The City as a Commons: The Collaborative/Sharing Economy as a Basis for a Commons-based economy

The city council of Sao Paulo, South America’s largest metropolis, voted to ban the U.S.-based Uber ride-sharing service late Tuesday. City lawmakers decided 48-1 in favour of banning application-based private car services such as Uber in a preliminary vote[1].

But What are the lessons and forms of innovation that we can learn from this literature and this movement in managing the urban commons? Some possibilities are the regeneration of common spaces in cities for co-working and co-manufacturing, forms of cooperative ownership models such as community land trusts and real estate investment cooperatives, and the conscious emergence of a collaborative class in cities which transforms the economic relations between urban inhabitants. Is the collaborative/sharing economy the way to a commons-based urban economy? These, are the open questions on which we should think about.

The first IASC Conference, named “The City as a Commons: Reconceiving Urban Space, Common Goods And City Governance” is coming! LabGov organizes it in collaboration with Fordham University of New York and the ICEDD of the LUISS University of Rome. The Conference will take place in Bologna on 6-7 November 2015. The conference will be co-chaired by the LabGov’s coordinator Professor Christian Iaione (UniMarconi University and LUISS Guido Carli) and by Prof. Sheila Foster (Fordham University) both pioneer scholars in conceiving the urban commons.

The Conference aim to analyses the phenomenon of urban commons in a comprehensive way, dividing the two day work in 6 Tracks. One of the them is devoted to the Collaborative/ Sharing Economy as the basis for a commons-based urban economy. . The emerging sharing or collaborative economy, across all sectors of society, suggests strong, more democratic and horizontal alternatives to producing, distributing and managing a host of private and public goods across society. Professors, scholars, experts are invited to submit a paper for contributing to the ongoing debate on the sharing economy. The Conference want to investigate on what are the lessons and the forms of innovation that it is possible to learn from the literature on the collaborative economy and from the experiences of the movement active all around the world.

Recently, Shareable published an interview about the IASC Conference, in which Professor Christian Iaione explicated “The urban commons discipline actually comprises several fields of studies (city governance and local democracy, urban design and economics, urban sociology and geography, service design, land use and comparative law, just to name a few) but remains still understudied by scholars and it is often an unfamiliar terrain for both local institutions and citizens. Therefore, the primary focus of the IASC conference is to expand and explore this new frontier of a collaborative governance for the urban commons movement.”

More info on: http://www.labgov.it/wordpress/urbancommons/

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/01/us-uber-brazil-idUSKCN0PB4N720150701

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