Andreas Arnold: Germany’s capital city Berlin has a thriving sharing and collaborative economy, thanks in part to think-and-do tank OuiShare. Since 2012, the group has facilitated a lively exchange of dialogue and action in many different formats, which has led to a strongly connected network of over 200 different projects and more than 1,000 individuals. In 2014, a group of sharing experts launched SharingBerlin and took the community building efforts to a whole new level. For two years, an exhibition and networking event called Share Fair (2014, 2015) brought together around 65 important players from the scene. After mapping Berlin’s collaborative economy ecosystem, the group started to engage with local politicians and the government to create an official Sharing City. While this hasn’t panned out yet, sharing projects continue to flourish in Berlin. Even without the official recognition of Berlin as a Sharing City, projects have been flourishing in the fields of food, mobility, money, and more.

1. Food

Mundraub (“theft of food”) is the largest online platform for the discovery of foraged food. It allows people to map locations, connect with others, and create actions to pick free fruits and vegetables. The group also organizes a harvest and offers plant care and other activities. Meanwhile, the organization Foodsharing offers tools for people to share leftover food. Another community food initiative is AufHaxe. The group’s mission is to encourage “cooking and partying in your neighborhood.” People are split into teams, and each team can choose to prepare an appetizer, a main dish, or a dessert, and invite another team over for one course. After each course, the teams split up and move to another team member’s home for the next course. At the end of the day, each team member eats three courses (each one at a different house), connects with 12 people, and participates in a huge party with all the members. Some of the food prepared at these cooking events come from FoodAssembly, a platform that connects organic farmers and buyers at local markets.

Photo of community harvest courtesy of mundraub

2. Mobility

The P2P cargo bike-sharing platform Velogistics is a community treasure. It facilitates a commons-based culture of sustainability and DIY by connecting borrowers and lenders who want to share cargo bikes, usually for free. The founders of the platform also maintain Werkstatt Lastenrad (“workshop cargo bike”), a site with information on DIY building and repairing of cargo bikes. Workshops like Regenbogenfabrik (“rainbow factory”) and local bike stores offer donation-based repair sets and knowledge for self-service. If you need to borrow a bike, you can choose between the free bike sharing group BikeSurf or other bike rentals like Call a Bike and nextbike.

Photo of a cargo bike ride along the old airfield of Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, courtesy of Andrea Künstle/velogistics.net

3. Item Sharing

The LEIHBAR (meaning “rentable”) runs a library of things, via a digital platform. It offers a network of pickup stations (mainly 24/7 convenience stores, community gardens) and provides users  convenient and time-saving access to items of daily use. Drills, projectors, tents, and many other items can be rented via the website for a small fee, making the user experience comparable to professional car sharing. The project’s social impact lies in its system design for circular economy. Partnering with tool producers (ex. Bosch), LEIHBAR convinces sales-orientated companies of circular business models and incentivizes longer product life times, reparability, and modular design. The longer the products last and the better they can be repaired, the lesser the toll on the environment.

Photo of item delivery, lending locker, and pick-up station at an urban garden, courtesy of LEIHBAR

The community-based sharing store concept LEILA has already become well-known worldwide and has inspired at least 10 other cities to launch similar projects. Members of the community donate and share items that can be borrowed by others. To ease drop-off and pick-up, the store established a reliable infrastructure run by its members. Users who cannot find a desired item via this channel still have a chance to browse the local P2P platform Fairleihen.

4. Work

At the cooperative CZY WRK, digital workers, freelancers, and artists are welcome to share mutual work assignments, profits, and certain securities to overcome down-periods. The group believes strengthening its network will benefit all participating individuals.

Closely entangled with CZY WRK is the coworking space SUPERMARKT, which is recognized as one of the key players of the German platform cooperative movement. The group’s conferences and workshops like “Co-op Futures” (June 2017), “Platform Co-ops — Start your own!” (Dec. 2016), and “Community Value” (Sept. 2016) regularly bring together local and international influencers. Another flagship in the Berlin coworking scene is Betahaus (meaning “beta house”). Established in 2009, it offers various rooms, event spaces, and woodworking facilities, where a lively maker community found its origins. Still quite new, the Agora community’s spin-off CRCL hosts a coworking space and a community garden.

