There are no alternatives to neoliberalism and capital?
With this question Mayor Park Won Soon opened the 2019 Future Innovation Forum in Seoul on Tuesday October 1st, underlying that we actually have thousands of alternatives which, of course, require courage.
The Forum was organized by the The Center for Asian Urban Societies (CAUS) together with FOREXCOM Inc. and hosted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government at the Social Innovation Park, an emblematic space of the city.
Seoul, indeed, under the Park’s mandate, focused on social innovation and sharing economy with the goal to favour a paradigm shift, a transition towards an innovation-led Sharing City. A city that can really be a place of freedom and conviviality of diverse and different individuals. Social innovation is considered a tool to realize this transition and transform urban space in an a more equal, free and fair space that allow citizens to own the city together and become the subject of conviviality. “It transforms the life of self-development for competition and consumption into a life of friendship and hospitality for freedom, dignity, and symbiosis, and enables us to imagine and create a more free and dignified life-cycle”.
Today the Seoul Metropolitan Government in its goal to build “the City for All” proposes to take the results of the Sharing City Seoul project, launched in 2012, and go further, transforming the city in “a distributed and resilient” urban system in which expand democracy in its participative version. That means develop Seoul into a “City as a Commons”. This crucial transition will proceed on three trajectories that will allow to create and enjoy the commonwealth and the common rule that is “urban commons”:
- The Economic transition for sustainable circulation of resources for production and consumption
- The Ecological transition that pursues inclusive growth with the recovery of the social-disadvantaged
- The Social transition that makes social value accepted as core principles of social operation.
To deepen the reflection about this transition, the Forum gathered many experts that framed the Commons universe. The plenary morning session, saw the involvement of LabGov, that intervened with a presentation of professor Christian Iaione. He talked of the meaning of making a civil regulation on commons for the future of the “Sharing Seoul” and for the city’s new task, presenting the Co-city methodological approach and the co-governance project run by LabGov, bringing insights also from the Bologna Regulation on collaboration between citizens and the city for the care and regeneration of urban commons“ (here to explore the Co-City protocol and here to download the Co-Cities full open book).
On the main stage also Michel Bauwens that introduce a model of poly-governance for the creation of a partner city based on meta-regulation. “The poly-governance mechanisms and institutions discovered by Elinor Ostrom (1990) as the hallmark of the management of commons resources becomes the new normal in institutional design. Poly-governance structures, possibly matched by appropriate property mechanisms, consists at least of the three levels (commons, state and market) but can be even more fine-grained, as the work of Foster & Iaione (2016) has suggested” ( see here for more information).
The following open discussion with Iaione and Bauwens involved Mayor’s Park, professor Ezio Manzini (Politecnico) and professor Lee Kwang-Suk (Seoul National Universty of Science and Technology) focusing on the meaning of transitioning from a sharing city to a commoning city and the importance to prevent neoliberal capitalism from coopting commons.
The Forum was also the occasion for the Mayor to meet the INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE.
The inspiring morning was followed by four sessions in the afternoon:
- Urban commons and co-creation: how to build the commoning platforms in Cities?
- Urban commons and democracy: who owns the urban nature? Urban commons against inequality
- Tech-Knowledge as Urban Commons for resilient community and
- Commoning Public Land
Every session saw the participation of many experts, practitioners, scholars, from USA as Neal Gorenflo – executive director and co-founder of Shareable, from Europe as Mayo Fuster – director of Dimmons Research Group at Open University of Catalunia, and several presenters from South Korea, coming from various sectors, in order to deepen both economical, ecological and social aspects around the topic of the commons.
The Forum gathered also a C.I.T.I.E.S delegation with representatives from Montreal and Barcelona. The Case of Barcelona with its sharing ecosystem, the experience around the topic of commons, and the birth of the Sharing Cities Action, was also presented on the stage by Mayo Fuster during the first afternoon session as best practice in the field.
The day closed with the message from the Forum Director, professor Seoung-won Lee (Seoul National University) and from the Head of the Social Innovation Division inside the Seoul Metropolitan Government. They both stressed the relevance of this crucial paradigm shift, the importance to incorporate and let thrive the commons to really build a city for all and the relevance of connecting experiences among cities.