The
question of how we will inhabit cities after COVID-19 has popped amongst most
urban planners, as we all question urban dynamics and see the pandemic as an
opportunity to reshape not only the way we inhabit cities, but also how we move
in them.
Since
the first images from an isolated Wuhan to the photos of empty streets in New
York, the media have shared powerful images that invite urban enthusiasts to
question the use of street space generally dominated by cars.
The
disruption of our everyday lives brought a perfect momentum for urbanists to
push forward a sustainable mobility agenda as many people worked from home, micro-mobility
became the only type of mobility for many, and even the World Health Organisation
encouraged people to consider riding bikes and walking whenever feasible.
Technical guidance for mobility published by the World Health Organisation
Since
public transportation and cab services are still considered risky spaces for
infection, local governments decided to pedestrianise streets and broaden bike
lanes in cities such as New York, Berlin, Milan, Bogota, Barcelona, Mexico
City, Paris, Vienna, Sydney and Brussels.
Planners
and local governments have described it as a moment for mobility to change, an
approach that is still to be tested once the social distancing restrictions are
lifted, and the use of walking and biking is tested versus motorised
transportation such as motorbikes and cars.
Car
affluence dropped to almost 40% in most major cities; some cities adopted temporary
measures implementing pop-up bike lanes while others fast-tracked bike
paths scheduled in the pre-corona city planning.
Percentage of city movement in comparison to usual in the European cities of Paris, Milan and Berlin during February and March 2020. Source: City Mapper Mobility Index.
City
mobility adapting to a health crisis
One of the most relevant
examples of city mobility adapted to the health crisis is Paris. The region plans to invest
300 million euros in building 650 kilometres of pop-up and pre-planned
cycleway infrastructure. In an overnight operation
street workers blocked traffic and painted bike icons
turning
streets into safe streets for biking.
Coronavirus
lockdown and the decrease in car traffic accelerated the implementation of the
“Plan Vélo”
which is part of major Anne Hidalgo’s promise
to turn every street in Paris cycle-friendly by 2024.
Berlin
introduced 20 kilometres of pop-up bike lanes, as Berlin Roads and Parks
Department official Felix Weisbrich called this a “pandemic-resilient
infrastructure.” As the pandemic has
accelerated the discussions in districts and municipal parliaments, public
officials can push for urban infrastructure to be implemented
ata faster speed than what the bouroucratic procedure would usually take.
Pop-up bike lane in Kottbusser Damm, Berlin. Source: author
The
city of Milan implemented the “Strade
Aperte” plan which contemplated the
transformation of 35
kilometres of city streets into either pedestrian or cyclists roads. The
Italian government issued bike-friendly traffic rules and promised people in
bigger cities to provide a subsidy of up to 60 per cent of the price for the
purchase of bicycles and e-scooters, up to a maximum of 500 euros.
Brussels
planned to build a total of 40 kilometers of new cycle lanes.
While the British government announced an
emergency plan of 250 million pounds
to
set up pop-up bike lanes, safer junctions and cycle-only corridors.
Finally,
Bogotá is one of the cities with the largest pop-up cycling lanes expansion
during the pandemic crisis as the city implemented 80km of temporary in-street
bikeways to supplement 550 km existing bike paths.
The
pop-up infrastructure like removable tape and mobile signs not only makes it
easier for people riding bikes to keep self-distancing,
but it also encourages people who would not cycle regularly to explore new ways
of transportation in a more comfortable space.
What about cars?
The
adaptation to COVID-19 is not always sustainable and resilient. The sanitary
measures present a risk as cars represent a tool for isolated mobility.
Car-centric cities may continue to be so as car use increases.
As
there is a higher demand for activities to restart under social distancing
conditions, many cities in Europe started embracing drive-in culture not only
for food but also for churches, cinemas and even concerts.
Examples
of drive-in entertainment alternatives take place in the outskirts of cities as
it is the case in Lithuania and Denmark. German car cinemas became
popular near Cologne, and the city of Schüttorf close to the border of Germany
and the Netherlands hosted a party in a drive-in club where the performer
invited people to “honk if they were having a good
time”.
In
the United States, famous for its drive-in culture, a strip club continued operation under this new modality that would allow people to
keep distance as the attendees stayed inside their cars.
