Birgit Daiber: After years of commoning in conferences, cooperation projects, networking, discussions on the diversity of experiences and designing strategies how broaden them – I think it’s time to discuss how to implement them on a political level: Commons as one dimension of initiatives to reclaim a social, ecological and democratic Europe connected with the reconstruction and democratization of public services.

Different from some of the commons networks in Europe which try to stay outside direct political debates, claiming commons as a fundamental new way of economic and social practice that is not assignable to one or the other political direction, I think commons are potentially an essentially left issue. Why? Very simple: The question of property is basic for all left politics from its (organised) beginning in the 19th century – until today. In his theory of value, Karl Marx revealed the contradiction between exchange value and use value. And this too is still relevant today. Within these two dimensions of left thinking we find the global movements of the commons. Francois Houtart says in his basic manifesto from 2011 that commons initiatives focus on use value, democratic participation and autonomy, being part of a new post-capitalist paradigm and in a short note from 2014 he is pointing out:

“Concretely, it means to transform the four ”fundamentals” of any society: relations with nature; production of the material base of all life, physical, cultural, spiritual; collective social and political organization and culture. For the first one, the transformation means to pass from the exploitation of nature as a natural resource merchandize to the respect of nature as the source of life. For the second one: to privilege use value rather than exchange value, with all the consequences with regard to the concept of property. The third one implies the generalization of democratic practices in all social relations and all institutions and finally interculturality means to put an end to the hegemony of Western culture in the reading of the reality and the construction of social ethics. Elements of this new paradigm, post-capitalist, are already present all over the world, in many social movements and popular initiatives. Theoretical developments are also produced. So, it is not a “utopian vision” in the pejorative sense of the word. But a clear aim and definition is necessary to organize the convergences of action. It is a long-term process which will demand the adoption of transitions, facing the strength of an economic system ready to destroy the world before disappearing. It means also that the structural concept of class struggle is not antiquated (fiscal heavens and bank secrecy are some of its instruments). Social protests, resistances, building of new experiences are sources of real hope.”

We are just in time, as left parties in Europe are preparing their national campaigns and their European performance for the next European elections in 2019. Election-campaigns always give the opportunity to discuss programmes and projects more intensely in public debates, and so the Common Good could become one of the core-issue for the Left. Practical initiatives and debates are already well developed on different levels in some countries – as e.g. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and France and Belgium and there are hundreds of examples of successful initiatives on municipal, national and international levels. Just to give some few examples:

The municipal level: most of commons initiatives are local activities, in cities as well as in rural areas. Urban Commons are prominent and well documented. Cities as Seoul (KOR), Barcelona (ES), Naples (IT), Ghent (BE) and Frome (GB) show how to realise urban commons and how municipalities can work together with commoners. There are legal competences too supporting commons initiatives. The Berlin Senate for example has the right to confiscate abandoned property (but they don’t use it yet and there is no obligation for social use).

National level: The movement for Water as a commons in Italy initiated a referendum with the result that 51% of Italian citizens voted for it. The government must act and the Parliament has to discuss new laws – a still on-going struggle. The water-movement is putting the question of Commons in the context of re-thinking the role of the public in the management of goods and services related to the universal human rights.

The “old” left idea, that the State per se would guarantee public services, failed with processes of privatization – and even when the State is still holding the ownership, goods and services are often given to private companies. It is crucial to suspend market activities from public services to ensure that profits in this sector are re-invested for public use. At the same time, public services must be democratized and there has to be public control with the participation of workers and citizens (only?) to guarantee correct functioning of the common good.

On national levels, the laws on social and common use of property and the laws on cooperatives are decisive. An interesting example is the legal structure of SCOPs in France (“Societé cooperative et participative” or “société coopérative ouvrière de production“). In 2016 there were 2680 SCOPs with 45 000 active members – and they are still on the rise.

