In our cities, a plethora of sharing and collaborative activities emerge and flourish. Since they are most prominent in urban areas, where the concentration of people and resources in close geographical proximity offers favourable conditions for growth, we refer to these activities as urban sharing organisations. They are designed in different ways and vary in terms of size (from global short-term rental platforms to local clothes libraries), market orientation (from for-profit car-sharing companies to non-profit tool pools) and organisational form (from municipal bicycle sharing schemes to umbrella sharing businesses to community-based toy libraries). All these initiatives are transforming urban production and consumption systems in both positive and negative ways as they bring along economic, social and environmental impacts. The ways in which urban sharing organisations are understood, accepted and used by citizens, policymakers, municipalities and other urban actors, in turn, define their geographical spread, size and scale, and their consideration in municipal strategies, agendas and regulations.

Research programme Urban Sharing at Lund University, Sweden, funded by European Research Council (Grant Agreement # 771872) and led by Prof. Oksana Mont, explores the design, sustainability of practices and institutionalisation pathways of urban sharing organisations across five cities: Amsterdam, Melbourne, Seoul, Shanghai and Toronto. The programme spans over five years, and on September 1, 2020, we celebrated two years since its inception. With this blog, and on behalf of the Urban Sharing team, I would like to introduce the readers of Shareable to a few of our recent research outputs. We hope that these will be of use to a variety of audiences including urban sharing organisations, sharing advocacy groups, municipal governments, scientists working on the topics of sharing and circular economy, users of the sharing economy and other people interested in the subject.

Read the full article about urban sharing by Yuliya Voytenko Palgan at Shareable.