How can we amplify cities as platforms for sharing?
Background:
Car sharing can replace up to 13 owned cars with one shared car. 50% of people join car sharing to get access to a car. And for every car taken off the road, a city can keep around $10,000 in the local economy annually. That means that Seattle could keep $1 billion in the local economy annually for every 100,000 cars taken off the road. Now imagine an entire urban economy powered by sharing.
The stats behind car sharing reveal sharing’s power to transform, to address multiple problems at once, and address the most urgent ones to boot. What other single strategy has the potential to dramatically reduce resource consumption, broaden access to resources, and strengthen the local economy? Sharing is so promising because it acts at the root causes of a systemic challenge.
Session:
To realize this potential, a new movement for sharing cities is on the rise. Seoul, Milan, London, Bologna, Amsterdam and other cities have sharing cities programs in place. In this session, Neal Gorenflo will first present a sample of these programs along with his favorite urban sharing case studies from his experience publishing about sharing in cities over the last seven years at Shareable.net. For the remaining time, with the help of participants, he will facilitate a world cafe discussion where discussants will explore solutions for sharing political power, space, and all kinds of assets in cities.
