Johannes Euler: In Cochabamba, Bolivia, the lack of water has caused conflicts for decades. In 1999, Cochabamba’s public water supplier, SEMAPA, was leased to the international consortium Aguas del Tunari. The major shareholder of the consortium was the multinational company Bechtel. In the course of the privatization procedures, independent water and irrigation systems and autonomous water services were threatened with expropriation. Water prices rose steeply as a result. In response, several civil society groups formed the “Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida” (Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life). Protests against these policies were fierce, lasted several months, and raised the issue to national and international levels.

Eventually, Aguas del Tunari was expelled. Control of SEMAPA was transferred to representatives from the municipality, the trade union, and the Coordinadora (though these arrangements have subsequently changed). The statutes of the hybrid company were rewritten in a challenging participatory process, but SEMAPA is still known for its lack of efficiency and transparency. Moverover, the state is currently trying to extend its sphere of control into the water sector. However, the so-called Cochabamba Water War contributed to major changes in Bolivia’s water sector, the respective laws, the establishment of a national Ministry of the Environment and Water, and of the country as a whole.

Key points of Bolivian policy reforms sparked by the Cochabamba Water War:

• In 2000, the pro-privatization Law 2029 was canceled and rewritten as Drinking Water and Sanitation Services Law (2066). It was the result of negotiations between social movements and the state during the water wars. It recognized marginalized communities’ rights to use water and differentiated them from capitalist activities, which had to be authorized and were subject to fees.
• In 2004, similar principles were applied to the irrigation sector (Law 2878), which recognized decentralized irrigation governance. Both laws support indigenous people and farm laborers from being dispossessed of water. At the same time, they contributed to the formalization of water management, which tends to favor commercial management over community management.
• The Bolivian constitution was changed in 2009. Prior to 2009, water supply concessions could be granted for up to 40 years. The new constitution considers water a basic right of life and bans the typical methods of privatization and leasing of water services to for-profit entities.

Sustainability and public participation are declared to be the responsibility of the state as well as universal access to water. To which extent these intentions will actually be reflected in reality remains to be seen, however. The responsibilities coming with this basic-rights approach demand action by the state and challenge community management at the same time.

Learn more from:

• Article on water laws in the Andes

Header image by kris krüg on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The post How a water war in Bolivia led to the reversal of privatization appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article was adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Download your free pdf copy today.

Myriam Bouré: Up until a few years ago, the residents of Loos-en-Gohelle, a small town in rural northwestern France with over 6,000 residents, consumed imported industrial food products despite significant local production. In addition to the negative health impacts of their diet, this practice also hurt the local economy. In 2013, the town government of Loos-en-Gohelle started a project called VITAL as part of an ambitious program to improve the diets of Loos-en-Gohelle residents.

The project was built on an existing initiative called Anges Gardins, run by a local association that has worked on community gardens and food education for years. It is also part of a long-term, comprehensive transition to a diverse, sustainable local economy from one dependent on coal mining — an industry that vanished when the French government closed the region’s coal mines in 1990, in favor of cheaper imports. Food is viewed as a cross-cutting issue, capable of supporting transition in other sectors.

The policy has a two-pronged strategy to meet the goal. First, to stimulate the demand for local, organic food through education, gardening ambassadors, free produce from open food gardens, and more. The town government led by example, by shifting to 100 percent organic food procurement for schools and 15 percent for retirement homes.

Second, to encourage farmers to convert to organic farming and support food distribution. To help achieve this, the town offered farmers free access to land on the condition that they grow organically and that they convert some of their own existing agricultural land to organic as well, thus raising the share of lands grown organically to 10 percent. Terre d’Opale, another local association, coordinates the farmers to ensure diversity of local production and manage distribution. Distribution is handled weekly through a combination of an online store, delivery of food boxes to local collection points, and procurement through catering businesses.

The program has operated successfully for three years. As the program benefits the entire local food ecosystem, including consumers, farmers, food kitchens, and distributors, it continues to grow and serve more and more of the community.

View full policy here (French).

