increasing among older age bracket. There is a need for us to increase the IT use among this age bracket.

There is little understanding of sharing among local governments. Cities need to develop this vision. Citizens, private sector, and governments all have to come together, and work in the same direction, with the same goals. We don’t have that yet — they are divided, and working separately. The people have not really felt or understood the Sharing City vision.

One of the biggest things right now is to help these groups understand each other and face the same direction — need to create something that people and the local government that can make their own city attractive, and build civic pride together.

 Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by thomwisdom

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