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In 2011 Shareable organized the Share San Francisco conference to promote the city as a platform for sharing, which in turn inspired the “Sharing Cities” movement. The goal of Sharing Cities was to create horizontal linkages between local communities and serve as a platform to coordinate policies for encouraging the growth of sharing economies. Shareable itself, under the “Sharing Cities” tag, highlighted commons-based projects like open-source hailing platforms and other shared mobility projects, coworking spaces, participatory budgeting, multi-family cohousing/coliving arrangements, tool libraries, community land trusts, neighborhood gardens, shared renewable energy, municipalist projects like those in Barcelona and Jackson, hackerspaces and repair cafes, and many more.

Shareable created the Sharing Cities Network as a support platform for the project. According to the project’s website:

Fifty cities around the world began mapping their shared resources in October and November 2013 during Shareable’s first annual #MapJam. This was just the beginning of the Sharing Cities Network – an ambitious project to create one hundred sharing cities groups by 2015.

As of this writing, there are seventy-three cities worldwide listed on their Community Maps page, each one with a detailed map of sharing projects and assets. In addition, the movement led to a series of Sharing Cities Summits, the second of which in 2017 set up the Sharing Cities Alliance — which includes thirty-odd cities worldwide — as a standing body.

The book Sharing Cities is the outgrowth of these nine eventful years. Following an introduction by Gorenflo, in which he summarizes the background of the Sharing Cities movement, states its basic principles and assesses its significance, the book — a collaborative effort by fifteen people — provides over two hundred pages of case studies of local sharing economy projects in dozens of cities.

The case studies, organized topically into eleven chapters, offer fairly comprehensive and systematic coverage of sharing projects in pretty much every functional subdivision of local economies, including land ownership and housing, food, cooperative finance, micro-manufacturing, transportation — and, well, everything else.

As Gorenflo notes in the introduction, the commons “was part of, but not the core of,” the initial Share San Francisco meeting. This changed, he says, because of the realization that “sharing” functions could and would be coopted by the above-mentioned corporate Death Star model if the movement did not explicitly embrace open and commons-based models.

Even more so, it changed because of the Sharing Cities movement’s interaction and cooperative engagement with a number of other commons-based movements. From organizations like the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation) founded by Michel Bauwens, to scholar-advocates of commons-based municipal economies like Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione (the closest thing the municipalist movement has to organic intellectuals), and even actual large-scale municipalist policy efforts (those emerging from M15 in Barcelona and Madrid, commons-based movements in Bologna and Amsterdam, older movements like Cooperation Jackson and the Evergreen Initiative in Cleveland, and the efforts that have since proliferated in hundreds of other cities), the Sharing Cities project has drawn inspiration from many areas.

In addition this ecosystem of movements includes a number of Autonomist thinkers like Massimo De Angelis who emphasize the commons as the kernel of an emerging post-capitalist society. And the role of the city in post-capitalist transition has been a theme in the work of thinkers ranging from Murray Bookchin to David Harvey.

All these things coming together amount, between them, to Steam Engine Time for commons-based municipal economies. This is more true than ever in the last couple of years. As even nominally leftist governments like Syntagma in Greece show their impotence or unwillingness to act in the face of neoliberal assault, and fascist or fascist-adjacent leaders come to power in a growing share of the West, municipal platforms and networks of such platforms have become the primary base for popular empowerment.

The importance of the urban commons to cities today is that it situates residents as the key actors — not markets, technologies, or governments, as popular narratives suggest — at a time when people feel increasingly powerless. To paraphrase commons scholars Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, the city as a commons is a claim on the city by the people. Furthermore, a commons transition is a viable, post-capitalist way forward….

And if the various strands of municipalism add up to an ecosystem, Shareable and Sharing Cities occupy a vital niche in that ecosystem.

