Barcelona hosted the third edition of the Sharing City Summit from November 12 to November 15, organized by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, The Barcelona City Council and the Dimmons research group (IN3-UOC), with the support of City of Amsterdam and City of New York, BarCola, Sharing Cities Alliance and Shareable. After Amsterdam’s first edition in 2016 and New York City in 2017 for the second one, this year’s edition in Barcelona was featured by a massive participation of cities from all around the world, exceeding the previous numbers and showing how crucial this topic has become for cities all over the world. More than 50 cities, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Milan, Montreal, Toronto, Montevideo, Kobe, Vienna, Barcelona, Singapore, Seoul, Austin, Torino, Portland, Madrid and Valencia, among others, attended the 2018 edition.
The first day of the Sharing City Summit represented an in depth moment of reflection among Mayors and Vice Mayors, together with all the actors of the sharing ecosystem (companies, nonprofits, foundations, networks, cooperatives, research centers and other actors which are reshaping the future of collaborative oriented platform economy) in order to discuss how the continuous growth of the digital economy platforms is impacting the life, sovereignty and economic development of cities. The Summit was opened by Mayo Fuster, from the UOC, as moderator, Gerardo Pisarello, First Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Pastora Martinez, Vice Rector OUC, Udo Kock, Deputy Mayor for Finance of Amsterdam and Sonam Velani from the NYC Mayor’s Office. The event moved from a very clear premise: there is a radical difference between the so-called horizontal platforms – based on peer-to-peer exchanges and able to generate new forms of collaboration and mutualism among citizens -, and so-called “extractive” platforms, quoting Bauwens, i.e. platforms that often act in a non-transparent way in terms of data usage, services offered to different segments of population and impact generated in the communities.
The day was therefore organized around the aim to reach common principles to tackle the phenomenon of the sharing economy, co-creating a common declaration, the so-called “Declaration of principles and commitments for a Sharing City”. In concrete, the summit focused on boosting concrete commons outcomes and collaboration measures, including: the co-creation of a set of common principles to reach a joint declaration; collaboration between cities on the regulation and negotiation with large platforms that generate disruptive impacts in the city; definition of criteria to distinguish between platforms; promotion and occupation policies on platform models inclusive and beneficial for the general common interest; and, knowledge’s policies and a sharing common data platform between cities.
Why? Because the technological and digital innovation are not bringing just opportunities; they are also opening new spaces of discrimination, generating new inequalities. The digital platforms indeed, are more and more orienting the economic processes, but also influencing our way of living and working, especially in the urban contexts. The city level becomes crucial. As remembered during the inspirational talk of professor Yochai Benkler (Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society) technologies allow changes only in the context of a more general socio-relational change: “now we need an alliance between governments, and the commons, the civil society to pull back power from the major platforms… an alliance based on transparency and democracy”. The results coming from the dynamic interaction among technology, ideology and institutions can be improved by specific choices: do we want a city as a service provider or as a democratic community? This is the choice. Cities, indeed, can make a difference in people’s day-to-day experience. They can offer a real lived experience of socially-embedded production and meaningful participatory democracy. Cities are the places where to combine technological freedom with participatory public administration. Building community is a practice and cities can be a perfect laboratory, remembering that without a robust city commons, cities would not be cities. Professor Benkler gave also interesting suggestions to structure the debate about the Sharing Cities Declaration (see the picture)
After Benkler’s speech, the city governments’ encounter was then moderated by Alvaro Porro (Barcelona City Council), and saw the participation of Susan Riley (Councilor of Melbourne), Þórdís Lóa Þórhallsdóttir (Deputy Mayor of Reykjavik), Matteo Lepore (Vice Mayor of Bologna), Saskia Bruines (Vice Mayor of The Hague), Im-Guk-hyun (Seoul City Council) and Gianfranco Todesco (Torino City Council). It represented a showcase of cities linked to the principles of the Declaration of the Sharing Cities, then discussed during the day through ad hoc working table and cities’ evidences.
The Declaration resulted from the previous summit in Amsterdam and NYC and represents a co-creation process with the cities prior to the summit (2 full round and 3 versions). It aims at being a framework to support actions of collaboration among cities and to build upon common strategies and a valuable resource to communicate cities’ common views. The principles are thus inspirational: the Declaration indeed is not legally binding, but represents a symbolic massage delivered globally about cities’ general approach towards platforms and the sharing economy. It is meant to ensure that platforms and other institutions take into consideration cities role and perspectives on these issues. The 10 principles propose an action plan and a coordination strategy among cities in order to gain negotiation power in the relationship with digital platforms and to address a joint action on national and supranational decision and regulation levels. Below are the 10 principles (the Declaration can be read here)
- Platform models differentiation: distinguish between the different models of digital platforms regarding their functioning and impacts, in order to design public policies according to these differentiations.
- Labour: empower people to have opportunities to earn or increase their income through new work, agreements and adapted fiscality without contributing to social precariousness or constituting an administrative burden
- Labour: provide fair working conditions and access to benefits and rights for workers
- Inclusion: prevent discrimination and bias by supporting fair and equal access to work for people of all incomes, genders and backgrounds
- Public protection: ensure and support health, safety and security standards along with effective institutional mechanism in order to protect them.
- Environmental sustainability: promote sustainable practices less oriented on the marketization and commodification of goods than on shared, to share within the framework of a circular economy, to foster and promote development of these activities in order to reduce emissions and waste.
