Sharing Cities Urban and Industrial Environments Series Editor: Robert Gottlieb, Henry R
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Sharing Cities Urban and Industrial Environments Series editor: Robert Gottlieb, Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy, Occidental College For a complete list of books published in this series, please see the back of the book. Sharing Cities A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in ITC Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed on recycled paper and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-02972-8 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword by Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth, London vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Case Study: San Francisco 21 Sharing Consumption: The City as Platform 27 2 Case Study: Seoul 71 Sharing Production: The City as Collective Commons 78 3 Case Study: Copenhagen 137 Sharing Politics: The City as Public Realm 144 4 Case Study: Medellín 191 Sharing Society: Reclaiming the City 199 5 Case Study: Amsterdam 247 The Sharing City: Understanding and Acting on the Sharing Paradigm 252 6 Case Study: Bengaluru 311 Synthesis 317 Notes 327 Bibliography 411 Index 423 Series List Foreword When Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, Mayor Michael Bloomberg from New York, and others set up the C40 Cities Network a decade ago, they had the vision that cities will be the locations where the world’s greatest envi- ronmental challenges will be solved. As nations continue to stumble and falter and are seemingly unable to make sufficient progress on issues such as climate change, their vision is becoming shared by many more people. That you can’t fix the planet without fixing our cities is obvious, but less obvious is that cities can fix the planet. A large majority of the population of the global North live in cities already, and city living will become the norm for most of humanity in coming decades. These are the places where most consumption takes place. The energy consumed in our cities to heat our homes and power our trans- port is driving climate change. The food we import to our cities, particu- larly meat and dairy produce, is leading to the destruction of wildlife-rich habitats across the globe. The consumer goods that we take for granted in the global North gobble up resources extracted thousands of miles away, far too often with dreadful environmental impact and working conditions that were outlawed in the US and UK over a hundred of years ago. The waste belching out of exhaust pipes, chimneys, and sewage systems is poisoning the air and water that we and every other species on the planet depend on. Viewed like this our cities are driving us towards a dystopian hell of envi- ronmental collapse and gross social inequalities. But as this book makes abundantly clear, there is the potential for the world’s cities to drive a very different future; a future where cities take their environmental and social responsibilities seriously; a future where cities transform themselves and the rest of the world; a future where cities fix not just themselves but also fix the planet. Central to this more hopeful vision is sharing. Sharing is not new. The vast majority of us share our journeys to work or play, for example on the subways of America’s great cities, or the London Underground, or the Bus Rapid Transit Systems springing up across Latin America. The green spaces in our cities are shared, and their loss or privati- zation is fiercely resisted. And it isn’t so long ago that libraries were where most of us got the books we wanted to read. viii Foreword But sharing can and must go much further. The tantalizing prospect offered in this book by McLaren and Agyeman is that we are just starting to embark on a sharing revolution. A revolution which builds upon the digital world of the twenty-first century; that utilizes the ingenuity and imagination that springs from the cross-fertilization of ideas from the diversity of people living in cities; that builds empathy and understanding between people rather than fear and loathing; that leads to much greater levels of sharing of stuff and much greater resource efficiency; that takes naturally evolved cultural traditions of sharing within families and local communities, and reinvents them to enable sharing between citi- zens and strangers; and that fundamentally transforms the dominant world view that individualism and material possessions are central to what it is to be human. The northern cities of the United Kingdom led the Industrial Revolu- tion. The thousands of chimneys belching out smoke were seen as progress. That children born in these cities were condemned to live in slums, live short lives, and suffer from illnesses such as rickets due to lack of sunlight was seen by some as a price worth paying. In these cities the chimney stacks and slums have now gone. But as we all know, they have not disappeared. They now dominate many cities in China, India, and other fast-developing nations. If the Sharing Revolution is to be truly transformational, it must not only complete the transformation of the cities of the global North it must also transform cities across the globe. And it can. In different ways, cities such as Seoul and Medellín are lead- ing the revolution. And sharing is still part of daily life for many people in many cities across the global South. The Sharing Revolution isn’t a revolu- tion to be led by wealthy countries and copied by the rest; it is a shared revolution with cities across the world learning from each other. The C40 Network and the Sharing Cities Network run by Shareable.net are testa- ment to this. Mayors Bloomberg and Livingstone had a vision. The C40 Network that they gave birth to has already enabled the world’s largest cities to learn from each other and learn from the most innovative smaller cities across the globe. As cities across the globe fight for and in many cases get greater fiscal and regulatory autonomy, such sharing is more critical. But in this book McLaren and Agyeman offer something new, something exciting, something earth-shattering—that if cities become Sharing Cities then we will not only fix the planet but will also transform the prospects for social justice. Now that’s a message well worth sharing. Mike Childs Friends of the Earth, London Acknowledgments Having known each other since working on sustainability issues in London in the 1980s—Julian in local government, Duncan in the nonprofit world— this book was born in the inspiration and stimulation of conversations over several years about sustainability, urbanism, equity, and justice. Fortunately our emerging ideas found fertile ground in UK Friends of the Earth’s Big Ideas Project. We both—and Duncan in particular—are indebted to them, and in par- ticular to Mike Childs, the leader of the Big Ideas Project. Without their support—moral and financial—neither our original Sharing Cities paper, which garnered great interest around the world, nor this book would have been possible. And in this endeavor we benefited immensely from the initial encouragement and support of the former acquisitions editor Clay Morgan and the Urban and Industrial Environments Series editor Bob Gottlieb—who responded so quickly and positively to our proposal— and latterly from Miranda Martin, Beth Clevenger, Katie Hope, Marcy Ross, and Margarita Encomienda at MIT Press. From the outset, the opportunity to work with Harriet Bulkeley, Eurig Scandrett, Roman Krznaric, and Victoria Hurth on their papers for the Big Ideas Project helped shape Duncan’s thinking as the ideas in this book devel- oped. For Julian, it was discussions with his students at Tufts and activists and academics in the Boston area that sparked his ideas. We would also like to thank Neal Gorenflo and Shareable for their encouragement, and for the flow of informative and insightful commentary on sharing cities and the sharing economy published on Shareable. Research assistance from former Tufts students Adrianne Schaefer Borrego and Abby Farnham was invalu- able, especially in compiling the city case studies—we thank you both. Feedback and suggestions from three unnamed reviewers was instrumen- tal in helping us improve our early drafting. Also deserving a mention are Skype and Dropbox, two characters that enabled regular communication x Acknowledgments between Boston and Västerås, Sweden. Without these sharing tools, our task would have been far more onerous. We’d also like to thank all those friends and contacts who took time to provide feedback on our title sugges- tions on Survey Monkey. As important as these joint acknowledgements are our individual ones: From Duncan: My partner Pernilla Rinsell, and our children Alex and Emelie, deserve deepest thanks for their support and tolerance—and maybe when they see their names here, the kids will appreciate what all those hours in front of a laptop were about, even though their screen-time remains tightly rationed. I’d also like to thank my PhD supervisor Gordon Walker for his understanding, even if he possibly didn’t anticipate just how much this book would drag me away from my studies. From Julian: I’d like to thank my partner Lissette Castillo and her daugh- ter Nairobi for their support and love when I had to work on the book.