On the purely theoretical side, commons-based scholars of post-capitalist transition (De Angelis, for example) have done superb work on the commons as a new mode of production growing within the interstices of capitalism. But aside from general recommendations like growing the commons by incorporating a growing share of the material prerequisites of physical and social reproduction into its circuit, they have been light on the nuts and bolts of institutional examples of such practice. And activists like Chokwe Lumumba and Ada Colau have done amazing work in building local municipal platforms to promote a commons-based model of economic development. But when it comes to developing the full range of tangible alternatives and integrating them into a cohesive commons-based economy, such local movements have been quite uneven in identifying the possibilities. For example Cleveland and Jackson have focused heavily on incubating cooperative enterprises under the inspiration of Mondragon, but have in my opinion failed to take advantage of the potential of open-source information and cheap open-source micromanufacturing machinery for community bootstrapping.

The combined and coordinated development of all the possibilities for sharing economies within a community’s discretion, to the full extent of its discretion, would be revolutionary beyond anything we have seen. What if a municipality incorporated all vacant municipal land and housing into community land trusts, and acted as a cooperative enterprise incubator on the Cleveland and Jackson models, and used the surplus capacity of city and public utility fiber-optic infrastructure to provide low-cost community broadband, and made the unused capacity of public buildings available as community hubs, and implemented participatory budgeting and citizen policy platforms, and facilitated the creation of open/cooperative sharing platforms as alternatives to Uber, and facilitated the creation of hackerspaces and repair cafes and Fab Labs and garage factories, and required government offices and public education facilities to use open-source software and mandated that all publicly funded research and scholarship be in the public domain? All at the same time? It would amount to an entire commons-based economy, comprising a sizeable core of the entire local economy, with synergies and growth potential beyond imagining.

This is where Shareable comes in, and where it has done more than anyone else to kick-start needed action. Shareable took the lead not only in encouraging municipalities to become platforms for supporting and facilitating local sharing economies. It also promoted concrete mapping projects in individual cities to systematically identify and catalog all the potential assets for incorporation into a commons-based economy, and publicized concrete examples of commons-based praxis in all areas of social, economic, and political life from around the world. The subsequent emergence of other efforts at urban commons mapping and commons-based development policies in specific cities around the world (particularly notable is the P2P Foundation’s efforts in Ghent) is arguably the fruit of a seed planted by Shareable.

If scholars like De Angelis point to the commons as the core of the post-capitalist economy, and Barcelona and Madrid point to the municipality as the primary locus for facilitating commons-based projects, then Shareable has taken the lead in cataloging and sharing the full range of specific examples of such projects and encouraging others to follow their example.

Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons embodies this cataloging and sharing project. Given the number of localities with municipalist movements, and the number of local activists and tinkerers worldwide developing commons-based projects, there are more projects on the ground than would fit into a thirty-volume encyclopedia, let alone one book. But the survey in Sharing Cities is a representative sample of the full range of what’s being done; every case study can be taken as a proxy for what others are doing in countless other communities around the world.

In short, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in what’s being done on the ground to build the society of the future.

The post Book of the Day: Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.

These examples demonstrate why urban commons are so important for a sharing city. When there are more urban commons, more residents can directly experience the effectiveness and empowerment of sharing practices. They cultivate the skills needed to create a sharing city by commoning over smaller urban resources, like parks, and becoming more familiar with working together and sharpening their capacities to govern the whole city as a commons. These communities show how — with the right mix of commoning — all cities could become sharing cities. —Ryan Conway and Marco Quaglia 

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

1.  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 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 Conway 

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

While the port city of Gdansk 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-de- termination, 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 Conway

3. 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 fi nd 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 a ect quality of life.” —Ryan Conway

4. 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

Longer versions of the above case studies can be found in our book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Header image by Štefan Štefančík via Unsplash

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Whether it be the grassroots artist organization Club Cultural Matienzo (CCM) that formed in Buenos Aires to build a cultural commons for the local arts scene in wake of a tragic nightclub fire, or land stewardship activists in Brooklyn reclaiming public space for urban farming and community gardening, Sharing Cities is filled with projects and policies ready to replicated and implemented in your community.