5. Money

The nonprofit organization Mein Grundeinkommen (“my universal basic income”) raffles off unconditional basic incomes of 1.000 €/month. Each person who wins receives a monthly transfer for the duration of one year, so 12.000 € in total. The team is interested in finding out what happens, if a society has the financial resources to focus on life-goals rather than on just basic needs. As of now the project has fulfilled the dreams of 105 universal basic income winners who are eating more healthy food, able to afford education, travel, and save.

Photo of the Mein Grundeinkommen team, courtesy of Christian Stollwerk

6. Communities

Das Baumhaus (“The treehouse”) is an open socio-cultural project connecting, inspiring, and empowering its members and local changemakers working for transition to sustainability. The project space was crowdfunded and collaboratively developed by more than 300 people of the community. Nowadays the team fosters the community with regular cooking sessions, concerts, workshops, and other events like the yearly Emergent Berlin gathering.

Photos of the space, community dinner, and concert, courtesy of Das Baumhaus

Another excellent example for a thriving community in Berlin is Prinzessinnengarten (“princess garden”). After occupying some wasteland in the center of the city in 2009, the group — along with friends, activists, and neighbors — cleared away rubbish, built transportable organic vegetable plots, and reaped the first fruits of their labor. Thanks to the openness and entrepreneurial skills of the team, the urban garden gives room to a self-managed, cozy restaurant underneath the trees. The restaurant is supplied by vegetables and herbs grown in the garden. There’s also a nursery, beekeeping area, repair workshops, flea markets, and an access point to pick up LEIHBAR items. It also features several spin-offs like Material Mafia, a recycling project for construction material.

Photos of Prinzessinnengarten: community gardening, nursery and plant sale, neighborhood event, courtesy of Marco Clausen 

7. Bottom-up mass movements

Driven by its own bottom-up community building over the last couple of years, Jolocom focuses on establishing private key applications that allow users to connect to online networks and manage private data to be shared with the platform at the same time. The principle of “own your data” is maintained on a blockchain. Similarly Resonate is a blockchain-based service for streaming music that is cooperatively owned by the people who make it great: musicians, fans, and developers. Both examples show how network value can be distributed among the community to generate new benefits like privacy, cost-effective access for users, and fair payments for producers.

Photo of demonstration for safer bicycle lanes courtesy of press archive Volksentscheid Fahrrad

The list of interesting projects could go on and on, because the collaborative ecosystem draws its power from people who question the status quo. This practice is not just common for the sharing movement, but for general bottom-up cases in Berlin. It explains why Volksentscheid Fahrrad (meaning “referendum bicycle”), the civil society’s answer to the mobility and bicycle policy of the city administration, has been very successful. The campaign has received 100,000 signatures from bicycle enthusiasts who are demanding better bicycle lanes, bicycle parking spaces, and car-free zones. One step behind, but promising as well is the movement BürgerEnergie Berlin (“civil energy Berlin”) reaching out to purchase the Berlin electricity grid.

Photo of a demonstration for residents to purchase the electricity grid courtesy of BürgerEnergie Berlin

Please visit Berlin and experience our local collaborative economy. I’ll be happy to guide you through the ecosystem.

Header graphic courtesy of Andreas Arnold

The post 7 Reasons Why Berlin is a Successful Sharing City appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Adrien Labaeye: You may have heard of smart cities that use data to improve urban networks like public transportation systems. In the shadow of this well-marketed story is another narrative around data in the city; a story where the right to the city extends to the digital realm. Here are two initiatives where reclaiming citizens’ control over data has enabled practices that run counter to mainstream narratives of market-driven urban development — practices of commoning data and urban spaces, together.

Usually, talking about the role of digital technology in cities brings about the concept of “smart cities.” With billions of corporate and public money invested into the concept, the narrative of tech and efficiency is quickly eluding other notions such as equity, participation, diversity, and nature. With its focus on all-efficiency, the smart city narrative is pushing a vision of the city where urban development is decided by planners and algorithms bound by financial capital that are gradually, as Richard Sennett put it, taking away from citizens the possibility to shape the space where they live.