While
drive-ins help entertainment industries to cope with the closures imposed by
the sanitary restrictions, there is a risk, especially in the suburbs, to
develop an even more motorised culture and a lifestyle that is more dependable
on cars.
What can urban planning learn from past epidemics?
One
of the first examples of a city adapting to an epidemic is the cholera outbreak
mapped by John Snow which encouraged cities to
establish higher hygiene standards and prompted the relevance of statistical
data in city planning.
However,
more recent outbreaks like the case of SARS epidemic that affected cities in
China, South East Asia and Canada highlighted the vulnerability of dense cities
to become arenas for a fast spread of the virus. Although
the use of public transportation was reduced in cities like Taipei, -the daily
ridership of public transportation decreased to 50% during
the peak of the 2003 SARS period– there is no significant evidence of a shift
toward sustainable transportation. The SARS epidemic provided
more examples of social control and exceptionalism than examples of sustainable
transportation.
In
the case of Covid-19, even if urbanists hope for the outbreak to be a
significant opportunity to design more sustainable cities in the “new
normality”, and car sales have drastically dropped, there is hope in the car
industry for sales to rise once the distance regulations
are eased since people will opt for a car to comply with social distancing
rules.
In
Korea and China the fears of contracting the Coronavirus have already shown an
increase in the sales of cars and in the United States, according to the IBM study on Consumer Behavior Alterations, “More
than 20 percent
of respondents who regularly used buses, subways or
trains now said they no longer would, and
another 28 percent said they will likely use public transportation less often.”.
In
addition, they claim that “more
than 17 percent of people surveyed said that they intend to use their personal
vehicle more as a result of COVID-19, with approximately 1 in 4
saying they will use it as their exclusive mode of transportation
going forward.” .
In
this matter, public transportation might be the most affected in terms of
revenue, New York City metro system reported its worst
financial crisis as their ridership decreased by 90%, while London Underground
put one quarter of its staff in furlough as it has only been used at a 5% of
its capacity for the past months. Even
after the social distancing measures are eased, public transport might be
considered more hazardous than other means of transportation
and be the most affected financially.
Can city mobility restart in a resilient way?
After
the biggest part of the crisis has passed and we
will inhabit cities with eased
sanitary restrictions is still uncertain whether
mobility patterns will be affected in a permanent way. Further data will show
if
the coronavirus pandemic did encourage the creation of instruments for the
implementations of sustainable mobility or it perpetuated a car centered approach.
So
far, at a medium-term, the relevance of longer-trips has
been questioned, and work from home acquired
significance as an alternative to commutes. Trips are expected to be carried
out mostly by walking, cycling and driving a personal car
and the investment in cycling infrastructure will remain as a long-term outcome
of this pandemic.
A woman biking through Schillingbrücke in Berlin. Source: author.
The learning
outcomes of this experience can also have a long-term impact
as they will be documented
in guidelines and the experience will set a precedent for critical and
resilient responses for local governments.
For instance, the guide for temporary bike lanes
titled “Making a safe space for cycling in 10 days”, developed by the consultancy
Mobicon, delineates what should the first relevant action should
include
to keep safe distance while boosting more sustainable commutes.
The
restoration of activities in dense cities might not bring an
automatic radical change in mobility behaviour and policy but,
despite the circumstances, life under social distancing became an
actual experimental period that many urbanists have dreamed
of and many citizens had not experimented before.
The
relevant question now is whether we will be able to maintain partially closed
streets and broader bike lanes after lockdown restrictions are lifted once
cities get through this moment, hoping for planners, public officials and
citizens to recognise the perks of having more room and infrastructure for
alternative mobility.
FAO reports that about 80% of
food produced globally is destined to feed urban areas (FAO 2020). During the last century,
the bond between food production and urban planning was devalued by the very
idea of urban life as antithetic to rural life. The food system seemed
condemned to industrial and mass production. More recently, agriculture has slowly
started to make its way back to the city.