You can Contribute to Shareable for a hard copy or E-Book copy, or download a free pdf of Sharing Cities from Shareable.net:

https://www.shareable.net/contribute 

(the free PDF is bottom right on this page)

An except from Neal Gorenflo’s introduction to Sharing Cities:

With the backdrop of worsening income inequality, climate change, and fiscal challenges, the growth of self-organized, democratic, and inclusive means for city dwellers to meet their own needs by sharing resources couldn’t be more relevant. These cases and policies taken together offer a new vision for cities that puts people – not the market, technology, or government – at the center, where they belong. More than that, the book represents a claim on the city run by people – a claim increasingly being made by city-residents the world over. This book was written for a broad audience, but may find special resonance with those who share this people-first vision of cities and want to act on it. Written by a team of 15 fellows with contributions from 18 organizations around the world, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons” not only witnesses a movement, but is a practical reference guide for community-based solutions to a range of challenges cities face such as affordable housing, sustainable mobility, and more.

Today’s show featured intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records. In the middle you heard a clip from Team Human Ep. 31  guest, RU Sirius.

After you check out Shareable.net, swing by TeamHuman.fm where you can listen to all 60 Episodes and support the show via Patreon. Your subscriptions keep this weekly show happening!

Photo of Neal : by Sebastiaan ter Burg https://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg/

Sharing Cities Photo thanks to Shareable.net

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Chris Rankin: On Wednesday, Sept. 13, we celebrated the launch of our new book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons” and crowdfunding campaign, at the Embassy Network house in San Francisco, California. We are grateful to everyone who joined us for a fun and inspiring evening. It gave us a rare opportunity to connect with supporters — old and new — in person, and witness just how much support exists for our work. The Embassy Network, which not only offers shared housing, but provides an avenue to share ideas and connect with people around the world, was the perfect venue to introduce the book — a global, crowdsourced effort. We’d like to thank our board member Tony Lai for graciously offering the beautiful venue.

At the event, Shareable’s executive director Neal Gorenflo and board member Laurie Schecter reminded us of the vital role Shareable has played in leading the sharing movement. If you missed the event, you can still watch their talks on Shareable’s Facebook page. We were joined by 50 friends, raised over $11,000, and nearly sold out of the early release version of the book. We are not done though. We have a goal of raising $100,000 in 60 days and are calling on our readers to support Shareable. A donation to Shareable is more than a tax-deductible gift — it’s a way to elevate our platform to allow essential voices to be heard and inspiring stories to be shared. Shareable’s storytelling is essential to individuals, community groups, and policymakers who use our reporting as a manual for creating a more resilient, equitable, and joyful world.

Our goals of our crowdfunding campaign are to:

• Build a new website to grow our readership and engage our core community more effectively.

• Provide additional coverage of solutions coming from the global south and unrepresented communities.

• Host a community-driven book tour. We’ll equip our community to organize book events around the world.

To make a donation to Shareable, learn more about the projects we have planned in 2018, and obtain a print copy or e-version of “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons” please click here.

All photos by Ambika Kandasamy

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Neal Gorenflo: When I began writing about the sharing economy in 2009, the eclectic array of struggling, communitarian-minded tech start-ups in San Francisco, California, were just one small part of a vast number of sharing innovations that made up what we at Shareable saw as an era-defining transformation in how people create value. This included open-source software, all the open X movements inspired by open source, Creative Commons, the resurgence of an economy based on solidarity, the rise of carsharing, bikesharing, coworking, cohousing, open government, participatory budgeting, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, hackerspaces, and more. We were in the midst of a sharing transformation.

Soon, however, money began to pour into a handful of these tech start-ups, most notably Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber. The media quickly shifted its attention to them, and they became synonymous with the sharing economy. However, as the money rolled in, the communitarian element rolled out. Exploiting peer providers, purposely breaking regulations, strong-arming local governments, and unethical competitive tactics became the norm. The very thing that earned these start-ups traction in the first place — how they recast relationships between strangers in radically constructive terms — was sacrificed to growth. Instead, they became a particularly aggressive extension of business as usual.