International level: Bolivia and Ecuador included Commons explicitly in their constitutions. In 2010 the UN general assembly adopted the resolution on access to clean water as basic human right. The initiative for a fundamental declaration on the Common Good of Humanity goes beyond this – well aware that a proclamation has no legally binding character but can be an instrument for social and political mobilization, creating a new consciousness and serving as a basis for the convergence of social and political movements at the international level. Clearly it is a long-term task, but it needs to be started. Not only can the coming together of social movements like the World Social Forum and political parties like the Forum of São Paulo contribute by promoting such a Declaration, but individual countries through their representatives in international organizations like Unesco and the United Nations can also push this agenda forward.

Coming to the European Level: Since some European Parliamentarians from different political groups founded an ‘Intergroup’ on Commons and Public Services in 2014, the ‘European Commons Assembly’ developed with participants from nearly all European countries. ECA initiated conferences and various activities and published a general call: “We call for the provision of resources and the necessary freedom to create, manage and sustain our commons. We call upon governments, local and national, as well as European Union institutions to facilitate the defence and growth of the commons, to eliminate barriers and enclosures, to open up doors for citizen participation and to prioritize the common good in all policies. This requires a shift from traditional structures of top-down governance towards a horizontal participatory process for community decision-making in the design and monitoring of all forms of commons. We call on commoners to support a European movement that will promote solidarity, collaboration, open knowledge and experience sharing as the forces to defend and strengthen the commons. Therefore, we call for and open the invitation to join an on-going participatory, inclusive process across Europe for the building and maintenance of a Commons Assembly. Together we can continue to build a vibrant web of caring, regenerative collective projects that reclaim the European Commons for people and our natural environment.

How could the common good be important for European politics? Just to remind one of the prominent battles of the Left (including Greens and Trade Unions) in the years 2000: the battle against the Bolkestein-Directive. In the end it was possible to introduce the protection of public services as “services of general social and economic interest (SSIG’s) on European level. This could be a starting point for initiatives for commons tofight for the recognition of commons initiatives in different fields as basic citizens rights in Europe.

All these examples show at least the slightly fragmented situation. The political and legal conditions differ widely and there is a need to discuss demands on all levels – and there is the need to discuss them on the European level.

Opportunities for the European Left

The general interest of European Left is to re-think the role of public for goods and services with relation to universal rights and to prohibit market-logic in public services. The aim is to suspend the market from public goods and services and to democratize public services for the recuperation of public services as Common Good. This is the first dimension. The second is to re-think social and workers rights as common goods. And the third is the recognition of citizens’ initiatives as basic rights and the promotion of commons initiatives.

So, it’s a three-fold battle and it could start from the general statement:

Commons are of general public interest, thus the general demand is the political and legal recognition of citizens’ initiatives whose aim is to create, re-construct and recuperate resources, goods and services in a social, ecological and democratic way. But there are specific demands to add. As there are (just to give some examples):

1. Cooperative use of abandoned land and houses. Social use of confiscated property.
2. Right for workers to recuperate their companies and manage them collectively – before selling them to investors or going bankrupt.>
3. Open access for all citizens to information services that are democratically organised, and free public internet.
4. Collectively and self-managed funds for citizens’ initiatives and access to public funding.
5. Democratization of digital radio and TV by reserving e.g. 30% of the slots for non-commercial, community etc. stations.
6. Participatory re-communalization/re-municipaliyation of energy and water.

And I’m sure there are others to add…

It could be the right moment to start to discuss practical political proposals – not with the illusion to change European politics immediately, but with the intention to bring the debate into the light of a greater public.

Thank you for your attention.

About the author: As Member of the European Parliament (MEP), as director of the European Office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Brussels, as coordinator of transatlantic and international projects and as an expert for social urban development, Birgit Daiber has been involved for over decades in the building of Europe. She is the author and publisher of a number of books and articles on European and international issues. The common good of humanity, gender-oriented civil conflict prevention and the intercultural dialogue are in the focus of her present attention.