Learn more:

• Report on the VITAL project (French)

​Header image by Loos-en-Gohelle on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The post Creating a vibrant local food ecosystem through government-NGO collaboration appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Wed 21 November 2018, 18:15 – 20:30 GMT

Makespace Oxford: 1 Aristotle Lane, Oxford OX2 6TP, United Kingdom

REGISTER HERE

Building upon Shareable’s years of experience covering the ‘sharing ecosystem’ and the 137 model policies and case studies curated for the new book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” Tom Llewellyn, strategic partnerships director of Shareable, will show how the real sharing economy is already connecting people together, empowering community-led disaster recovery efforts, and working under the radar to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Tom Llewellyn is a lifelong sharer, commoner, and storyteller who travels the globe inspiring and empowering communities to share for a more resilient, equitable, and joyful world. He’s the Strategic Partnerships Director for Shareable.net, executive producer and host of the podcast documentary series The Response, and co-editor of the book “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons”.

Following the presentation, attendees will participate in an interactive ‘World Café’ style discussion, working together to evaluate Oxford by exploring the state of things, the available resources, the needs of residents, and what the steps might be to meet those needs together.

This workshop is for anyone interested in exploring how we might activate Oxford’s urban commons together to address some of our city’s most pressing needs. Please bring your enthusiasm, ideas, and any examples of projects you’re already aware of to share and connect with others.

This event is in partnership with the Solidarity Economy Association, an Oxford-based organisation supporting the growth of the UK’s solidarity economy through education, research, and awareness raising projects. The solidarity economy is made up of grassroots organisations, informal meetings, local community groups, co-operatives, associations and networks of organisations in every sector of our economy. They have been created to meet a need within their community, or broader society, that isn’t being met by our mainstream economy, or because those needs are being met in unethical or unsustainable ways. These initiatives all share a set of values that include equal decision-making, equity, sustainability, pluralism, and solidarity, and they are working towards a just and sustainable world, one that puts the real needs of people and our planet first.

The post Sharing Oxford – Activating our Urban Commons with Tom Llewellyn appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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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Cities have been caught in the middle of a clash: they are stuck competing for business investments while, simultaneously, seeking to meet the needs of their inhabitants through access to public goods and social services. For this reason, there is no surprise in seeing two opposite trends growing globally: on the one hand, the commodification of cities — where public spaces are sold to private buyers at the expense of citizens fenced out by these transactions; on the other hand, and likely in reaction to this privatization, there is a growing trend where cities are turning into ecosystems for collaboration, cooperation, and sharing.

Pressure is especially mounting from social movements that are asserting claims to urban governance by invoking a “Right to the City” — a slogan proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book, “Le Droit à la ville.” This can be generally characterized as the collective right of urban inhabitants to have control in the decision making processes concerning public spaces, city resources, and other factors that shape their lives. The “Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto” in Brazil, Reclaim the Streets in the UK, and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey are all examples of this. Yet, the effectiveness of these movements has been limited, due to a lack of conceptual or legal frameworks that could connect their movements and advance their claims to a Right to the City.

In “The City as a Commons,” Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione propose an urban commons framework that provides new ways of seeing and creating the city, itself, as a commons. It is also a valuable way of thinking about how people can exercise their Right to the City. They explain how if collective action of a community is what creates common wealth from a shared resource, then the activities themselves are what creates wealth from the city. This can be a way to grant each person a right to that wealth, and a right to any decision making processes regarding the distribution of that wealth. This is distinct from commoning — a type of governance that is based on self-organized sharing arrangements — which is characterized by the sharing of authority, the sharing of power, and the sharing of control, relying wholly upon collective action and collective accountability. —Ryan T. Conway and Marco Quaglia

1.  Open Source App Loomio Used to Govern 200-person Artist Collective

Gängeviertel Collective emerged in 2009 following the occupation of 12 buildings in the center of Hamburg, Germany, next to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, and Exxon-Mobile. The original motivation for the occupation was to create affordable space for local artists to live and work while saving the historic buildings from development. The collective is governed by a weekly general assembly which every member can attend, and where they can speak out, and vote. However, for more complex decisions requiring detailed preparation, the community uses Loomio, an open-source collective decision-making app created by the Loomio Cooperative. This online tool can quickly and easily take input from all community members and, after adequate feedback collection and deliberation on Loomio, bring the decision back to the main assembly for a final vote. The software was used for decisions about the potential ownership structure of the collective’s housing and remodeling of the main gathering place. —Neal Gorenflo