Case study #1: Urban Foraging in Germany

In 2009, Kai Gidhorn was regularly picking apples while cruising on his bike through the backcountry of Berlin, Germany. Because he wanted to remember the good spots, he plotted them on a map. And because he also wanted to share that with friends, he made it a collaborative map online. Slowly, the map grew as people added more fruit trees in public spaces to it. One thing lead to another, and Mundraub (“theft of food”) was born. Now the Berlin-based initiative has more than 40,000 registered users in Germany and Austria.

The practice in itself — foraging and gleaning — is not new. Still, it was forgotten, particularly in cities. Thanks to Mundraub’s collaborative mapping (or so it seems), the practice is now re-emerging in Germany. People have become used to maps to relate to their environment and find their way. This is not limited to the German-speaking world. Falling Fruit, a similar platform in the U.S. has a global reach and has collected probably the largest data repository of fruit trees globally, tapping on the crowd as well as open data. To sum it up, the idea of urban foraging is to crowdsource a map of growing edibles, reconnect ourselves to our edible urban landscape, and, if possible, get free food. But this isn’t just about taking.

Mundraub staff work with children and adults to share literacy about edibles and plant growth. They also offer tours to uncover new edibles, organize collective harvests, and make apple juice and cider, giving people a taste of DIY projects. In December of 2016, in Pankow, a borough of Berlin, urban foragers struck a deal with the local government to plant and take care of fruit trees in a public park.

Fruit trees are usually not favored by municipalities because they require intensive care. While the number is humble — twelve trees — this is quite a ground-breaking achievement when one considers the tradition of top-down management of German city administrations. Consider that in most German cities, in order to pick up fruits from public trees you are supposed to ask permission to the municipality. In Berlin-Pankow, not only have urban foragers received a bulk authorization to pick fruits from any public tree, but also the right to take care of the planted trees, which includes pruning.

“We are currently in an experimentation phase: If it’s successful, if citizens take good care of the trees, then we are ready to open more land for such direct involvement of citizens,” says Andreas Johnke, director of the municipal service in charge of streets and green spaces of the Berlin-Pankow borough. This is just a start, one borough, twelve trees planted, but Mundraub plans to do the same everywhere in Germany, and many cities already have shown interest. The goal is to get 200 cities by the end of 2017 to open up their tree cadasters and grant bulk authorization to citizens to pick up edibles without needing to ask. And in March, Mundraub also collaborated with a supermarket to let citizens plant five fruit trees in the parking lot, blurring the line between private and public space.

Families planting edible trees for future generations on the private land of a supermarket in Berlin. Photo: CC-BY-SA-NC Adrien Labaeye

Case study #2: Reclaiming Vacant Land in New York City

In 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, Paula Segal started to gather information about a vacant space in her neighborhood. It was empty for years, collecting garbage. After some research, it appeared the vacant, fenced lot was public, and had been planned as a public park — which was never built. After several community meetings and exchanges with the municipality, Myrtle Village Green was born as a community space. It includes a research and production farm, meeting space, and an open-air cinema.

Based on this first experience, Segal and other activists wanted to find out how many such vacant public lots existed. It turned out to be 596 acres, which became the name of Segal’s initiative. Over the past six years, the grassroots organization reclaimed, remixed, and opened to the crowd public data about vacant lots through its Living Lots map. The map offers information about each lot and gives an avenue to chat with neighbors interested in doing something with it. “New community gardeners are contacting us because they are using the Living Lots map to explore what city-owned land is potentially available for community gardening,” says Carlos Martinez, deputy director of Green Thumb, New York’s program for community gardening that emerged to support civic use of land left vacant by the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s.

However, the true strength of 596 Acres lies not only online: The organization also puts up signs calling neighbors to seize the land for their community. And it works. It has spurred the creation of 32 community gardens on previously vacant public land mostly in underprivileged neighborhoods that lack parks and community facilities. Another reason for the success of the organization lies in the productive relationship it has with local agencies for urban gardening: “With 596 Acres, we work closely with each other, they help us to find key people who have interest to be the steward or the leader of a community garden,” says Martinez. As of January, more than 848 acres of vacant public land have been plotted on the map.

