Eleni Katrini: Analysis: Imagine living in a neighborhood where you can learn from your neighbors, grow your own food, participate in your child’s education, and invest back to your community’s well-being through your daily transactions. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably interested in or already involved in a community garden, daycare cooperative, trade school, tool library, or other hyperlocal initiative. These projects, which can be found all around the world, allow communities to build their collective agency in solving everyday needs and create a local sharing culture, thus providing an alternative for more sustainable and socially just communities.

While the field of “urban commons” has been around for a while, there’s limited research that investigates the relationship between initiatives like those listed above and physical space. My doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, takes upon this exciting challenge of identifying spatial patterns of sharing practices. In my research, I’m drawing from the fields of the commons, social practices, human behavior, architecture, and urban design, while investigating four contemporary case studies of sharing culture in London, U.K., and Athens, Greece. I’m interested in learning what a daycare cooperative, an alternative currency, a cultural center, and self-governed refugee shelter have in common with regards to their spatial attributes. Some of my early findings might be useful to others researching sharing and the commons, but more importantly, I think they can be insightful to those who are on the ground, working on amazing sharing and collaborative initiatives.

So, what have I learned so far?

Space acquisition and appropriation: In their early stages, sharing programs tend to run into the challenge of acquiring a space. Many cities often limit themselves to residential and commercial uses, with very little opportunities for communal, nonprofit uses. Even after a group has found a space, it is usually a space not designed for sharing. Given the inherent dynamism of sharing initiatives’ activities, they tend to be creative in appropriating their spaces to accommodate emerging needs. Towards that end, a large open floor-plan space is usually preferred as it allows for flexibility and can afford a wide range of activities.  

Identity and interactions: Sharing initiatives aspire to engage with the wider public by being open and accessible to all. To this end, it’s important to consider the spatial attributes of a place — large, open doors, for instance, serve as porous spaces, inviting people outside of the group inside. However, beyond the physical “openness” of the space, there are non-spatial conditions such as territoriality and the projected identity of the group that can create barriers between the initiatives and the adjacent community. In those cases, the group needs to make an effort to engage with the neighborhood by extending its activities to adjacent public spaces. Nearby parks, sidewalks, or squares could be instrumental in providing a fertile ground for facilitating interactions between the initiative and those who may not have made it to the group’s physical location.

Local ecosystem: Finally, for an initiative to be fully supported, it needs to be embedded in the daily routine of the people involved. The proximity of people’s homes to the space is critical. That does not necessarily mean that sharing initiatives should be located in purely residential areas. Finding a place that has a good mix of residential area and local commerce is important for the initiatives to place themselves within a supportive ecosystem of people, organizations, and businesses.

This piece is based on the paper “Creating the Everyday Commons; Towards Spatial Patterns of Sharing Culture,” published by Bracket Magazine.

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Mirella Ferraz:  Since 2013, the Network of Wellbeing, where I work, has hosted community potlucks in Totnes, a small town in the south of England. These potlucks, which are open to all, have been helping build friendships among residents since day one. We started the potlucks because we realized that there weren’t many avenues for local community members to participate in events that are accessible, affordable, and family-friendly. The community potlucks take place on the third Friday of each month at the local church hall. The premise is quite simple: just bring some food to share. Around 50-100 people of all ages, including children, attend these events. During holidays and festivals, the potlucks have attracted around 300 people. Often there is entertainment, such as live music, poetry readings, children’s activities, wool spinning, or cooking demonstrations that are led by local volunteers.

“It has been wonderful to see the Community Potlucks go from strength to strength, and help transform the town in the process,” says Larch Maxey, Network of Wellbeing’s community project manager. “When we started, very few people had even heard of a potluck, let alone been to one, now it’s become the default whenever an organization meets, when people have a party, or celebration, it’s a potluck.”

For five years, the Network of Wellbeing took responsibility for organizing the community potlucks, but recently, a group of local residents has taken on this responsibility. Now, the potlucks are run by the community for the community, Wendy Douglas, one of the volunteer coordinators, says. “Potluck suppers are a wonderful community event, open to everyone, and costing no more than the contents of the homemade pot of food for you,” she says. “It’s a great opportunity to meet other locals over a plate of delicious food. No need to be lonely or eat alone when there are events like this to attend. The Totnes Community Potluck has enabled me to meet many like-minded people, and I enjoy my involvement as a volunteer. I hope it will continue well into the future.”