2. Neighborhood Partnership Network: Empowering Residents to Participate in City Planning

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed longstanding economic and racial inequalities in New Orleans, with low-income people of color having been left most vulnerable to the disaster. Even those who managed to escape the storm returned to find public services had become privatized, their housing demolished by developers, and their access to basic needs almost nonexistent. Amid the chaos, many people self-organized to support and provide mutual aid to each other. From this, the Neighborhood Partnership Network (NPN) emerged to empower residents to take part in city planning. Since 2006, the NPN has connected neighborhoods through regular meetings, a weekly newsletter, and a self-published journal. NPN has held a Capacity College that builds individual and organizational capacity through workshops and classes on topics ranging from stormwater management to filing public records requests. Furthermore, it was a pivotal advocate for pushing through changes to New Orleans’ City Charter, which requires the city to implement “a system for organized and effective neighborhood participation in land-use decisions and other issues that affect quality of life.” —Ryan T. Conway

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

While the port city of Gdansk in Poland was ravaged by World War II, a majority of its population was either lost or displaced during its many years of heavy conflict. Today, however, the Polish city is a modern and vibrant urban center in eastern Europe. Having only relatively recently caught up with other European cities in terms of economic development, the city looked for ways to improve its quality of life. The city created the Club of Gdansk, an informal think tank for civil society groups and grassroots organizers to collaborate with city leaders to design and develop the Gdansk’s long term strategy. What began as an experiment in enabling bottom-up processes to identify priority issues, eventually became a fixture of the city’s administration. Core to the Club’s civil society and government members is their commitment to a set of values, which includes transparency, self-determination, and “courage to act.” Over the years, the Club of Gdansk has transformed the city and brought about a wave of institutional reorganization supported by the city administration. It has successfully involved tens of thousands of citizens and made them active co-creators of city policies. —Ryan T. Conway

4.  LiquidFeedback: Free and Open-source Civic Engagement Software

E-governance is the state’s use of communication technology to provide information and services to the public. Many cities have successfully implemented such systems to give people access to ongoing policy discussions, provide input on local policies, or even make proposals for official consideration. Though these efforts can enhance civic engagement, the bulk of the digital consultation platforms are proprietary and, therefore, carry a hefty price tag that many cities cannot afford. LiquidFeedback is a collaborative decision making software based in Wunstorf, Germany, that is both free and open-source. That means it is freely available for anyone to install, maintain, and modify — although they may need the help of a computer technologist to put it into place. The Public Software Group in Berlin had initially developed it for use within political parties and community organizations, but in 2015 they scaled it up to expand its application to e-governance. Since then, several cities in Germany and across Europe have incorporated LiquidFeedback into their digital consultation systems. —Ryan T. Conway

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

Header photo by Lyndsey Marie on Unsplash

The post 4 examples of why commons are important for Sharing Cities appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a greater interest in creating more resilient cities where residents produce what they need, in order to minimize waste and dependency on industrial-scale food production and retailing. This, combined with individual interest to learn and reconnect with the food system, has given rise to a number of urban and community gardens. This bottom-up movement of urban agriculture is also seeking a structural support by policy makers. Several grassroot communities around the world are finding innovative ways to distribute the surplus food grown or cooked which otherwise would go to waste. —Khushboo Balwani

1. League of Urban Canners: Stewarding Urban Orchards

Planting an urban fruit tree is more than a lifetime commitment — it is an intergenerational civic responsibility. Each summer, in Greater Boston, a huge amount of backyard fruit falls to the ground and sidewalk, where it rots and creates a mess. Property owners and municipalities are often pressured to remove these “nuisances,” while many urban residents are struggling to access local and organic food sources. The League of Urban Canners has developed a network of individuals to map, harvest, preserve, and share this otherwise wasted fruit. They make agreements with property owners to share the work of fruit harvesting and preserving, as well as tree and arbor pruning. The preserved fruits are shared between property owners (10 percent), preservers (70 percent), and harvesters (20 percent). Each season the completely volunteer-run enterprise harvests and preserves about 5,000 pounds of fruit from a database of more than 300 trees and arbors. Myriad acts of cooperation sustain this urban commons, in which harvesters, property owners, preservers, and eaters learn to share responsibility, resources, and care for each other and their urban environment. —Oona Morrow