Urban agriculture or urban
farming is the practice of cultivating and distributing food in or around urban
area. If urban agriculture, stricto sensu, refers to small areas inside
the city such as small farms or community gardens for growing crops or raising
small livestock for own consumption or sale in neighborhood markets. Peri-urban
agriculture refers to intensive or semi-intensive agriculture undertaken on the
fringes of urban areas (FAO 2015). Indeed, urban agriculture has been spreading
in cities across the world in the last years, with the aim to boost more
sustainable food systems and the hope to offer a better relationship between
natural systems and human communities (McDonough 2014). In New York City, for
example, growing food in the city has been booming in the last years and
agriculture networks strengthened (McDonough 2014). In London, the enterprise GrowUp Urban Farms, which
produces fish, salads and herbs in unused city spaces now sells wholesale (Lovett 2016).
The Covid-19 pandemic is not
only changing our daily lives but especially the way we live in cities. It also
affected the globalized and industrialized food system producing a variety of
responses, both in the short and in the long-term. FAO and RUAF provided a
framework to understand the vulnerabilities of urban food systems, to improve
communication and cooperation and provide new strategies to safeguard food security
and nutrition during this trying time (Blay-Palmer et Al. 2020). In particular,
they recognized how some cities are particularly exposed to food supply
problems, given their lack of diversification of food value and supply chains,
their dependency on imports and other economic and natural vulnerabilities (Blay-Palmer et Al. 2020). The less
cities rely on their rural hinterlands, the more they result unprotected to unpredictable
shocks of their food supply chain, as the pandemic showed.
Source: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Indeed Covid-19 health crisis
has quickly aggravated food security for most vulnerable urban populations.
According to FAO, “the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting urban food systems
worldwide, posing a number of challenges for cities and local governments that
are obliged to deal with rapid changes in food availability, accessibility and affordability”
(FAO 2020: 1). In London, for
example, foodbanks are struggling to provide food to city dwellers during the
lockdown, and this is affecting mostly low incomes, older people, those with
disabilities, rough sleepers and asylum seekers, given the fall of donations,
the insufficient supplies from supermarkets and lack of volunteers (London City
Hall 2020). RUAF also reported that in
Quito, Ecuador, public places being locked down meant that local markets, could
not remain open and provide food to low-income residents (RUAF 2020). Maximo
Torero, Food and Agriculture Organization chief economist, explained that the
challenges that the pandemic is posing to the food system do not affect the
supply of food in itself but the logistics of food distribution, given the high
dependency on food imports (Harvey 2020). Moreover, The Economist reported
how current food system bottlenecks have severe impacts on consumers, who are
facing reduced or lost incomes since the lockdown measures were implemented
globally (The Economist 2020). In fact, vulnerable urban residents can only
afford to buy food in small quantities and depend mostly on small shops and
open-air markets rather than supermarkets and other food delivery options. Therefore,
some national governments are trying to maintain outdoor food markets open to
support vulnerable groups’ access to food. For example, in France food markets
partially reopened at the end of March (The Connexion 2020) and UK is prepared
to reopen all outdoor markets from the 1st June (Sustain 2020).
Hence, it could be interesting
to investigate if among other long-term actions that cities and local
governments can implement to strengthen urban food systems’ resilience, growing
food in cities may be a viable option. FAO stated that promoting short supply
chains may adequately support the resilience of urban food systems in the
long-term. In particular, “the crisis provides an opportunity to underline
the multiple benefits of local food systems, enabling local actors to better
coordinate during the crisis to avoid main gaps distribution, and making cities
more food resilient” (FAO 2020: 6).
Therefore, cases of urban and
peri-urban agriculture and/or urban residents directly growing their food from
home are spreading. In particular, Kotchakorn Voraakhom, the designer of the
largest urban rooftop farm
in Bangkok stated that “more people are thinking about where their food comes
from, how easily it can be disrupted, and how to reduce disruptions” (Chandran 2020). She also
reported how urban planners and local governments tend now to be more concerned
with land-use in cities (Chandran
2020).
For instance, Singapore relies
on other nations for almost everything its residents eat. More recently, it has
been working on addressing land constraints to diversify food sources and
increase local production. According to William Chen Professor of Food Science
and Technology ant Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (Kwiatkowski
and Stringer 2020), Singapore is not only developing expertise in technologies
such as vertical farming, but it has also been working constantly to increase
free additional urban spaces for urban farming, such as rooftops on multi-storeys
car parks (Kwiatkowski and Stringer 2020). An example is a structure atop a car
park in the Ang Mo Kio district where “Citiponics Pte Ltd. grows about 4
tons of Georgina lettuces and other leafy greens a month, while part of a
former downtown high school site has also recently been re-purposed for urban
agriculture” (Kwiatkowski and Stringer 2020).
