At Public Seminar, Vince Carducci reviews the book Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities by Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyerman, in which the authors attempt to outline how a genuine sharing economy (as opposed to the faux sharing economy of Airbnb) can make our growing megacities sustainable. Carducci praises the book for its critique of cities organized around consumption and planned by top-down methods, but he suggests that the authors don’t go far enough. The problem with cities is not just consumer capitalism. Its capitalism as such.
Citing social science research, the authors assert that sharing is endemic to human culture and indeed a major contributing factor to the species’ evolution. They further argue that cities are quintessentially sharing structures, spaces for leveraging physical resources, social connections, and cultural interactions. What smartness brings to the equation is a new ‘mediated’ sharing, the ability to access much broader networks of exchange made possible through the various forms of information and communication technologies that have emerged in the last two-and-a-half decades. While mediated sharing potentially broadens opportunities for exchange, its commercialization under the sharing economy threatens to diminish it. McLaren and Agyerman argue for a new ‘sharing paradigm,’ which focuses more on solidarity, collaboration, and trust than on monetized transaction.
As the Harvard Business Review notes, the ‘sharing economy’ isn’t really about sharing in the conventional sense but more about using other people’s stuff without being obliged to reciprocate. It’s essentially governed by the alienating effects of monetary exchange as noted more than a century ago by social philosopher Georg Simmel in his 1900 classic, The Philosophy of Money. HBR uses the term ‘access economy’ to denote exchange transactions in which people essentially rent goods and services rather than buy them outright. McLaren and Agyerman want to turn the conversation back to sharing in its traditional form by focusing on examples that embrace its more communal aspects, organizing their narrative around general themes, each of which is prefaced by a case-study city that encapsulates the concept that follows.
The first is collaborative consumption, exemplified by San Francisco. A key trend they identify is ‘disownership,’ the rising popularity of sharing, renting, or borrowing things that have traditionally been individually owned, exchanges that have been greatly facilitated by the internet. Among the items to disown according to The People’s Guide to Disownerhip are cars, vacation properties, wedding attire, and luxury wear and other goods. Some of this trend is driven by sheer economics: for younger consumers carrying onerous student debt loads and residing in areas with high living costs, owning a car or house simply doesn’t square with the monthly budget. But older, more affluent consumers are also drawn to it in an effort to reduce the hassle of routine maintenance over time and, more altruistically, maximize use value from an environmental standpoint. For cities, collaborative consumption can increase the efficiency of infrastructure and services. But as the authors note, ‘sharing’ on this level can overlook preexisting inequalities: you can’t rent out ‘spare’ rooms on Airbnb if you have no room to spare, you can’t offer rides through Uber or Lyft if you don’t own a vehicle, and you can’t even get a gig in the wretched gig economy without a way to get online.
Image of San Francisco via getyourguide.com.