2. Restaurant Day (‘Ravintolapäivä’): Fostering Cross-cultural Gatherings Through Shared Meals

In big cities, people of many different cultures live in close proximity. However, there often aren’t enough chances for them to intermingle and experience the diverse traditions within their city. In an effort to bring people together and foster cross cultural interaction, local organizers in Helsinki, Finland, created “Ravintolapäivä,” or Restaurant Day. Initiated in 2011, it began as a food carnival where anyone with a passion for food was encouraged to run a “restaurant” in their private home or in public spaces for a single day. Even though the pop-up restaurants charge money for the meals, the emphasis is not on profit, but rather on community teamwork and cultural exchange. During the event, Helsinki is transformed by hundreds of these informal restaurants serving a wide range of cuisines in this city-wide street festival. The event is put on through distributed organization — individual volunteer restaurateurs are responsible for finding a location, managing the menu and invitations, and setting the meal prices. Now, Restaurant Day has become a global movement, with over 27,000 pop-up restaurants having served over 3 million community members across 75 countries. —Khushboo Balwani

3. Kitchen Share: A Sustainable Community Resource for Home Cooks

Kitchen appliances can be superfluous uses of money and cupboard space, especially for city residents with tight budgets and small homes. Yet interest in healthy eating is growing. More people are trying out unusual food preparation techniques, which can require unique appliances. Kitchen Share, launched in 2012, is a kitchen tool-lending library for home cooks in Portland, Oregon. It enables community members to borrow a wide variety of kitchen appliances such as dehydrators, mixers, and juicers. Members can check out over 400 items online using affordable lending library software from myTurn. With two locations in Portland, Kitchen Share helps residents save money, learn new skills from neighbors, and reduce their environmental footprint. As a nonprofit community resource for home cooks, Kitchen Share only asks for a one-time donation upon joining, providing affordable access to otherwise expensive and bulky items while building a more resource-efficient city. Learn about starting a lending library with this toolkit.—Marion Weymes

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

Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by Artur Rutkowski on Unsplash

The post These 3 grassroots movements are bringing people together through food appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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Adrien Labaeye: Here’s the problem: Internet access has become an essential part of life. However, many still cannot afford it. There are also growing concerns that internet connections could be unilaterally cut by Internet Service Providers at the request of public agencies. How do we ensure everyone has internet access?

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: As early as 2002, the German activists of Freifunk, a noncommercial grassroots group, decided to self-organize to provide a free and autonomous internet infrastructure for all. In 2014, Münster free-internet activists from the local hacker space Warpzone decided to deploy a mesh network for their building complex. They visited a neighboring Freifunk community in Bielefeld that provided them with a crash course into the technology involved, which was mainly provided by the national Freifunk network.

The idea is that any WiFi router can be turned into an access point that communicates directly with other routers, passing along information between them, and thus forming a “mesh” of router-to-router connections. This way, people can send data from any point in the mesh without even connecting to the internet. The infrastructure is owned and maintained by the activists, who formed an association to handle legal and financial practicalities.

In 2015, Freifunk Münster joined with nearby Freifunk Warendorf to pool resources, including skilled people and IT infrastructure, and then made them available to the whole Münsterland region.

Results:

• In June 2015, the parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia (Landtag NRW) decided to support the local Freifunk initiatives by granting permission to use the roofs of buildings that belong to the state.
• In 2016, the Freifunk initiative was awarded 8,000 Euros to build a wireless backbone over the city, bringing Freifunk to places with no internet connection and connecting the scattered little mesh clouds.
• Thanks to the growth of communities in western Münsterland, the mesh reached 2,000 access points on April 20, 2016, making it the largest mesh network in Germany.

Learn more from:

• Freifunk network
• Freifunk community forum (German)

This case study is adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Get a copy today.

Header image of the Freifunk-Initiative installing WiFi-Antennas in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 2013 provided by Boris Niehaus

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