Despite this, the real sharing economy did not disappear. We at Shareable helped catalyse two related movements to help draw resources to this real sharing economy. In 2011, we hosted Share San Francisco, the first event framing cities as platforms for sharing. The city of San Francisco incorporated our thinking into their Sharing Economy Working Group, which then inspired a former social justice activist and human rights lawyer, Mayor Park Won-soon of Seoul, South Korea, to launch Sharing Cities Seoul in 2012. Sharing City Seoul’s comprehensive package of regulations and programmes supported a localized version of the sharing economy where the commons, government, and market work together to promote sharing and the common good. Many cities have followed suit, including Amsterdam, London, Milan, Lisbon, Warsaw, five cities in Japan, and at least six other cities in South Korea. Last year, Mayor Park won the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for his sharing cities work.

In late 2014, we published a feature story by Nathan Schneider, “Owning is the New Sharing,” which reported on an emerging trend — tech start-ups organizing themselves as cooperatives. This, together with a conference about platform cooperatives, proved the stimulus for a new movement. One of the cornerstone examples of this movement is Stocksy United, a growing online stock photo marketplace where the photographers own and control the business. In other words, Stocksy is a 21st-century worker cooperative. Another example is Fairmondo, a German eBay-like site for ethical products owned and controlled by sellers. It’s expanding by recruiting cooperatives in other countries to a federation of cooperatives that, together, will maintain local control of each country’s market through a single technology platform. Fairmondo exemplifies an approach to impact that philanthropists ignore because, too often, they are as obsessed with scale as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist and don’t see the virtue of impact through replication instead.

In this regard, philanthropists today should follow the instructive example of Edward Filene. Filene played a leading role in developing an institution that allowed ordinary people to build their own wealth — credit unions, a high-impact model that could be and has been replicated. Philanthropists should use their resources to help do the same across a whole range of new institutions including sharing cities, platform cooperatives, and much more. This will help ordinary people build and access wealth, reduce resource consumption, and reweave the social fabric. Now, that’s what I’d call a real sharing economy.

This piece was originally published on Alliance Magazine.

Photo by Avariel Falcon

The post To Create a Real Sharing Economy, Think Replication — Not Just Scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Neal Gorenflo: Last year, LabGov, a think tank and action platform focused on the urban commons that’s based in Rome, Italy, asked us to provide feedback on the draft of an opinion report on how to regulate the collaborative economy. The effort was spearheaded by Benedetta Brighenti — vice mayor of Castelnuovo Rangone — for the European Committee of the Regions. It was clear from the start that the report would have a strong public-interest bent due to the inclusive process LabGov designed to draft it.

Last month, the final report was presented to the EU and made public. It’s largely a response to the EU’s call to provide “guidance aimed at supporting consumers, businesses and public authorities to engage confidently in the collaborative economy.” Here are key takeaways from the report:

• Avoid regulatory fragmentation across the EU, but do so for the benefit of the public rather than just to spur economic growth
• Form a collaborative economy forum for cities to help exchange knowledge
• Conduct a rigorous local impact assessment as the collaborative economy is based in and spans localities
• Tackle cross-cutting issues within the Urban Agenda for the EU, particularly that which relates to the digital transition
• Take a holistic approach that considers the economic, social, and environmental assets of systems for sharing goods and services
• Make sure that the collaborative economy doesn’t worsen the digital divide
• Create an environment in which local services have a chance to thrive in local and world markets in context of a market often dominated by U.S. businesses

Also notable is recognition of the collaborative economy’s potential positive environmental and social impact, its social and experiential quality, and the importance of shaping it according to European values.

The report covers much more in its 10 pages. While far from a complete treatment of how to regulate the collaborative economy, it provides a model that other jurisdictions can take inspiration from, especially in considering human values, embracing a broad definition of the collaborative economy, and involving local authorities in crafting regulation that works at multiple levels of government.