The initiative is also helping tackle social isolation, one of the greatest issues of our times. “I love the simplicity of potlucks — open to everyone and a great way to help bring people together,” Maxey says. “Loneliness is as bad for us as smoking, and potlucks are a great way to connect people and overcome loneliness.”

If you are inspired by the idea of the community potlucks, but are unable to attend the regular events in Totnes, you could launch a similar event in your local community. If this is of interest, then check out the Network of Wellbeing’s Community Potluck Guidelines, which provide you with all of the information and inspiration needed to successfully organize these community-building events.  “We’re also happy to speak with you about our experience of this event, and provide any guidance that may be helpful,” Maxey says. Please get in touch with Maxey at [email protected] for any support you may need.

Have you listened to our new podcast “The Response“? It’s a riveting look into how communities help each other out after deadly natural disasters. Listen here:

Images provided by Network of Wellbeing

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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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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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Social capital is shaped and molded by space. This same social capital is crucial in the successful self-organization of the commons, according to the late political economist Elinor Ostrom. Thus, in places where people can mobilize social capital, decades of urban planning practices are being challenged.

Digitalization is also an opportunity: It allows people to collect and make use of data in creative ways on an unprecedented scale. This has a huge potential for the urban commons. City administrators hold large amounts of land data that is so far hard to access or use, but when it becomes open data, it can unleash bottom-up innovations.

Last but not least, we should not forget that practices that foster Sharing Cities may have actually been there for decades. Some of those practices may be seen as old-fashioned, but might prove useful today. —Adrien Labaeye

1. Bottom Road Sanctuary: A Post-Apartheid Community Managed Nature Sanctuary

The area around Zeekoevlei lake, in South Africa, has had extremely high concentrations of threatened native plant species. This is partly because its northern bank was used as a garbage dump for many years. Then, in 2005, the city of Cape Town rezoned the area into parcels of land to be purchased by people who suffered through the Apartheid. The residents who moved in joined forces with nature conservation officials and local environmental organizations to restore the wetland. In practice, this meant residents largely left the space open and undeveloped. Some residents have actively removed invasive species, allowing a particularly threatened plant species, the fynbos, to thrive again in its natural habitat. The Bottom Road Sanctuary now has over 50,000 native plants, attracting many kinds of wildlife. It also has walkways, benches, and barbecuing spaces for nearby residents to share. —Adrien Labaeye

2. Gängeviertel: Repurposed Historical Building for Public Art and Culture

The city of Hamburg decided to tear down a deteriorating historical building complex in a neighborhood once known as “das Gängeviertel.” In August 2009, artists formed a collective to oppose the destruction of the 12 buildings, and advocated that they instead be repurposed as a public space for creativity. The collective succeeded in saving the Gängeviertel, and held a launch celebration. The event brought 3,000 residents of Hamburg into the space for exhibitions, film screenings, concerts, and other cultural events. The collective then transformed into a co-operative in 2010, and presented a concept plan for the complex to the local urban development authority in Hamburg. The city approved the plan and granted the co-op’s use and management of the buildings. In the six years since, several of the buildings have been renovated by the city and tens of thousands of people have visited the cultural complex. In 2012, the German UNESCO Commission celebrated the Gängeviertel initiative as a successful example of urban development that promotes cultural and social participation through the preservation of public spaces and democratic city policies. —Adrien Labaeye

3. Chisinau Civic Center: Vacant Lot Reclaimed as a Public Park for Community Gatherings

A neglected plot of triangular land once lay in the city of Chisinau in Moldova. Cars regularly drove over it. Some used it to dump their garbage and construction rubble. Now, the site is a lively public space, known as the Chisinau Civic Center. The transformation was initiated by the local nongovernmental organization the Oberliht Association, and was created together with local officials as well as artists, architects, scientists, students, and community members. In the very beginning, they held a public picnic at the park as a way to invite nearby residents to get involved in the park’s restoration. The organizers then built a wooden platform in the center of the park with support of the nearby residents. This eventually led to the Civic Center becoming a play area for children, as well as a place for community gatherings, film screenings, games, exhibits, and performances. —Cat Johnson

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

Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by humblenick

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Amanda Abrams: For years, Wayne Trevor was a typical resident of West Norwood, a suburban region in south London. He knew a couple of his neighbors and mostly thought of the area as a place to commute to and from his job as a customer strategy senior sponsor at the Transport for London. But all that changed in 2014. That year, a team of researchers and local council staff joined forces and transformed West Norwood into a hub for community participation — also known as an “urban village” — and Trevor said it was the “start of a transformational journey” for him.

