Sharing Cities

The notion of sharing is something we encourage in our children even though it is antithetical to the leisure shopping, celebrity reverence, money-worshipping society in which we live. Recent incarnations of the term sharing are here argued to have been subtended too narrowly. McLaren and Agyeman make the case for implementing a wider and deeper social, cultural, economic and political understanding to overcome the apparent shortcomings of the more disjointed and commercial notion of sharing that we increasingly encounter: ‘consumerism discourages trust and empathy’.

The sharing idea outlined in the introduction is fleshed out with actual examples throughout the case studies, such as communal food growing, library parks providing internet access or local venues to swap toys. Detailed case studies of San Francisco, Seoul, Copenhagen, Medellín, Amsterdam, and Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) contextualise the authors’ discussions of: collaborative consumption and production; the shared public realm, both physical and virtual; the design of sharing to enhance equity and justice; and, the prospects for scaling up the sharing paradigm through city governance. They show how sharing could shift values and norms, enable civic engagement and political activism, and rebuild a shared urban commons. Whilst there are detailed notes, bibliography and index and a few explanatory diagrams, there are no photos, which would have helped visualise the refreshing mix of case study places. This wider notion of sharing could be of things, services, activities or experiences, and could be material, virtual, tangible or intangible.

This wider definition would then enable us to properly acknowledge some of the challenges often sidelined in any meaningful sense such as, one thousand million people living in extreme poverty, rising income inequality, and lack of genuinely affordable housing; and from an environmental perspective, resource scarcity, biodiversity loss and climate change.

This acknowledgement highlights the extent to which humans are living outside the parameters of an environmentally safe, socially inclusive and sustainable, operating space. These parameters are set with a social foundation as an inner boundary and environmental ceiling forming the outer. Human deprivation sits below the inner and environmental degradation beyond the outer, of this doughnut shaped envelope. This questions the framing of capitalism as our only viable model, that commercially orientated ‘solutions’ are our only tool to address social issues. What should not be dismissed are the ‘symbolic, intangible and ideational aspects of culture that underpin beliefs, values, norms and desires’, all of which help to shape and define the wide variety of identities that make the world the interesting place it is. This, of course, is just the humans, flora and fauna notwithstanding. The planet is our ultimate shared space.