Collaborative Economy and Online Platforms a Shared View of Cities and Regions by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Header image of Benedetta Brighenti by the European Committee of the Regions. 

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Neal Gorenflo shares his report on the recent The City as a Commons conference, held in Bologna, Italy. For more coverage on the conference, check out David Bollier’s take on the event.

The City as a Commons conference broke new ground earlier this month. As the first International Association of the Study of the Commons (IASC) conference on the urban commons, it urged that the historical focus of study and action on rural natural resource commons should shift, at least somewhat, to material and immaterial commons in cities. This is appropriate now that humans have become an urban species for the first time within the last decade.

However, the conference organizers, legal scholars Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, took things even further. This was not just a call to shift the focus, but a call to recast the city in the image of the commons. The wording of the conference title was carefully considered. As co-organizer Sheila Foster has made clear, the city as a commons is a claim on the city by the people that calls for us to rethink how cities are governed and resources allocated and by whom. The city imagined as commons is a starting point that can lead to more fair, convivial and sustainable cities.

While a radical proposal for cities, one well aligned to Shareable’s vision, it was well grounded in theory and practice by scholars and commons practitioners alike in the conference’s dizzying number of panels (related papers available here until December 1, 2015). Moreover, one of the goals laid out by Foster in her welcome message — to create community around the urban commons — seemed work out too.  After two days of sessions and delicious Italian meals together, this diverse group seemed to jell.

The conference was hosted by LabGov, the International Association for the Study of the Commons, the Fordham Law School’s Urban Law Center and LUISS University in Rome. It was appropriately held in Bologna, Italy, a historical center of urban innovation which more recently celebrated the one year anniversary of its Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, a groundbreaking new law and process empowering citizens to be hands-on city makers.

The conference was bookended by two powerful keynotes, one about the past and one about the future. The opening keynote by Tine De Moor, President of the organization (IASC) Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom co-founded 1989, gave a short, insightful, and sobering history of the commons. Silke Helfrich, one of the world’s most astute commons activists, closed with a keynote imagining the urban commons in 2040.

De Moor’s speech outlined the long history of European commons, with a heyday starting in the 11th century and ending in the 19th when the commons were literally legislated out of existence. She warned that we should not place too high an expectation of the commons as they are revived or we risk repeating the mistake of the private property story as a one fits all solution. She urged attendees to be realistic about what can and can’t be governed by the commons.

She also highlighted the revolutionary nature of the commons. She reminded us that people lost their sense of collectivity with the rise of the individual and market paradigm, and that the commons re-introduces this sensibility and way of being. She put the urban commons in historical context noting that commons rise during economic crises. Urban commons like cooperatives, associations, and credit unions are all a product of such crises. She noted a similar dynamic at work today in the Netherlands, her home. There’s been a dramatic spike in the formation of cooperatives in the last decade.

Helfrich speech was the perfect closing to the conference. She prefaced her exploration of a future urban commons with this philosophical bottom line about the commons:

Human beings are free in relatedness but never free from relationships. That’s the ontological bottom line. Relation precedes the things being related to, i.e. the actual facts, objects, situations and circumstances. Just as physics and biology are coming to see that the critical factors in their fields are relationships, not things, so it is with commons.

Then took us on a walk of the 2040 version of the city as a commons exploring commons-based housing, food, workspaces, services, and more. She brought to life a total vision of the city as commons in 2040. She called this a “concrete utopia” because all the pieces of it already exist but have not been assembled yet. Then she told us how it came to be, or rather how we can get there. The key is to, “connect commons, confederate the hot spots of commoning, create commons-neighbourhoods, commonify the city.”

The conference was just such an effort. I agree with commons expert David Bollier that we’ll see increasing activity in this space. People may look back at this conference as the catalyst for a powerful movement.