The project was spearheaded by Tessy Britton, director of Participatory City, a London, England-based initiative supporting projects that strengthen social cohesion among city dwellers. Britton launched the pilot project in West Norwood, which mobilized 1,000 people to initiate and participate in 20 community projects, including starting a “library of things,” sewing classes, and communal cooking sessions.

Trevor, who is interested in food systems, got involved with an urban gardening program and spearheaded a group of 20 neighbors who were also interested in gardening. Together, they wound up cultivating carrots and fruit trees and bees, and eventually began running a 200-square meter community garden. “Before, I knew just a few people,” Trevor says. “[The project] completely transformed my approach to community and people — now, I’m a lot more trusting.”

Like Trevor, most participants said that the initiative added to the neighborhood’s vibrancy and made it easy to start new projects. Many also said that it strengthened bonds among people and increased the community’s ability to collectively respond to social, economic, and environmental problems.

Search for “urban village” online and many of the entries that come up will refer to an urban planning concept of residences clustered near shops and offices. In the U.S. in particular, it’s a fairly new idea that focuses on neighborhood design. But an urban village is traditionally much more than a physical space. It’s a network of relationships; a community of interrelated people. Similarly, a true urban village isn’t just a real estate grid and the marketplace exchanges that occur there. Among those who focus on sharing and the commons, it’s a term that refers to a collaborative way of life — a relatively small, place-based urban community where people cooperate to meet one another’s many needs, be they residential, economic, governmental, or social. In the process, they wind up transforming their own experience of that community.

And these kinds of urban villages are on the rise around the world, especially throughout northern Europe. Metropolises like Berlin and Copenhagen host do-it-yourself communities like Holzmarkt and the long-running Christiania. Israel is seeing a growth in urban kibbutzim. In South Korea, Seoul is aiming to establish “sharing villages” throughout the city. While ecovillages and intentional communities are still more popular in rural areas, where agriculture plays a key role, urban villages are seen by their proponents as a natural and obvious antidote to the problems of climate change, economic inequality, and social isolation.

“The city is a normal environment for this because there’s critical mass, so it’s logical,” says Tine De Moor, a professor focusing on “Institutions for Collective Action in Historical Perspective” at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “I’ve been describing these cooperatives for quite a few years, but they’ve only been growing since.”

How urban villages look around the world varies hugely. They range from basic experiments in participatory governance to broad-spectrum projects that provide many critical services to residents. What the most effective urban villages have in common is their grassroots nature — the people who participate in them have created them.

For example, there are projects in development around the world, like Australia’s Smart Urban Villages and the Deeltuin in Utrecht, that are innovative and groundbreaking, containing residential units and a broad range of shared services. However, many of these initiatives were planned by developers, not the end users, and the levels of participation in decision making tend to reflect this.

While cohousing complexes may qualify, an urban village doesn’t have to be a physical space that’s built from the ground up. It can simply be a concept and an activity that’s overlaid on an existing urban community — a much faster process than the seven years the average cohousing project requires to come to fruition.

Above all, an authentic urban village is defined by its participatory ethos — and that’s both its strength and its weakness. Working together to create something builds a sense of community among participants that’s otherwise very difficult to manufacture among a collection of strangers. The effort ensures that the product genuinely meets everyone’s needs, usually at a low cost.

But it’s a different way of interacting than many people are accustomed to. “We’re used to having someone from above telling us what to do, having one person deciding for everyone,” says Genny Carraro, the managing director of the Global Ecovillage Network Europe, an international group that includes urban villages. “It’s a very different mindset. You need to understand that you have to move from your individual space to the common space. If you pretend that your needs will be answered in the same way, then it’s not going to work.”