Map and Data: Strategic Resources to Inspire Citizen-Led Change

These two examples show that creating a data commons about a shared physical resource may be a critical step in enabling communities to reclaim that resource. In one case, the data is crowdsourced from scratch, and in the other, open municipal data is compiled and given a new life.

As our cases show, data needs to be broken down into digestible bits of information, and the map is a crucial tool in doing that. The mapping interface allows people to make sense of complex information, to visualize vacant lots and fruit trees in the city. It creates a new reality in our minds. Open data alone is not enough to start a social process of slowly and iteratively re-appropriating public space. Data itself needs to be re-appropriated, remodeled, refined into digestible information and collaborative mapping is a powerful tool to do so.

But as Paula Segal found out in Brooklyn, real change happens when people start working together. The point on the map, the sign on the vacant lot is the starting point to collaboration, but it is really on land (i.e. in the physical space but not necessarily offline) co-production, the joy of doing things together that really brings lasting change in communities. It is about pressing apples into juice, planting trees, and so on. Only the sustained and lasting collective action has a chance of reshaping the status quo of local governance towards more collaborative governance of urban resources.

For city administrators, in our two cases, active participation of citizens was viewed favorably: “We find it a good thing that citizens start taking care of a piece of land,” says Johnke of Berlin-Pankow. “They switch from being  like passive customers expecting something in return for the taxes they pay to a more active and civic attitude where they feel and act responsibly.” This, he continues, has a wider impact: “With increasing participation of the public, the role of city administrators in charge of public land is changing from being simple managers of streets and park to becoming more facilitators, coordinators.” But at the same time, administrations are careful about delegating their work to groups of citizens who may fail to sustain action over time. For this, community building and some clear structures and clear rules are essential, says Carlos Martinez, from Green Thumb in New York City.

This image is a screenshot of Mundraub’s map in Berlin: Each icon shows different fruits or herbs

From Public Management to Commoning Cities

This evolution of the role municipal administrations can play, from being top-down managers to becoming facilitators of citizens’ re-appropriation strongly echoes the philosophy followed by the City of New York. “We don’t intervene in any decision-making, [community gardeners] decides their own rules,” Martinez says. “What we ask them is to have by-laws or some guidelines — regulations on how they manage the garden to reduce the risk of conflicts. In that case we may facilitate the conflict resolution, but, generally, we try to stay away, giving them the tools to resolve the conflict themselves.”

Leaving citizens to design the rules to manage shared spaces supports a process of commoning public spaces. This is less about arguing whether green spaces or trees are public goods or commons. It is about municipalities acknowledging and actively enabling the self-organization of public space by citizens. This is what cities like Bologna in Italy are doing at scale to manage the city as a commons. In this process and as we have shown, digital networks offer new opportunities. “With a new generation of gardeners — millennials — there is more room for digital technology to be part of this [community gardening] movement,” Martinez says. The coming of age of the digital natives will transform these traditional grassroots practices. Commoning will have to be increasingly understood as a process that manifests across the digital and physical spaces.

In this story of the digital transformation of cities data in the form of maps, is just a powerful tool among many others that communities may use in a wider commoning process to co-produce shared spaces — a sharing city. This (messy) reality on the ground contrasts starkly with the narrative of a smart city smoothly planned and managed from the top by the technocratic alliance of the bureaucracy and market that would  thanks to big data — calculate the most efficient solutions, and shape optimal, but stupefying spaces. At odds and in the shadow of the mainstream, initiatives like Mundraub and 596 Acres show us that commoning urban data, making it actionable and accessible for normal citizens may trigger a creative practice of commoning public spaces and make cities more livable. Commoning the city in an age of digital transformation may provide people with opportunities for a convivial use of technology. Commoning, with the use of tools like collaborative mapping, enables urban dwellers to actually own and shape the places where they live. Thus, Sharing Cities could be a powerful antidote at a time when so many feel powerless and overwhelmed by a world that appears to be getting more complex and threatening every day.

These two small stories sound marginal? How can we uncover many more?

Photo by Daniel Wehner

The post Sharing Cities: Using Urban Data to Reclaim Public Space as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.