Vision of a city as a commons from Helfrich’s presentation, created by N. Kichler und D. Steinwender. City of Workshops – green, Lizenz: CC BY SA

The post City as a Commons Conference Reimagines Cities, and in High Relief appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Join P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens, Shareable’s Neal Gorenflo, and Sharable Cities expert April Rinne on November 12th for this special event. Click here to register. If you can’t make it, the event will also be shown as a livestream on November 12.

Speakers

Michel Bauwens
Founder and Director, P2P Foundation

Michel Bauwens, theoretician, activist, and public speaker, is one of the pioneers of the peer-to-peer movement. He is founder and director of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer productions, governance, and property. His work lays the conceptual foundations of a production system that would serve as an alternative to industrial capitalism.

In 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a ‘social knowledge economy’. In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents.

His recent book ‘Save the world – Towards a Post Capitalist Society with P2P‘ is based on a series of interviews with Jean Lievens, originally published in Dutch, it has since been translated and published in French with an English language publication expected in the near future.

Neal Gorenflo
Co-founder, Shareable

Neal is the co-founder of Shareable, a nonprofit that publishes the leading blog about sharing and convenes the Sharing Cities Global Network. He is a keynote speaker, consultant, and writer on the sharing economy, sharing cities, the future of work, and travel. He is the co-editor of the sharing-themed books “Share or Die“ and “Policies for Shareable Cities“. As a pioneer in the sharing cities movement, he advises mayors and co-convenes the Sharing Cities Global Network, a group of 2,000 grassroots sharing activists from around the world. As an avid sharing practitioner, he recounted a year living shareably in an inspiring article.

April Rinne
Expert on the Sharing Economy and Shareable Cities

April focuses on the linkages and opportunities between the sharing economy and cities; policy; travel and tourism; and emerging markets. She advises companies, local and national governments, entrepreneurs, think tanks, investors and development banks, working across for-profit and non-profit models. She is a skilled public speaker and workshop facilitator who has presented to executives and practitioners on five continents about a wide range of topics, from policy reform to the future of work and labor. She contributes regularly to news and media about the sharing economy.

Previously April was Chief Strategy Officer at Collaborative Lab, global Director of WaterCredit at Water.org, a private lawyer focusing on international microfinance and impact investing, and adjunct faculty at the International Development Law Organization. She advises numerous enterprises, ranging from BOP marketplace creation to trust, alternative currencies and new forms of insurance, across a range of developed and emerging economies.

April holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in International Finance from The Fletcher School, and a B.A. from Emory University. She is a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum where she leads the Sharing Economy Working Group and serves on the Urbanization advisory group. She also serves on the Advisory Boards for Seoul Sharing City (South Korea), Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and the National League of Cities (USA). She is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation and a member of REX. She is an avid globetrotter, having traveled to 90 countries (at last count) and worked in more than 50, and does a mean handstand.

Visit the Disruptive Innovation Festival’s website to register for the event.

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It all began with park benches.

In 2011, a group of women in Bologna, Italy wanted to donate benches to their neighborhood park, Piazza Carducci. There was nowhere to sit in their park. So they called the city government to get permission to put in benches. They called one department, which referred them to another, which sent them on again. No one in the city could help them. This dilemma highlighted an important civic lacuna — there simply was no way for citizens to contribute improvements to the city. In fact, it was illegal.

Fast forward to May 16, 2015. The mayor, city councilors, community leaders, journalists, and hundreds of others gathered at the awe-inspiring MAST Gallery for the opening ceremony of Bologna’s Civic Collaboration Fest celebrating the one year anniversary of the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, a history-making institutional innovation that enables Bologna to operate as a collaborative commons. Now Bologna’s citizens have a legal way to contribute to the city. Since the regulation passed one year ago, more than 100 projects have signed “collaboration pacts” with the city under the regulation to contribute urban improvements with 100 more in the pipeline.

It was an impressive event filled with ceremony, emotion, historical significance all in a context of tough political realities.