An Urban Village in Seoul

That’s certainly been apparent with Seoul’s Sungmisan Village, a model example of an urban village and a neighborhood-level economy. In 1994, a group of families living by Sungmi Mountain in northwest Seoul created a preschool to serve their kids. That brought them together, as did a battle a few years later against the municipal government to save the mountain from a water treatment facility. When their activism succeeded, the families decided to create an alternative school for their now-older children.

They wanted something distinctly different from what was offered in public schools, but agreeing on the school’s mission and curriculum didn’t come easily. “We had endless debates. Different opinions among teachers, between parents. We had very serious splits that divided us,” wrote one of the early members, explaining the negotiation and consensus-building that was required of the group.

The result was an unusual school focusing on ecology, practical skills, and individualized learning that opened in 2004. Along the way, the community collectively created other services: a low-power broadcasting radio station, an organic food cooperative, a car repair shop, a tea house, a community theater, and many other projects tailored to the residents’ needs. Those projects persist today, though generational change has shifted the village’s flavor somewhat.

Video of Sungmisan Village by UrbaParis

Resident Sanghoon Kim adds that motivating residents to initiate projects is always a challenge. “A heavy burden is on a few core people. They are kind of in a constant burn-out mode,” he says.

What is key about Sungmisan, aside from the accomplishments, is the collective way it’s been created. The community bonds that have been forged through collaborative activity and shared spaces are particularly critical in a country whose rapid modernization means that many residents are alienated from one another and from traditional practices.

Sungmisan Village map. Photo by Monica Bernardi

Sungmisan Village has run parallel to a broader sharing movement that Seoul’s mayor, Park Won-soon, launched in 2012. His “Sharing City” project utilizes idle spaces, common goods, and shareable services across the city by encouraging grassroots, bottom-up efforts by citizens as well as facilitating the work of local startups. It’s a brand-new experiment and a major step for a metropolitan area with 10 million inhabitants. Mayor Park won the 2016 Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for the project.

Top left: Sungmisan cafe, top right: childcare cooperative. Bottom left: consumer cooperative, bottom right: theater. Photos courtesy of icoop.

In order to focus the initiative more closely, Park and his team are going hyper-local — turning entire apartment complexes into “sharing villages” where resources that can be shared are more intensely sited. The project is still getting off the ground, and two apartment complexes were selected as pilot sites earlier this fall.

Senior Urban Villages

A very different type of urban village is the “senior village” that has become popular in the U.S. Originating in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood in 2001, senior villages are member-run organizations that allow older urban residents to age in place and delay or avoid having to move to retirement homes. The groups utilize volunteers, and members sometimes pay an annual fee to hire staff who provide assistance — like transportation, home repairs, and medical services — to those who need it.

The groups now number around 230 and are spread out across the country, though particularly concentrated on the coasts. They provide social opportunities and fortify bonds among people who might otherwise become isolated. So when an elderly woman calls on volunteers to help her with repairs in her home, gets a ride to a doctor’s appointment from a village member who’s still driving, and asks another village member to accompany her to an exercise class, she is deepening her sense of social cohesion, contributing to the stability of her community by staying in her home, and remaining relatively independent and vital.

Those conclusions are borne out by research. An article in the Journal of Gerontological Social Work by Carrie L. Graham, Andrew E. Scharlach, and Bradford Stark published last year showed that a majority of senior village participants felt that membership had enhanced their sense of connection to others and ability to count on others — and those feelings increased the longer they were part of the group. And it’s all grassroots-driven. A hallmark of senior villages is that they start from the bottom up, says Natalie Galucia, executive director of Village to Village Network, an umbrella group that helps senior villages get going and shares best practices. “Family members or friends hear of it, realize it’ll benefit them and their community, and work together to create it,” she says. Later, the members can adjust the group’s structure as needed.

That’s what’s occurred with At Home in Alexandria (AHA), one of roughly 35 senior villages in the Washington, D.C. area. Founded in 2011, the group is like most other senior villages, providing members with transportation and assistance with home related-tasks like hanging pictures or installing new computer software. But members have also developed a wide range of social activities, including monthly brunches and dinners, current events gatherings, and trips to the movies.