In the meanwhile in UK, the University of Sheffield’s
Institute for Sustainable Food is working on the launch of the Resilience
Food Project which will see the creation of “financially self-supporting
aquaponic micro-farms in unused or under-used urban spaces of Sheffield that
offer a localized high tech intensive food production method” (Nickles 2020). The project aims to assess
the financial viability and resource efficiency of urban agriculture, gather
evidence to stimulate investor confidence and explore ways to involve local
communities in the co-production of farms and food, particularly in more vulnerable
urban areas (Nickles 2020).
Also, in Bolivia, lockdown
measures highly affected the urban food system. However, families working in
urban and peri-urban agriculture resulted fundamental to guarantee the supply
of food into Bolivia’s cities. With local governments and FAO’s support to
urban and peri-urban food sector, farmers managed to shorten food value chains
and guarantee food access in Bolivian cities during quarantine (FAO 2020).
These examples showed how the
increased attention towards urban and peri-urban agriculture in the attempt to
shorten food supply chains has become even more urgent, since lockdown measures
have been implemented in cities all around the world. Even if urban farms can
only partially address food needs in cities, they seem able to promote more
sustainable communities and generative capacity of buildings and urban
infrastructure (Yang
2020). Additionally,
Covid-19 is showing how urban and especially peri-urban agriculture will
certainly play a more relevant role in reducing food insecurity and food supply
chains vulnerabilities, if unpredictable shocks happen to compromise the food
system. Therefore, more attention from local authorities is needed to ensure the
safety of local food production by supporting policies aimed at shortening food
supply chains. As Jane Jacobs noted, perseverance of peri-urban agriculture embodies the symbiotic relationship that occurs
between cities and their hinterlands (Jacobs 1984) which can definitely be a shock
absorber during disruptions such as a global pandemic. Therefore, in a world
after coronavirus, as the European Agriculture Commissioner, Janusz
Wojciechowski, advocated “we need to have our own food, produced on our fields,
by our own farmers, and we have to take better care of local markets, shorten
those supply chains” (POLITICO 2020).
Food and
Agriculture Organization (2015). Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture. Food and
Agriculture Organization (2020). Urban Food Agenda. Available at: http://www.fao.org/urban-food-agenda/en/
Food and
Agriculture Organization (2020). Urban food systems and COVID-19: The role
of cities and local governments in responding to
the emergency. [online] Available at: http://www.fao.org/3/ca8600en/CA8600EN.pdf
Paris 2020 municipal elections: caveats and challenges
for la Ville-lumière
After the transportation strikes that blocked the city for over a month in opposition to French President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform, the year 2020 seems to continue on the path of 2019, conveying radical changes and bouleversements for the French political universe.
Well before the deciding presidential elections which
will be held in 2022, the current year appears to be crucial for political
parties. In point of fact, in March 2020 the political scenario will be largely
dominated by the upcoming municipal elections; for the sake of this article,
our attention will vert solely on Paris.
As to avoid simplistic conclusions as well as spurious
and scattered information, first and foremost we will provide introductory
premises regarding the nature of the electoral system and the incumbent
administration.
French political tradition is consistently conjoined
with the Two-Round System, given that presidential, legislative, regional and
departmental elections all employ the system. The first round resembles the
typical First Past the Post (FPTP) system; if a candidate receives an absolute
majority of the vote, then it is elected outright with no need for a second
ballot. Otherwise, in case no candidate receives an absolute majority, then a second
voting round is conducted. The candidate who wins the most votes in the second
round will be then elected. For the French National Assembly, all candidates
winning more than 12.5% of the votes of registered voters, or the top two
candidates, go through the second ballot.
In the case of municipal elections, a Two-Round system
is exerted only for municipalities with more than one thousand residents. While
it is slightly more representative at the constituency level than the First
Past the Post (FPTP), it is deemed to be highly disproportional while
artificially boosting large parties.