The MAST Gallery in Bologna

City Councilor Luca Rizzo Nervo opened the ceremony with a rousing speech. He said a new day was dawning where “no you can’t” was turning into “yes we can together,” where citizens are self-determining, and where a new, empowering relationship between citizens and city had begun. He said he was tired of the old, pessimistic rhetoric and that the regulation opened up a new, hopeful development path that takes “active citizenship” to the next level. He ended with a vision of Bologna as an entire city powered by sharing and collaboration as part of a global network of other cities on the same path.

Administrator Donato Di Memmo, the urban commons project leader, spoke to the importance of the urban commons for urban art, digital innovation and social cohesion and the need for improvement in the application of the regulation. He said that relationships are the starting point and that with training and more visibility the regulation could meet the high expectations for it.

We heard from the leaders of three projects that had signed pacts. Michela Bassi spoke of the impact of her Social Streets project, which has moved from a network of neighborhood Facebook groups to a nonprofit with a set of tangible projects including an outdoor ad turned into a neighborhood bulletin board. Veronica Veronesi introduced Reuse With Love, a group of 50 neighbors who joined forces to fight waste and improve the lives of children and the poor. Annarita Ciaruffoli of Dentro Al Nido (Inside the Nest) spoke of how the regulation was helping to restore schools.

Stefano Brugnara, president of Arci Bologna and spokesperson for the Bologna Third Sector Forum, an association of local nonprofits, spoke of the durable role of nonprofits under the new regulation; that they don’t get subsumed by it, but rather can be strengthened by it, especially if there’s transparency in its application. His comments hinted at a concern that nonprofits would be weakened by the regulation.

Giovanni Ginocchini of Bologna’s Urban Center commented on urban transformation from a physical standpoint including fighting graffiti, renovation of the city’s famous arcades, green lighting in public spaces, and better social housing.

While the proceedings included a diverse set of stakeholders, Mayor Virginio Merola was clearly the headliner. He gave an engaging speech filled with emotion and historical reflection. His main point, which was a reminder of Bologna’s long history of civic innovation, was that Bologna’s people and their cooperative culture are the city’s most important assets, the things that set it apart. He said the regulation was taking this tradition to the next level.

Bologna’s Mayor Merola about to give civic collaborators keys to the city at the recent Civic Collaboration Fest

He got emotional at points in his speech, pausing to hold back tears. This stirred the audience. He connected. He spoke of the need for citizens to love each other and to have the freedom to do the best for oneself and others. He said it’s easy to get depressed by the daily news, but that the DNA of Bologna is the ability of citizens to fulfill their dreams. He spoke about the increasing diversity of the city – only 30% of residents are Bologna born – and the need to focus on commonalities, common assets, human rights, and equality. He urged the audience to create an intelligent city – one based on great relationships – as opposed to a merely smart city. He concluded that while there’s a need for much more citizen action, that this doesn’t mean the end of hierarchy. The city still needs dedicated civil servants.

The mayor has been criticized as “the mayor who cries” and for not having a vision. I got word after the ceremony that the mayor said the urban commons is now his vision. I was blown away how aligned his and Luca Rizzo Nervo’s vision is with Shareable’s and our Sharing Cities Network. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that our vision is aligned with theirs as Bologna has a thousand year history of civic innovation that includes the first university in the Western world, self-rule as a independent city-state during the Middle Ages, and more recently the rise of the region’s famously large cooperative sector. One conclusion of Robert Putnam’s influential book about Italy, Making Democracy Work, was that Northern Italians were richer than their southern cousins because they were civic, not the reverse as he had previously thought. The mayor’s speech about the cooperative spirit of Bologna was not hot air. It had the weight of history behind it. It spoke to a necessary and feasible revival of it.

Mayor Merola giving a citizen a key to the city. Said citizen beams with pride.