“I lost my husband not quite two years ago, and I’ve made so many friends through AHA — I’ve met people I’d never have met otherwise,” says Nancy Kincaid, who’s been a member since the group’s founding. She’s part of a new effort to create a “buddy” program that will pair older and younger members on a one-on-one basis.

The villages’ missions are fairly specific and limited, and once they’re up and running, they don’t require too much effort. As a result, explains Galucia, few of the villages experience problems. “They’re mostly good about resolving whatever the conflict might be,” she says. Plus, her organization acts as a facilitator when problems arise, and can flag worrisome practices before they become a real problem.

Participatory Living in London

Standing in stark contrast to the simplicity of senior villages are Britton’s London experiments in participatory living. For Britton, the West Norwood project was just a successful prototype compared to the big project that her team are now scaling up to. Using the detailed information gathered from the earlier program about how and why people participate in community activities, Participatory City — in collaboration with the local council — is launching Every One Every Day, a five-year initiative that will cover the entire London borough of Barking and Dagenham.

Every One Every Day from Participatory City on Vimeo.

With groundbreaking funding totaling $8.5 million, the project — which began in November — aims to work with over 25,000 people, creating 250 projects, and 100 businesses. It may feature many of the projects that occurred in West Norwood, but will also include retrofitting an old warehouse to create a makerspace where businesses in food, manufacturing, or retail can incubate and flourish. Essentially, Britton and her colleagues are making a giant bet that collaborative city living — that is, a giant urban village — will improve the health, finances, and overall well-being of Barking and Dagenham’s residents.

But right now, exactly what those projects will look like is unknown, and that’s because the area’s residents will come up with the ideas themselves. While Every One Every Day sounds like a top-down initiative, it’s not. The organizers will help with infrastructure and provide support, but by and large, they’ll simply be creating an atmosphere that builds on already-occurring activity and encourages residents’ involvement and sense of ownership.

Graphic from “An illustrated guide to Participatory City” by Amber Anderson

After all, facilitating genuine participation among members of an urban village or other collective gathering isn’t particularly easy. Some people wind up taking on too much responsibility, and everyone frequently has to wade through long discussions to come to an agreement. Britton and her colleagues acknowledge that while public participation is likely the key to a more healthy, egalitarian future, getting there can be challenging.

So they spent their time in West Norwood looking at what works and developing best practices, and now they’ll apply them in this new project. “We’re trying to be completely person-centered,” says Britton. Activities will be short and close to home, groups will be welcoming and non-threatening, and the aesthetic will be cheerful. “We’re serious about trying to chop down every barrier possible so everyone can participate. We’re enticing people back into public life, inviting them, making it exciting,” she says.

It certainly worked for Trevor. Following the West Norwood project, he quit his job with London’s transport authority and is now working with Britton on the new initiative. He’s confident the same thing can work in Barking and Dagenham. “One thing leads to another, then another, then another — and suddenly you have all those people engaged,” he says.

Barking and Dagenham is one of London’s poorest boroughs, and one of a handful of boroughs that voted for Brexit, making the experiment particularly intriguing and important. The goal, ultimately, is to utilize the growing “participation culture” to build resilience and build community.

After all, in a world where the social fabric seems to be rapidly fraying, the economy is uncertain, and the future of the planet is at risk, is there a better way to hit the reset button than to come back to the neighborhood level and begin to genuinely rely on one another again?

Header image: Sungmisan grocery cooperative. Photo by Monica Bernardi

Top left: Sungmisan cafe, top right: childcare cooperative. Bottom left: consumer cooperative, bottom right: theater. Photos courtesy of icoop.

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The U.S. government allows tax deductible donations to socially beneficial organizations incorporated as non-profits. However, the Internal Revenue Service needs proof that the non-profit corporation is actually operating to benefit society. (Apparently, no such scrutiny is applied to anonymous, for-profit corporations operating in known tax havens).

As a result, a small group of people intending to develop a blighted neighborhood, or provide job training to unemployed adults faces a huge obstacle. They cannot attract tax deductible donations without incorporating and filing voluminous tax documentation annually.

Ioby (In Our Back Yard) provides non-profit, incorporated status to ordinary people who want to do good. It enables accountantless and lawyerless groups to conduct crowdsourcing that is tax deductible for donors.