Photo by pedrosimoes7

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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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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

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“Sharing is not an opposite of ownership nor a panacea. But we can make use of existing resources rather than create everything we need, sharing our knowledge and skills and getting inspiration. And through the dialogues inevitably occurred during the process, we can restore community spirits that have been forgotten for a while.”

* eBook: Seoul Draws a City Through Sharing. Creative Commons Korea, 2016

Excerpted from a summary by Cat Johnson of Shareable magazine:

“A new ebook from Creative Commons Korea (CC Korea) provides an insider’s view into Sharing City, Seoul, a pioneering, city-wide sharing initiative. Seoul Draws a City Through Sharing details the project origins, from Mayor Won-soon Park’s first announcement of the Sharing City in 2012, through the end of 2015, when Seoul had firmly established itself as a leader in the global sharing cities movement.

The ebook highlights the inner workings of the project and provides the following explanation of why Sharing City, Seoul was launched in the first place:

“To solve issues around welfare, environment, and jobs under the existing economic system, the public sector needed to be able to play a bigger role. But with the limited budget capacity, it is simply not possible to keep bulking up the public sector forever. Seoul had to find a way to solve problems without putting additional resources in. The only way was making use of existing resources that had been in use. And sharing was also needed in order to recover community spirit that had been lost during the industrialisation and urbanisation.”

It also lays out the primary areas Sharing City, Seoul is focused on:

* Solving traffic congestion and environmental pollution by using car-sharing services to rent a car only when you need it

* Solving the scarcity of parking spaces by sharing vacant parking spots

* Solving the growing need for more accommodation for tourists by sharing spare rooms

* Lessening the burden of rising household expenses by sharing kids’ clothing, tools and books

* Increasing use of idle space in public buildings by opening up the spaces to the community

Seoul Draws a City Through Sharing shines a light on CC Korea and its Share Hub, the main portal for Sharing City, Seoul. To create Sharing City, Seoul, CC Korea joined forces with Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) and has been a driving force for connection, information sharing, and networking.

“With its experience of promoting sharing activities in Korea since 2005, CC Korea promoted through Share Hub why we needed to share and how we could do it,” the ebook reads. “It served as a messenger between SMG, companies, organizations, and citizens to raise awareness that Sharing City was not just a policy pursued by SMG but also something that should be built as a culture by us all.”

An overview of Sharing City, Seoul reveals the following five key policies:

1. Sharing Promotion Ordinance – The Sharing Promotion Ordinance defines sharing as “activities that create social, economic and environmental values by jointly using resources, such as space, goods, information, talent and experience.”

2. Support for Sharing Enterprises – SMG examines non-profit organizations, corporations, or enterprises that provide sharing services and designates them as sharing organization/enterprise if they meet a certain criteria. The purpose of this system is to encourage better use of the services of the enterprises and more participation in the activities of the organisations by citizens.

3. Improvement of Laws and Institutions – While pushing ahead with the Sharing City initiative, SMG searched for regulations that would drag sharing companies down. It examined areas including transportation, tourism, taxation, parking lots, food industry, insurance, and infrastructure.

4. Autonomous Gu Incentive System – SMG used the “Autonomous Gu Incentive System” to promote the Sharing City (gu is Korean for a borough or district within a city). The system is intended to encourage participation from Seoul’s 25 gu offices in the city’s sharing initiative. Gus are evaluated on their effectiveness in promoting designated projects, and they may get extra budget based on their scores. The gu incentive system serves as a way to draw voluntary participation from gu districts in the Sharing City Project.

5. Opening of Public Facilities and Administrative Information – SMG decided to increase citizen use of public space and buildings in response to growing demand from community groups for meeting and activity spaces. The Community Building Project, a resident-led initiative, aims to engage Seoul citizens in community-building project proposal, planning, implementation and follow-up management. While facilities that are meant to be open to the public, such as Nanji Camping Site and sports facilities, have long been open to citizens, meeting rooms and lecture rooms at community centers have also become available for rental to citizens as part of Sharing City Project. In addition, documents such as expense reports, public data, and other data produced by city and district offices are also made public online.”

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