“Before the
city, there was a land” (Cronon,1991).
In his book, William Cronon
recounts how Chicago was formed out of a city-less landscape, by people who migrated
there and crafted the urban scenery through cultural and economic exchanges.
Cities are not structures, cities are people, or better, they are the people
who live them. This is why their destinies are so dissimilar one from the
other. Assuming the equation city = people,
in a social Darwinistic perspective cities can be considered to be struggling
for survival too. Their success or their failure, their sterility or their
blossoming, is strictly dependent on the renewed impulses of its inhabitants. What
this brief and not exhaustive excursus wishes to highlight, is how significant
a mayor can be for an urban space.
Since 2014 elections, Paris has been administered by the socialist Anne
Hidalgo[1],
the first women to conquer the French capital and one of the most prominent
figures of the Socialist party on the national chessboard. Portrayed as strict
and inflexible, the Socialist mayor of Paris has stood and still stands as a
symbol of resistance to the ballot-box domination of 2017 which saw the macronian
party La République En Marche! (LREM)
winning 12 out of 18 National Assembly seats. In between acclaims and harsh
criticism, she has renewed her willingness to be elected and has launched her
campaign for 2020.
Anne Hidalgo, during a press conference in March 21, 2019. Source: France24
According to the French newspaper Le
Monde, around 60 percent from a sample of 2.942 electors, have expressed
their dissent towards a putative re-election of Hidalgo; despite this fact, the
polls still deem the incumbent mayor to be the favourite, just before Benjamin
Griveaux.
Her term has seen efforts to strive towards a “eco-friendlier” city,
including battles to thin out car traffic as well as an array of construction
projects throughout the city which have appraised a positive record on
environmental transition.
La République En
Marche (LREM) has
indeed been characterized by an odd schism within its proposed candidates. The
official name has been the one of Benjamin Griveaux[2],
who won the seat in the fifth constituency of Paris during the 2017 legislative
elections, with 56.27 percent of the vote. His campaign seems to be proactive
and verts around urban planning pillars, like the pretentious project of a
Parisian “Central Park”. Howbeit, during the summer another LREM affiliate
decided to take a stand in the mayor race. Cédric Villani[3],
French deputy and university professor but with an Italian heritage, is best
known for being a mathematician rather than a political leader, winning in 2010
the Fields prize for a pioneering empirical work.
Cédric Villani and Benjamin Griveaux; Source: Le Parisien
His growing consensus, despite Macron’s latent dissent, is probably due
to his willingness to have a direct contact with citizens; within his
proposals, the desire to create a parallel body to the parish council, composed
by citizens and experts in the socio-economic realm. His attempt represents a
forceful rupture and a quantum leap towards inclusiveness under the aegis of
horizontal subsidiarity. Quite hazardously, it may appear a sui generis tentative co-governance.
From the part of the Republicans, the presented candidate is Rachida
Dati[4];
her proposals will focus primarily on the well-known rightist triad of
security, health and family. At the moment, the polls attest her to be the
fourth most favoured candidate.
Rachida Dati. Source: www.lalibre.be
The Green Party’s nominee has been for David Belliard[5],
journalist and president of the group at the parish council. Given the fracture
from the macronian side, the ecologists will be increasingly relevant and
weighty during the campaign. Quite coherently with his party affiliation, the
proposed plan for Paris, is to commute it into a ville nature, so a “city of nature”, with particular attention on
climate change challenges, tourism and traffic spillovers (namely, limiting
emissions).
David Belliard. Source: GettyImages.it
The scenario seems to be quite scattered and fragmented in light of a large
supply side. The Socialist candidate Hidalgo leads the polls, followed by
Griveaux (LREM), Villani (Independent), Dati (LR) and Belliard (EELV), while
leaving a marginal and insignificant role to the candidates Rassemblement National and France Insoumise.
The graph shows the projected consensus of each candidate according to the polls. Source: Ifop, Ipsos
After our considerations and suppositions around Paris municipal
elections, candidates and their tailored programmes, we ought to ask whether
the upcoming mayor will be a blessing or a curse for a city facing growing
challenges in terms of security, migration, increasing costs and climate
issues. Each candidate’s programme pinpoints on issues such as urban planning,
measures for a “greener” Paris, more involvement form the part of the citizens
and security, although the latter seems quite marginal. Will their tentative
effort be enough or remain exclusively heuristic in value? Will he or she will
be capable to restore the grandeur of la
Ville-Lumière?