Ioby is, well, your very own shell corporation.

Extracted from https://www.ioby.org/about

What we do

ioby helps neighbors grow and implement great ideas one block at a time. Our crowd-resourcing platform connects leaders with funding and support to make our neighborhoods safer, greener, more livable and more fun.

ioby believes that it should be easy to make meaningful change “in our backyards” – the positive opposite of NIMBY.

How we do it

ioby uses the concept of crowd-resourcing (a term we coined) to drive projects to success:

       crowdfunding + resource organizing = crowd-resourcing

Crowdfunding is the pooling of small online donations for a cause or project.

Resource organizing is a core tenet of community organizing that considers activists and advocates the best supporters to ensure the success and long-term stewardship of a cause or project.

As a combination of these two, ioby’s platform gives everyone the ability to organize all kinds of capital—cash, social networks, in-kind donations, volunteer time, advocacy—from within the neighborhood to make the neighborhood a better place to live.

Extracted from http://www.shareable.net/blog/iobys-erin-barnes-on-the-nonprofit-advantage-in-civic-crowdfunding

This was really part of our founding initiative. The US Forest Service had done all this research in 2007 on the grassroots groups that stewarded open green space in New York City. They inventoried these groups, and they found that about seventy percent of them are volunteer-run and more than half had annual budgets of less than a thousand dollars.

Our interest was in supporting this civic vanguard in this grassroots, mobilized network of people who just were responding to the urge to protect and care for open spaces and public spaces in cities. By being able to extend our 501(c)3 status through fiscal sponsorship, we’re allowing those groups a couple different things.

One is their donors can write off their donations to those projects. The other is the groups don’t have to feel forced to incorporate because they can use ioby as a fiscal sponsor up to a certain point so they don’t have to have that urge to incorporate. They can stay unincorporated for longer periods of time or possibly even consider incorporating in a different way.

Then I guess the third part is, and I think that this varies depending on groups, so I would say some groups have said that being able to operate under ioby’s fiscal umbrella has, in some ways, legitimized their work in the eye’s of some of their potential donors or supporters. It’s about people’s perceptions of where they’re putting their funding or who they’re throwing their weight behind.

Photo by IvanWalsh.com

Photo by deeje

Photo by Parvin ?( OFF for a while )

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Sharing Cities have been generating a lot of attention recently thanks to the Sharing Cities Network and the announcement of Shareable’s upcoming book on commons-based urban solutions for municipal and civic leaders. Interest in Australia and New Zealand is growing too as evidenced by some recent events like the Melbourne Conversations panel on Smart City Leadership that I spoke at for the launch of Melbourne Knowledge Week last year.

In a recent interview with Wallace Chapman for RadioNZ Sunday, I talked about the rise of Sharing Cities,platform cooperativism and the shift from extractive to generative forms of ownership and value creation. This led to a series of invitations from Kiwis across the country keen for me to speak on sharing cities including a warm welcome by the Mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand, a city devastated by the 2011 earthquake and going through a period of experimental urban regeneration (see Gap Filler for inspiration).

The Commons in Christchurch is located on what used to be the site of the Crowne Plaza hotel which was demolished in 2012. The site is now a hub of transitional activity and home to a number of post-quake organisations.

Widespread interest in Sharing Cities makes perfect sense. In 1800 only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. This figure has climbed to 50% today, and the global urban population is projected to reach around 70% by 2050. We are clearly living through the urban century and human civilization will either make it or break it in cities. The need to develop innovative thinking to address the climate crisis, resource constraints, inequality, and energy descent is greater now than ever.

That’s why Sharing Cities is a refreshing antidote to the top-down, technologically deterministic vision of the future we so often hear about in discussions of Smart Cities and the Internet of Things – a vision dominated by sensor networks, data mining and myriad opportunities for corporate and government surveillance.

Too many cities have been quick to embrace ‘smart technologies’ that attempt to overlay a city-wide digital operating system. Where integrated water, energy and transportation networks track and respond to the movement of people and objects. Who wins and who loses in this scenario?

It’s reminiscent of a scene from the 1969 Philip K. Dick novel Ubik where the protagonist gets into an argument with his “money gulping door” which demands payment every time he needs to enter or exit the building as his terms of service contract makes clear.

