The Sharing Economy : Taking initiative on the future
The revolution of Internet and mobile communications have subverted our existences to the very meaning of social life. After observing the emergence of peer-to-peer networks of data rising from the development of Napster, we have now a very intimate knowledge of decentralized, real-time exchange platformism like Uber, Amazon or Kickstarter. While these networks promote the effectiveness of processes management, reducing cost of transactions and optimizing the benefits of peers, the sharing economy still remains mostly a financial architecture. Yet a powerful one, we must still innovate in achieving efficiency models which also embrace the deeper purposes of the Internet revolution. So that peers can also mean users, people and human beings, these networks must be thought over from the « inside » of our communities. The case of local and regional economic model in Quebec could reveal a potential to further the ecologic and communal dimensions of the sharing economy.
The sharing economy is... everywhere!
We must not illusionize ourselves with the nomenclatura of the «sharing economy». Neither it is to be only benevolent nor it is to be something else than economy. This machine works upon networking devices and social media architecture and thus it drives upon the power of urban flux and middle class consumption power. It requires people who want to acquire a rental capacity from their means and also who take a claim upon the idea of self-entrepreneurship. It constitutes networks of a different conception of working and exchanging services. To some extent, we could say that this model is rooted in the vivacity of culture and daily life.
The sharing economy is progressing extensively. Revolutionnizing the means of organization in communities, the sharing economy is establishing the norm in local networking for the 21st century. While solidarity outlets have served of intermediary to the exchange of used goods, Kijiji, for example, as taken the relay of exchanges of goods to be re-used. In this situation, the social places of exchange are being challenged to reinvent their meaning and efficiency in order to exist beyond last ressort services.
A key model in the next events
Contrarily to the negative impression that can be insinuated from my reflexion, the sharing economy constitute a major social opportunity. The networks grant tools and an architecture for social organization that is far more interesting than what is being known in most local communities right now. The networks have the flexibility and the structural arrangements to grant social activities perpectives yet unknown. What can our mefiance inform us of, then? It is more likely the deeper economic trend of techno-cultural networks which is taking place as a stance of corporations and governments to manage social life. We must then be severe critics of the separation of living actors from their autonomy as peers and true « owners » of their social existence. We must be intransigeant as this stake will become determining in the near reinvention of technological cities. In other words, the development of sharing economy is ordered by abstract financial dynamics that have to be taken over by people and communites.
As the cities are passing from the status of national architecture to poles of development, cities themselves are becoming part of these networks of variable configurations. They are in such sense that they establish the convergence of local and regional economic development. This is how, for example, we can understand the development of technological parks and urban affairism in globalized cities. In the heart of such convergence relies the power of logistics where the sharing economy fulfil its meaning. These possibilities are widely and avidly engaged throught the rise of the market of the intelligent cities (intelligent cars, intelligent homes, intelligent phones and platforms, so on.). In order for this model to beneficiate our localities truly, we must as people and communities take the course of local economy.
Our Ecology, our districts, our power!
What interests me here is to indicate the situation we are confronted to as citadins and demonstrate issues of solutions. I believe here that it is possible to beneficiate from the current dynamics and engage-in from a perspective of « active citizens » and autonomous citadins associations. The prospect is to initiate our own sites of development and take advantage of a privileged position in the current economic and decisionnal circumstances. In these respects, the new urbanized fringes of cities may represent, as places of experiment for sustainable development, an asset to defend while thinking beyond gentrification dynamics and strategic planning in developping network management in cities. We are indeed very well situated to politize by the means most questions concerning radical autonomy.
In a partly divergent article I have written before on this very topic, I have discussed strategies from a very localized perspective around the capital city where I live. More or less, I had demonstrated that organic developments of alternative economy in social movements created some sort of a « sharing culture » in localities which was perfectly fitted to serve as a framework and an environment of development to normatize the uses of community networks. Since they were engaged in very specific positions of critics but were laking any means of generalizing their perspectives throught real politics of the urban scape, they had an interesting range of innovation as being thought in an horizon of dialectically planned economy of the localities. As such, the sharing economy and its structural management by decentralized applications and peer-to-peer exchange protocols have a very distinct signature throught an immanent organization in localities. Much must still be discussed and shall be.
~Netslums