The Business Roundtable has released a new definition of a corporation, which advocates that companies account for all their stakeholders, not just their shareholders, when distributing corporate value. To fully implement their stated intent, companies will need to invest not just in their own strategic objectives but in processes that allow communities to self-determine their priorities and direction.
Earlier this month, Apple announced it would invest $2.5 billion to address the housing crisis in the SF Bay Area. Joining Facebook and Google in their investment, Apple has never placed much stock in “philanthropy.” Why the change?
Corporate investment in socially beneficially initiatives may have finally reached a tipping point. This August, the Business Roundtable released a new statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, the first time this credo has been updated in more than twenty years. Signed by 185 member CEOs, including those of many of America’s largest companies, the new statement stipulated that a corporation would no longer solely seek to deliver profits to its shareholders but would instead seek to maximize value for their broader community of stakeholders.
While in recent decades, many companies have increased their philanthropic investments in social programs that benefit communities where they operate, this statement marks the first time that such a large group or business leaders have explicitly changed their shared understanding of a company’s operational intent.
While the new statement offers cause for celebration, it is likely to be met with a healthy dose of skepticism from social change advocates. Adding a CEO’s signature to a one-page letter of intent, while culturally significant, is a simple act that doesn’t itself deliver any social value. Adapting supply chains, business models, and revenue management to account for the holistic needs of a company’s constituents is orders of magnitude more complex (not to mention, expensive).
Companies should be judged, not on their intent, but on their actions and follow-through. Revised intent will only matter if corporate leaders make investments that drive results. The three big tech giants’ co-investment in Bay Area housing is a promising start. But more of those 185 companies need to make billion-dollar commitments that advance solutions to pressing social challenges.
As more companies seek to make good on their new shared intent, it’s vital that journalists and activists alike scrutinize not just what social issues companies choose to address but also the process they use to make those investments and the way that communities are engaged in determining the parameters of social value and wellbeing.
So who exactly are the “communities” these 185 companies will now seek to benefit? A majority of US corporations are headquartered in cities. In 2010, McKinsey reported that 85% of US GDP was generated by cities of 150,000 inhabitants or more. As such, when companies commit to improving the lives of their stakeholders, they should actually interpret this to mean the ecosystem of the cities in which they operate.
Urbanization worldwide is on the rise. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, including 82 percent of Americans and 41 percent of Europeans. Human consolidation into urban centers helps companies find easy access to skilled labor. But increased human density creates its own slew of hairy problems. Housing is one issue that is well met with a private-sector solution. But what about education, transportation, childcare, healthcare, and general economic inequality?
Corporate leaders are accustomed to using the leverage of hierarchy to make choices from the top down. Based on whatever sources of information they choose to consider, a select group of senior leaders within any one company will typically decide how resources are allocated and utilized. When it comes to making meaningful, long-term investments in the health and well-being of cities and their residents, a top down decision making model will often fail to deliver meaningful outcomes. Indeed, companies could learn from the experience of the international development sector, where many practitioners have finally realized how vitally important it is to involve target stakeholders from the very beginning in the process of defining problems and devising solutions.
Why? Because the most effective solutions to the biggest problems facing the world today cannot be mass produced. Each city, each community is unique and requires an approach that is adapted for its specific challenges and needs. Service designers have demonstrated that those with the most direct experience of a problem often have the best insights into how to address it. For example, if you would like to understand the ecosystem of soup kitchens in a city, the best person to ask would be a homeless person. Yet, involving the users who are most affected by a problem requires that those making the investment appreciate that the process used to arrive at the solution is just as valuable as the process itself.
As companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook seek to operationalize toward their new collective intent, they will likely be rewarded for their attention to how, not just what, they seek to address. In cities, where many of these investments will likely originate, a collaborative process focused on intentional innovation and community involvement is likely to deliver the greatest return.
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).
Christian Iaione, LabGov co-founder, presenting at the Future Innovation Forum
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 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.