Chinese city opens ‘phone lane’ for texting pedestrians via The Guardian,

Sharing Cities on the other hand provide citizen-centric alternatives that focus on increasing the sharing capacity of existing infrastructure like public buildings and free wifi; provide access to idle or underutilised assets for ridesharing, coworking or urban agriculture; and strengthen the social fabric through deliberative decision-making like Citizen’s Juries, Participatory Budgeting and other forms of active citizenship.

Sharing Cities are an interesting hybrid between the public, private and community sectors and rely on a range of public goods and commonly owned resources to operate effectively. These include everything from the internet and road networks to open data and vacant public land. Cities are at the vanguard of the sharing movement as hubs of disruptive innovation, knowledge transfer and creative communities. Sharing Cities are about creating pathways for participation that recognise the City as Commons and give everyone in the community the opportunity to enjoy access to common goods and create new forms of shared value, knowledge, and prosperity.

The Agrocité urban commons project in the suburbs of Paris (via The Guardian).

The time has come for cities everywhere to emulate Sharing City trailblazers like Seoul and Amsterdam who recognise that sharing builds urban resilience, economic interdependence and social cooperation. City governments can help strike a fair balance by putting citizens first, supporting platform cooperatives and protecting the public realm. Cities can design the infrastructure, services and regulations that enable sharing in all its forms and strengthen the urban commons through policies for sharing cities that support food, jobs, housing and transportation initiatives to keep and grow wealth in local communities.

Sharing Cities give everyone who wants to participate in the sharing economy the opportunity to have a fair go. Government and business must work together with citizens to develop policy solutions that make sense for people, cities and sharing platforms. Sharing Cities provide a framework to make this vision for an inclusive sharing economy a reality.

This article originally appeared in Shareable. 

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We’re so used to seeing the world from the point of view of institutions, that the most important things are hidden from us. We all “feel” it when a neighborhood or a city begins to decompose, even before anybody tells us to only call “trusted” taxi drivers, not to be on the street after six in the evening, or that we have to pay the rent in cash. It may even be that a society, like in many countries in eastern Europe before the fall of the Wall, is not insecure simply because the repressive capacity of the state prevents security, but because it is so decomposed that as soon as the State withers, the vacuum is immediately filled by organized crime of a new kind that, to everyone’s surprise, is woven into the culture overnight.

It’s true that it’s difficult to define, because even though it can be measured, it’s produced in a space so intimate that the crude tools that a sociologist or a city hall has can’t do it. But it’s there.

It’s there when we leave our child in the care of the neighbor to go and do some last-minute shopping; when the cashier tells you “you can pay me tomorrow”; when we trust a kid from the neighborhood school to give us private classes, or when there is always someone quicker with their wallet than the neighbor who lost his job when it’s time to buy a round.

All these micro-interactions between people, outside of any institutional framework, not only start from a general trust in the surroundings, they also build it. If we listen to the studies that massive businesses do of their customers, each positive experience earns the trust of one person, but each dissatisfaction, each negative experience, alienates nine. Which is to say, for the fabric of social cohesion to be strengthened, at least nine out of ten interactions with the neighborhood have to be satisfactory.

This means that, if we want strengthen the fabric that sustains social cohesion, the best possible strategy is to increase the number of interactions based on sharing between people, while we also create theconditions so that less than 10% go badly.

Space, identity and the logic of connection

But we can’t bring everyone into a big plaza to do that. The panopticon, a building in which everyone sees everyone, functions as a control mechanism in prisons and schools, when there is a watcher and fear of that watcher. When there is not, as we’ve seen with Twitter, the result is the devaluation of conversation, a culture of being “on edge,” and recurrent and sometimes terrible episodes of harassment.

But even in cases where there is effective control, like in many centralized services of the “sharing economy,” trust is placed in a third party, the organizing business, not in others. That’s why they have not had a positive impact on urban identity. And that’s also why, looking at the city, the natural space for sharing is the neighborhood, not the city as a whole.

