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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mayo Fuster Morell ¹ and Ricard Espelt ² ; Republished from mdpi.com. (This article belongs to the Special Issue Sharing Cities Shaping Cities).

Abstract

The term “collaborative economy” or “collaborative economy platforms” refers to exchange, sharing, and collaboration in the consumption and production of capital and labor among distributed groups, supported by a digital platform. Collaborative economies’ use is growing rapidly and exponentially, creating high expectations of sustainability and their potential to contribute to the democratization of the economy. However, collaborative economy platforms lack a holistic framework to assess their sustainability and pro-democratization qualities. In addition, there is confusion about platforms which present themselves as collaborative when they actually are not, and similar uncertainties and ambiguities are associated with diverse models. To address this confusion, this article provides a framework for assessing the pro-democratic qualities of collaborative economy initiatives. It was applied to 10 cases in the context of the city of Barcelona. The methods used in this study include mapping and typifying 10 collaborative economy cases in the city, structured and in-depth interviews, and a co-creation session. The results indicate the presence of several modalities for favoring democratic values in a collaborative economy.

Procommons collaborative economy analytical star framework

Full text available here

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).

Photo by glocalproject

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Mike Hales: Here’s a libertarian socialist addressing a pluriverse¹:

• Many co-existing forms of commoning, in a world of profuse and inescapable difference/diversity; also, of abundance not scarcity.

• Seeing commoning as a material relation that communities and resources stand in – a system of alternative (non-capitalist, liberating) RoPs (relations of production) in the material sphere. Prefiguratively constituting a mode of production, which may evolutionarily supplant the capitalist mode.

• Seeing commoning, also, as requiring radical modes of knowing (an altered ‘dance of knowing’) organised under alternative (distributed) RoPs in the sphere of knowing. This is another, critical, dimension of class recomposition: a globalised recomposition of labour-power.

• In the sphere of the heart – the wellsprings of action (both wise and unwise) – commoning (and especially, multiple co-existing, differing commons) requires transverse orientation, an altered system of RoPs in the production of motivation and affiliation: open to true diversity, to mutuality across difference, to the non-Othering of different others.

The table below sketches six modes of participation in commons, each associated with a particular political mode: anarchist (free-libre), socialist-associationist cooperative, municipalist, consumerist, libertarian-legal.

All modes may coexist (pluriverse-wise) in communities alongside each other in the same territory. But also, multiple modes may be deployed within a given community, addressing a single commons, to deal with various dimensions of material, cultural and emotional reality. For example, anarchists in the FLOSS/free internet movement fundamentally attempt federating around protocols. But they need to engage successfully in politicised collaborating too, in order to arrive at viable protocols. In their ‘autonomous’ lives (workplaces, families, neighbourhoods) they also are likely to engage in politicised collaborating.

Q: Platforms are infrastructure-pieces. What is the contribution that platform infrastructures – in the current digital/cloud sense – may make in each mode? In each of the modes of commoning, what are the current or traditional ways of doing it, without resorting to post-post-Fordist tech? ²

Q: What kind of landscape do multiple platforms and commons constitute, together and alongside one another, for a community or in a territory? A complex, layered, institutionally-partitioned, pluriversal, material-cultural infrastructure for living and working.

NOTE: The ‘nudging’ mode below (unselfconscious individualistic participants in an unregulated common pool) is particularly important in a context of chaotic environmental commoning.>

Mike Hales, July 2018. Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence BY-NC-SA 

Photo by pedrosimoes7

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Bart Grugeon Plana: After the breakthrough of the internet, Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Harvard University, quickly understood that new online forms of collaboration such as Wikipedia or Linux responded to a completely new economic logic. Specializing in the digital culture of the networked society, Benkler worked on a coherent economic vision that guides us beyond the old opposition between state and markets.

According to Benkler, we may be at the beginning of a global cultural revolution that can bring about massive disruption. “Private property, patents and the free market are not the only ways to organize a society efficiently, as the neoliberal ideology wants us to believe,” Benkler says. “The commons offers us the most coherent alternative today to the dead end of the last 40 years of neoliberalism.”

Bart Grugeon Plana: In the political debate today, it seems that world leaders fall back to an old discussion whether it is the free market with its invisible hand that organizes the economy best or the state with its cumbersome administration. You urge to step beyond this old paradigm.

Yochai Benkler, law professor at Harvard University: Both sides in this discussion start from an assumption that is generally accepted but fundamentally wrong, namely that people are rational beings who pursue their own interests. Our entire economic model is based on this outdated view on humanity that goes back to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, philosophers from the 17th and 18th centuries. My position is that we have to review our entire economic system from top to bottom and rewrite it according to new rules. Research of the past decades in social sciences, biology, anthropology, genetics, and psychology shows that people tend to collaborate much more than we have assumed for a long time. So it comes down to designing systems that bring out these human values.