- Data sovereignty and citizens’ digital rights: protect citizens’ digital rights through the implementation of Technological Sovereignty policies and ethical standards
- City sovereignty: guarantee respect for the legal jurisdictions of cities given the potential disruption from the digital platforms, create a coordination mechanism and tools to support cities and encourage changes in regulatory and framework policies.
- Economic promotion: promote the development of local collaborative economic ecosystem, and particularly small and medium enterprises (SME, based on positive impact in cities (as described in the first principles), through entrepreneurship support programs, participative tools , funding or other promotion tools.
- General interest: preserve the Right to the City and Urban Commons, strengthen communities, protect General Interest, public space, and basic human rights, such as access to affordable and adequate housing.
As we can see, the declaration introduces a series of “conditions” that promote the successful collaboration between city governments and platforms and touches different aspects: respect for workers’ rights, competition (especially with regard to SME), environment, current legislation, provision of services that do not discriminate by gender, age, nationality, collaboration and sharing with local authorities, fair and correct use of collected data, up to the recognition of the sovereignty of the city governments and their right/duty to preserve the common goods, the general interest, the public spaces, services and sustainable accommodation for the communities of reference.
The action plan linked to the declaration consists of an action task force and structure to support the continuation for communications and collaborations between cities after the summit and until the following summit in 2019. It is a plan of concrete actions to favor the preservation of the Principles by cities, kept flexible to be further developed through the cities suggestions, active in terms of common strategies to be proposed to the European Commission to face the platforms challenges, and technological in order to share information among cities through a public platform inspired by the principles of the Open Innovation. This last aspect becomes extremely important since it is related to the power distribution between public and private sectors: the current sovereignty of the elective institutions is indeed linked to the ability/possibility to own and manage the huge amount of data – coming from citizens that use digital supports -, for public goals.
A special focus was devoted to the 8th and 9th principles. For the former, some cities intervened sharing their own experiences: Klemes Himpele of the Vienna City Council, a representative of the Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Udo Kock for the city of Amsterdam and Tracey Cook from the Toronto City Council. The principle was further analyzed and developed through six working tables:
- EU lobby vocation rental
- Data sovereignty and citizens’ digital rights
- Labour platforms and impact on labour
- Criteria to differentiate platforms
- Collaborative public services: partnership with platforms
- Government structure and sharing/platform economy
The latter principle was introduced by the speeches of Cristina Tajani, Deputy Mayor of Milan, Hidetoshi Terasaki, Vice Mayor of Kobe, and by Mariana Sampaio, Deputy Secretary of São Paulo. It was further discussed in seven working tables:
- Entrepreneurship programs and internationalization programs
- City challenges and innovative promotion policies
- Collaborative policy design and city labs
- Social inclusion
- Platform cooperativism
- European project
- Nehotiation standards and collaborations among cities in the global task force
The activities closed with a follow up from the working groups and with a speech of Pieter van de Glind and Harmen van Sprang of the Sharing City Alliance about the state of the art of the alliance, about the new monthly journal they created and the database Alex (Alliance Lex) that gathers information about social innovation and sharing economy.
The day ended with the “Procomuns meetup”, a public event on collaborative policies for the collaborative economy, open to everyone, with institutional presentations and processes of co-creation of policies and ecosystem networking. In particular it saw the institutional welcomings of Alvaro Porro who presents Innova from Barcelona Activa, Joseph Planell, Rector of the UOC, Udo Kock from Amsterdam and Sonam Velani from NYC. Then Mayo Fuster from Dimmons moderated the last session of interventions: Professor Juliet Schor from the Boston College deepened the topic of the challenges posed by the platform economy questioning if the sharing economy is disrupting of reproducing inequalities presenting the results of her research team (MacArthur); the entrepreneurship program of Communicadora was also presented with some inspirational cases (Moodle, Wikiloc, Som Mobilitat).
The first day was full of inspiration and great moments of networking and led to the opening of the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC 2018) the next day. This edition gathered more than 700 cities and 21.000 participants and ShareBarcelona promoted the continuation of the Sharing City Summit during the three-days manifestation. In particular, November 13 saw the public presentation of the Sharing City Declaration with mayors and vice mayors attending the Summit, an opportunity to institutionalize the declaration and to stress how the declaration is just a first important step in a common path. As said by Mayo Fuster “today is the start of a new journey”. The SCEWC saw for the first time a specific program on Sharing and Inclusive Cities that hosted several interventions and speeches from cities from all over the world, while the sharing city stand (ShareBarcelona) worked as an agora offering a rich program of encounters and talks, with the main actors of the sharing ecosystem (companies, foundations, researchers, entrepreneurs, civic society…). On November 14 was also presented the book: “Sharing Cities. A worldwide cities overview on platform economy policies with a focus on Barcelona”, edited by Mayo Fuster from the Dimmons Research Group; the book provides an overview of current policy reactions and public innovation by cities in the field, a quality balance of platforms to differentiate models and a focus on Barcelona as a reference model for its vibrant ecosystem and its innovative policies.
In the last three years the number of cities reflecting and also acting to manage and integrate the sharing economy in the daily life of their citizens has incredibly grown and today a network is committed to start a common path to face the presence of the phenomenon in the urban contexts. Let’s see what will happen. Meanwhile, congratulations to all the cities that took part in this new international process.
For a video summary have a look here: youtu.be/J-g_l0Fx-58