But neighborhoods are not isolated entities, nor should they be. Any strategy to develop “sharing” in a neighborhood also has to promote “going outside,” understood as a projection of that trust that we’re looking to maximize by supporting daily sharing. The technical solution is nothing more than a replica of the way in which networks grow in the real world, a mechanism called “federation.” In the end, something as simple as knowing about someone requires someone from our broader environment to give them some minimal trust. Then we will be able to choose if we also want give it to them or not, but either way, they will be able to come up in our conversations.

A strategy to develop social cohesion in neighborhoods

Let’s take neighborhoods as cells of a distributed structure, and let’s federate them with each other. Let’s include everything that the “sharing economy” has taught us, all those demands that we know that are there because there are already dozens of centralized platforms trying to turn them into businesses: from car-sharing to get to work to exchanging hours of language practice, from offering babysitting to offering hospitality to people who speak other languages or are part of our hobby network. And let’s add all those microentrprenuers who bring food to your office or make a website for you. And life-long businesses that want provide services or set up activities. Let’s turn them all of them into more forms of communication on a virtual network, the same way we share photos or videos. And let’s add to all that, like in Daniel Suarez’s novel, a mechanism that allows us to identify those neighbors who are most active in collaborating with others, most ready to lend a hand.

Wouldn’t that be a true “sharing city,” a “smarter” city, than than the ones the corporate giants are installing? And above all, wouldn’t it promote the development of sharing, of small daily gestures made with community spirit, of cohesion and of the feeling of belonging?

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

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Consider a neighborhood, or neighborhood-to-be, which is now receiving your attention for the first time. Let us assume that a rough boundary of the area has been established. The area may be part of an existing city, in need of new life or refurbishing. It might equally well be a green field site near a town, or on the edge of an existing town or village.

Rule 1. Let us ask ourselves which place in the area dedicated to the neighborhood most inspires us by its life or potential for life, and also has the greatest capacity for becoming the spiritual and emotional center of the new neighborhood?

In order to do this, we need to walk around the place many times, with others, and alone, asking ourselves which place has the natural magnetism to pull us to go there, which makes us want to stay there, which has the power (potentially) to give us life merely from being there.

On a green field site, where a neighborhood does not exist, this feeling will most likely be generated by a view, by the form of the land which has a natural protected area, a declivity, or by a high spot which looks out. Great trees, are also capable of giving us such a place, naturally occurring water, the edge of a forest, the bottom of a cliff. It is impossible to predict with any general principles, what feature of a particular piece of land will have this character. Each piece of land is different, and will tell you, in its own way, what unique feature, on that land, is best suited to become the spiritual center of a future neighborhood built there.

On a site that is part of an existing neighborhood, or part of an existing town, the procedure is not very different, though it may turn out to be more complicated. ….

Rule 2. Let us now ask ourselves how the place we have chosen as the most natural center, may be enhanced and made profound. What we are asking here, is what kind of actions will support the essence of the place, make it convenient and natural for people to come to it, protect it from surrounding influences, so that it can have its own peacefulness and life.

Rule 3. Let us now ask ourselves how this place, which has been activated (in principle) by our response to Rule 2, may also be made beautiful and tranquil, as a work of architecture.

The way to achieve this is to spend time, gazing on the land, at the place where the building is to be, or at the space itself, as a place and as a beautiful entity in itself. Ask yourself — standing there, and closing your eyes — how high it is, what line will enhance the place, where you would most expect to find the front edge of the building, if it is a peaceful and gentle place.

It will not be out of place, either, to ask childish things, of your inner eye. What color is it? When you close your eyes, what color do you see? What kind of windows does it have? When you close your eyes, what shape are the windows, what figure gives them inspiration, and makes the place worth being in?

Conclusion

As you see, these three rules are not rules in quite the usual sense. The rule does not tell us, magisterially, Do this! Do that!

Instead it is a rule, but the rule says to you, Ask yourself this, and this and this — and it works this way, because the rule knows that if you follow it, the vision of your own heart will answer the question correctly, and know what to do. And it knows, too, that when several of you, do the same — that is, do what this rule tells you, in the way of asking yourselves these questions — then , for the most part, you will find yourselves in agreement with your fellows.

And that is where a lasting sense of unity and harmony within the neighborhood can come from: the results are not arbitrary, but found in the deepest place in your heart. It will last.

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