Many existing social and economic systems — hierarchical company structures, but also many educational systems and legal systems — start from this very negative image of man. To motivate people, they use mechanisms of control, by incorporating incentives that punish or reward. However, people feel much more motivated when they live in a system based on compromise, with a clear communication culture and where people work towards shared objectives. In other words, organizations that know how to stimulate our feelings of generosity and cooperation, are much more efficient than organizations that assume that we are only driven by self-interest.

This can work within a company or an organization, but how can you apply that to the macro economy?

Over the past decade, the internet has seen new forms of creative production that hasn’t been driven by a market nor organized by the state. Open-source software such as Linux, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the Creative Commons licenses, various social media, and numerous online forms of cooperation have created a new culture of cooperation that ten years ago would have been considered impossible by most. They are not a marginal phenomenon, but they are the avant-garde of new social and economic tendencies. It is a new form of production that is not based on private property and patents, but on loose and voluntary cooperation between individuals who are connected worldwide. It is a form of the commons adapted to the 21st century — it is the digital commons.

What is so revolutionary about it?

Just take the example of the Creative Commons license: It is a license that allows knowledge and information to be shared under certain conditions without the author having to be paid for it. It is a very flexible system that considers knowledge as a commons, that others can use and build on. This is a fundamentally different approach than the philosophy behind private copyrights. It proves that collective management of knowledge and information is not only possible, but that it is also more efficient and leads to much more creativity than when it is “locked up” in private licenses.

In the discussion whether the economy should be organized by the state or by the markets, certainly after the fall of communism, there was a widespread belief that models starting from a collective organization necessarily led to inefficiency and tragedy, because everyone would just save their own skin. This analysis has been the responsibility for the deregulation and privatization of the economy since then, the consequences of which have been known since 2008.

The new culture of global cooperation opens up a whole new window of possibilities. The commons offer us today a coherent alternative to the neoliberal ideology, which proves to be a dead end. After all, how far can privatization go? Trump and Brexit prove where it leads to.

Image by Bart Grugeon Plana

The commons is a model for collective management, which is mainly associated with natural resources. How can this be applied to the extremely complex modern economy?

The commons are centuries old, but as an intellectual tradition it was mainly substantiated and deepened by Elinor Östrom, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Over the past decades the commons have gained a new dimension through the movement of open source software and the whole culture of the Digital Commons. Östrom demonstrated on the basis of hundreds of studies that citizens can come together to manage their infrastructures and resources, often in agreement with the government, in a way that is both sustainable ecologically and economically. Commons are capable of integrating the diversity, knowledge, and wealth of the local community into the decision-making processes. They take into account the complexity of human motivations and commitments, while market logic reduces everything to a price, and is insensitive to values, or to motivations that are not inspired by profit. Östrom showed that the commons management model is superior in terms of efficiency and sustainability to models that fall back on a strong government — read: socialism or communism, or on markets and their price mechanism.

Examples of commons in the modern economy include the management model of the Wi-Fi spectrum, for example, in addition to the previously mentioned digital commons. Unlike the FM-AM radio frequencies that require user licenses, everyone is free to use the Wi-Fi spectrum, respecting certain rules, and place a router anywhere. This openness and flexibility is unusual in the telecommunications sector. It has made Wi-Fi an indispensable technology in the most advanced sectors of the economy, such as hospitals, logistics centers, or smart electricity grids.

In the academic, cultural, musical, and information world knowledge or information is increasingly treated as a commons, and freely shared. Musicians no longer derive their income from the copyright of music, but from concerts. Academic and non-fiction authors publish their works more often under Creative Commons licenses because they earn their living by teaching, consultancy, or through research funds. A similar shift also takes place in journalism.

An essential feature of the commons management model is that all members of the “common” have access to the “use” of goods or services, and that it is jointly agreed how access to those goods and services is organized. Market logic has a completely different starting point. Does this mean that markets and commons are not compatible?

Commons are the basis of every economic system. Without open access to knowledge and information, to roads, to public spaces in the cities, to public services and to communication, a society can not be organized. The markets also depend on open access to the commons to be able to exist, even though they try again and again to privatize the commons. There is a fundamental misconception about the commons. It is the essential building block of every open society. But commons and markets can coexist.

If today it is mainstream to think that a company should maximize its financial returns in order to maximize it shareholder value, it isn’t a fact of nature, it’s a product of 40 years of neoliberal politics and law intended to serve a very narrow part of the society. Wikipedia shows that people have very diverse motivations to voluntarily contribute to this global common good that creates value for the entire world community. The examples of the digital commons can inspire to set up similar projects in real economy, as happens with various digital platforms in the emerging collaborative economy.