After the mayor spoke, and on the invitation of our host, Christian Iaione of LUISS LabGov, Fordham University professor Sheila Foster, commons activist David Bollier (who also posted about the event here), and I gave short talks about the urban commons. Sheila focused on the potential of the urban commons to foster human development. David spoke about commons-based economic development, and Bologna’s potential to inspire other cities.  And I spoke about the how living day-to-day in the commons builds citizenship.

The ceremony was concluded in the most fitting way possible. All the leaders of projects operating under the regulation were invited on stage. The mayor gave each a USB key to the city with a copy of regulation on the drive. The USB key was the brainchild of Christian Iaione and Michele d’Alena, the civic collaboration fest project leader. What a great idea. It created a joyful moment that symbolized a shift in power from elected leaders to citizens.

One of the many keys that Mayor Merola passed out at the Civic Collaboration Festival

The next day Christian Iaione and Elena De Nictolis, Alessandra Feola and Elia Lofranco of LUISS LabGov gave a delegation including Sheila Foster and I a tour of projects that were active that day. Our first stop was one of seven citizen groups painting buildings in the city’s historic center. Painting is a big deal because of an abundance of graffiti and the need to maintain the ancient buildings, which is crucial for quality of life not to mention the tourist trade.

A group of volunteers from nonprofit Lawyers at Work painting under one of the many arcades in Bologna’s historic city center

There I saw the regulation’s multistakeholder collaboration in action. The painting crew was a nonprofit, Lawyers at Work. The municipal waste management company Hera had dropped off the painting kit earlier in the day. It included paint that met the city’s historical code, brushes, smocks to protect clothing, cones to mark off the work area, and more.  Hera had also cleared the painting project with the building owner and city. The city hosted an online map that showed all the projects active that day and their location. Citizens could track and join projects online or do it spontaneously. A neighbor had joined Lawyers at Work when they happened by the worksite, something that happens regularly with Bologna’s urban commons projects. Neighbors also share project activity on social media which can spark more activity and civic pride.

A screen shot of a real-time map developed by the city to track urban commons project activity

My idea of placemaking was radically upgraded by witnessing the regulation in action.  Here the making part of placemaking was brought to life in a vivid and dynamic way. No longer was placemaking for urban design experts who plan everything out in advance, but rather it was for everyone in a real-time multistakeholder dance that included both planned and spontaneous elements. I began to see the possibilities of an entirely new way to live in a city that was even more creative, enlivening, and social than what cities already offer.

In between stops in what turned out to be a long, vigorous walk, I had the chance to chat with Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione who had just co-authored a soon-to-be published paper conceptualizing the city as commons from an administrative law standpoint. Two points stood out in our conversation. First, that a new era was dawning where citizens are active co-managers of the resources they use in cities instead of passive recipients of services. Secondly, that the old idea of commons needed an upgrade in the urban context. Most academic studies of commons revolve around relatively isolated natural resource commons like forests, fisheries, and pastures. Urban commons must by necessity be embedded in a dense weave of institutions. They can’t be as independent of the market and government as the natural resource commons that Elinor Ostrom was famous for studying. Room must be made for urban commons in a city’s administrative law and processes. In addition, they must be productively linked to other sectors of with a city. This arguably makes urban commons more complex to set up, but could provide more protection for them than what’s typical for natural resource commons, which are prone to closure. This highlighted the importance of Bologna’s urban commons regulation. It has opened space for the urban commons to flourish in Bologna and is already leading the way for other cities in Italy and beyond.

After a couple of other stops, we ended our tour at Piazza Carducci. I wanted to see where Bologna’s urban commons began. I got my wish. The park was ordinary, and that’s just the point. The most extraordinary social innovations can begin in ordinary places with a simple wish. This was such a place, and it was beautiful to me for that reason. All of us gathered on one of the benches for a picture to commemorate the pioneers of Bologna’s urban commons, the women of Piazza Carducci.

Sheila Foster, Christian Iaione, the LabGov team, and myself on a bench in Piazza Carducci

Originally published on Shareable
Lead image by Martina. Article images by Neal Gorenflo

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