A society that puts the commons at the center, recognizing the importance of protecting them and contributing to them, allows different economic forms of organization to co-exist, both commons and market logic, private and public, profit-oriented and non-profit-making. In this mixture, it is possible that the economy as a whole is oriented towards being socially embedded, being about the people who generate the economic activities, and who can have very different motivations and commitments. The belief that the economy would be driven by an abstract ideal of profit-oriented markets is no more than a construction of neoliberal ideology.

You seem very optimistic about the future of the commons?

I was more optimistic ten years ago than I am today. The commons are so central to the organization of a diverse economy that they must be expanded and protected in as many sectors of the economy as possible. There are many inspiring examples of self-organization according to the commons model, but it is clear that their growth will not happen automatically. Political choices will have to be made to restructure the economy beyond market logic. Regulation is necessary, with a resolute attitude towards economic concentration, and with a supportive legislative framework for commons, cooperatives and various cooperation models.

At the same time, more people need to make money with business models that build on a commons logic. The movement around “platform cooperativism” is a very interesting evolution. It develops new models of cooperatives that operate through digital platforms and that work together in global networks. They offer a counterweight to the business models of digital platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, which apply the market logic to the digital economy.

This brings us to the complex debate about future of work.

In the context of increasing automation, there is a need for a broader discussion that can see “money” and “work” as separate from each other, because the motivations to “work” can be very diverse. A general basic income is an opportunity to build a more flexible system that makes these various motivations possible, but also a shorter working week is an option.

We are facing an enormous task and we do not have a detailed manual that shows us the way. However, the current economic crisis and the declining acceptance of austerity means that the circumstances are favorable to experiment with new forms of organization.

When Wikipedia began to grow, it was told that it “only works in practice, because in theory it’s a total mess.” I believe, however, that today we have a theoretical framework that allows us to build a better life together without subjecting ourselves to the same framework that gave us oligarchic capitalism. The commons is the only genuine alternative today that allows us to build a truly participatory economic production system. The commons can cause a global cultural revolution.

This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

Photo by Ratchanee @ Gatoon

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Platforms enabled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), like Uber and Airbnb, are increasingly being seen as looters by cities. They are like Death Stars, extracting great swaths of value from local communities only to transfer that wealth elsewhere. Indeed, it would seem that the original ideas of sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration have been co-opted through an almost feudal structure of wealth extraction. Technology as such is not the culprit here. But it certainly enables the creation of new products and markets that, in practice, can perpetuate or even deepen existing socio-economic inequities.

In contrast to the usual examples of on-demand “sharing” platforms, the initiatives below demonstrate technology’s capacity to enable real sharing within cities. These examples offer crucial alternatives to extractive platforms that are currently dominant. They are also solutions that are intentionally designed to address urban challenges, instead of exacerbating them. There are solutions based on an understanding of digital technology as what philosopher Ivan Illich defined as tools for conviviality: tools that empower people to realize their freedom through interpersonal dependence and reciprocity. — Adrien Labaeye and Ryan Conway 

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

1. Human Ecosystem Project: Social Media Data Used to Analyze City Infrastructure and Citizen Well-being 

Social media networks and state intelligence agencies harvest massive amounts of data on their users. Private services primarily use the data to show targeted advertisements to their users, while government surveillance programs allegedly use the information for national security purposes. In both cases, the use of the data is neither transparent nor is it used to directly help the people whose information is being collected.

Human Ecosystem Relazioni is a project funded by the city of Bologna to harness public information available from social media to understand what their citizens care about and how they are feeling at a given time and place in the city. The Human Ecosystems platform, on which this project relies, turns data from privately-owned social media platforms into open data that can be used by city officials, researchers, and the community at large. It is a way to identify trends and patterns that can lead to observations about the functioning of city infrastructure, and which can in turn lead to possible paths toward their improvement. The data can also be analyzed to produce interactive exhibits featuring a series of visualizations that demonstrate certain types of behavior and opinions among the citizens of Bologna. The Human Ecosystems platform has also been adopted in São Paulo, Brazil, and New Haven, U.S. — Adrien Labaeye 

2. Smart Citizen Toolkit: Monitoring City Air Quality with Crowdsourced Data 

Air pollution is a critical public health issue that many cities are struggling to address. Aside from political disputes that can hinder regulatory solutions, there is also a broader obstacle to solving this challenge: the lack of accurate, publicly-accessible data that reflects the extent of the pollution on a real-time basis. This is why FabLab Barcelona, through a collaboration between technologists and citizen scientists, created the Smart Citizen Toolkit. It is a compact device that contains a data processor and a series of sensors that people use to monitor environmental conditions where they live.

Using the kit and the accompanying online platform, users can monitor such things as temperature, humidity, and carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide levels. The information is automatically uploaded to an independent platform that gathers the data from hundreds of distributed sensors. Since the published data can easily be made publicly accessible, universities, city governments, and anyone with the know-how can use the data for research on the local environment. The software and hardware for the toolkit is also all open-source. In addition to Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Manchester have used it to measure air quality in their region. — Adrien Labaeye 

3. PetaJakarta: Disaster Response Management Through Crowdsourced Civic Data

Jakarta has long faced a host of challenges. It is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and every year the area is battered by a monsoon. Since 40 percent of the city is at or below sea level, it regularly floods — a problem that will be exacerbated by the global sea-level rise induced by climate change. Jakarta also has one of the highest concentrations of active Twitter users in the world and a high proportion of cellphone use overall. That’s why a public-private partnership between Twitter, Jakarta Emergency Management Agency, the University of Wollongong in Australia, and others developed CogniCity, an open-source intelligence framework that manages spatial data received from mobile messaging apps.

The first platform built on CogniCity was PetaJakarta, a Twitter-based crowdsourcing map for flood data. It relies on Twitter to organize and display real-time information about flooding to Jakarta residents. PetaJakarta allows users to geotag Tweets to indicate flooded areas, which are verified and added to a map of government ood alerts that anyone can use to navigate hazardous, urban terrain. The platform has been so successful that it has received international praise from organizations such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. — Ryan Conway 

Longer versions of the above case studies can be found in our book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” 

Header image by Zach Meaney via Unsplash

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2. What assets were for the industrial firm, network effects are for the post-industrial firm.

Excerpted from Esko Kilpi:

“The basic units of the industrial era were transacting entities enabled by market, price and coordination mechanisms. It was a world of particles separated from other particles.

As social innovation the enterprise as we know it, was born when the volume of economic activity reached a level that made administrative coordination more efficient and more lucrative than market coordination of these particles.

The important innovation of the modern firm was to internalize activities by bringing many discrete entities under one roof and under one system of coordination. The multi-unit business corporation replaced the small, single-unit enterprise because administrative coordination enabled greater productivity through lower (transaction) costs per task than was possible before.

Managers essentially carried out the functions formerly handled by price and market mechanisms.

The practices and procedures that were invented at the dawn of industrialism have become a standard operating system and are still taught in business schools. The existence of this managerial system is not questioned. It is the defining characteristic of the business enterprise.

But two aspects of work have changed dramatically.

The most successful firms are themselves multi-sided markets in interaction with entities “outside”, enabling interaction between customers and network partners. These firms are the new market platforms.

Second, the products/services the platform firm sells to its clients are not offerings of the firm per se, but offerings created by specific network players in specific situations of “local” network interaction. Scale and scope are combined.

The mistake that is often made is to equate online marketplaces and the growth of the number of sellers and buyers with network effects. The size of the network does not necessarily mean, or lead to, network effects, as Groupon, LivingSocial and many others have found out.

Thus, aiming to become a platform requires a vision that extends beyond one’s firm and aims to build and sustain an ecosystem where each network node benefits from more nodes joining the network. During the industrial era, economists called this phenomenon network “externalities”. Now it is more properly called network “effects”. This conceptually small difference represents a hugely important change in thinking.

What assets were for the industrial firm, network effects are for the post-industrial firm.

We all have mindsets of the world that serve as maps that guide what we see and how we understand the world around us. The maps can be helpful but also outdated and crucially incorrect. The approach that managers do the coordination is just too slow and too costly in the low transaction cost environments we live in.

Traditional business economics focuses on supply-side economies of scale derived from the resource base of the company. It scales much more slowly than the demand-side network effects the new firms are built on. Network effect-based value can increase exponentially at the same time as costs grow linearly, if at all. If you follow the valuations of firms today, there is an ever-widening gap between the network-economy platforms and incumbents driven by traditional asset leverage models. Investors and markets have voted.

People participate on the basis of transparent information and high-quality communication systems enabling “resonance”. The most important contributing individuals are not leaders/managers but customers and other network partners. The more of them that are in active resonance, the more assets there are. The big shift is from market transactions to network interactions.

The main mission of platforms is to make network effects possible.

Platforms are, so far, the best means to flourish and create growth in low transaction cost environments, the same way as the industrial firm was the best means to flourish and grow in high transaction cost environments.

Growth looks very different if we “change the way we look at things” from transaction cost economics to network effect economics.”

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