La multiculturalidad liberal frente a la diversidad del comunitarismo

Conducting situated conversations on the relationship between social practices and urban

futures: co-creating scenarios of sharing cities.

7.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter reflects on how VCUF can be used to understand the relationship between social practices and the urban environment when co-creating scenarios of possible futures for specific cities or neighbourhoods. It draws on part of a six-month project in which the Liveable Cities research team sought to understand what a “sharing city” is, and how to help city decision-makers, city leaders and citizens rethink how cities can grow and encourage sharing.

This project was the first of a series of thought-experiment conducted as part of Phase 2 of Liveable Cites (see 4.4.1). It was lead by the team at Lancaster University (Prof. Rachel Cooper, Prof. Nick Dunn, Dr. Christopher Boyko, Dr. Stephen Clune, Dr. Claire

Coulton, and myself), with significant contributions from other members of the

programme across the four universities. The theme of the project was chosen during the programme’s mid-term co-creation workshop, when 'sharing' was identified as one of the cross-cutting issues potentially involving all of the themes within the programme, and tightly linked to urban environments and urban lives.

The VCUF approach was adopted as part of the research strategy for the inquiry. Sharing and collaborating are activities that require the active participation of various actors and infrastructures to take place. For this reason, we engaged groups of citizens involved in sharing in Lancaster and Birmingham to discuss the current landscape and possible

futures of sharing in the city. Drawing on the reflections from DE#1, I developed the methodology that was adopted to conduct these participatory activities.

The following sections provide a necessary introduction to the “Sharing Cities” research theme (Section 7.2) and a detailed overview of the project, and will then discuss the role of VCUF.

7.2 FROM SHARING AND THE CITY TO THE SHARING CITY

The popularity of the sharing economy and collaborative practices of production and consumption have already been changing the way in which we design, deliver, and access services and products, and it is often at the centre of future-oriented conversations on urban living. For example, the Atlas of Future Imaginary Cities shows “sharing and collaborating”, “services and access”, and “spaces for communities” to be some of the most talked about issues in the conversations on possible futures conducted in the Future Visions Workshop series.

In the last few years, the rise of new models of collaborative economy (Botsman and Rogers 2011) inspired new interest in sharing. Much has been written, especially on popular media, on sharing economy models, in which companies provide platforms that allow individuals to share idle assets (Botsman 2013). However, the way sharing and collaborating as social practices relate to the urban environment and infrastructure has yet to be fully understood at the moment of writing the research plan.

Cities have been essential places of sharing for centuries. But what does it mean for a city to be a ‘sharing city’ in the age of the reinvention and revival of sharing (Mclaren and Agyeman 2015)?

While the Web (and Web 2.0 in particular) plays a central role in supported and popularising practices of sharing and collaborating (Botsman and Rogers 2011), most models of sharing have at their core physical interactions, and are enabled by a combination of platforms in the urban and digital space (Mclaren and Agyeman 2015; Agyeman, McLaren, and Schaefer-Borrego 2013).

Thisbecame particularly evident in recent years, when actors involved in city

governments and sharing economies started confronting each other over regulations often unable to deal with these new practices. These confrontations lead to disparate results (Mclaren and Agyeman 2015). In some cities (most notoriously San Francisco) negotiations were dominated by well-established sharing economy companies, lobbying for supportive policies. In other cases (like Seoul or Amsterdam), local administrations took proactive actions to rethink their cities as ‘sharing cities’. Elsewhere, efforts

focussed on promoting social inclusion by helping communities to thrive (e.g. Medellin) or by improving the shared use of urban commons (e.g. Copenhagen).

Beyond the sharing economy, the term ‘sharing city’ is also used by groups such as OuiShare and Shareable to define the landscape of grassroots collaborative initiatives that spread in cities around the world, such as food-groups, time-banks, tool libraries and so on. Formalised grassroots initiatives, new examples of the sharing economy, but also informal sharing in close knitted communities, urban commons and shared spaces and resources often coexist and affect each other.

As part of the Liveable Cities project, we proposed a “spectrum of sharing” as a conceptual tool do describe the sharing city to help us understand the dynamics and dimensions of sharing simultaneously at play in the city

Figure 37 A spectrum of sharing in the city

The spectrum captures models of sharing that occur with private property or collective property. Building on Belk’s description of sharing practices (2010), we distinguish informal practices of sharing in (i.e. within the family or a small group of close friends) and formal or informal practices of sharing out (with others that are not close friends or family members) as models of sharing private property (i.e. goods or resources that are privately owned by individuals or groups). Collective property is an additional dimension in the sharing spectrum that needs to be included in any mapping of the sharing city. Collective property refers to public goods (resources provided to citizens and managed by sovereign governments) and common goods (collectively owned resources shared through social practices) (Quilligan 2012).

This section provided a short summary of the complexity of actors and practices involved in the ‘sharing city’. It is because of this complexity that we decided to adopt the VCUF approach to help us exploring what the sharing city is and could be. More details on the theoretical framework that we adopted in the project to conceptualise the sharing cities are included in two journal articles (“Dialogues and Visualisations; Co-designing scenarios of sharing cities” (Pollastri et al. 2017) and “How

“Little Book of Sharing” (C. Boyko et al. 2016) a publication created for a non-academic audience.

7.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

As a whole, the Sharing Cities project was guided by two research questions:

• What could a sharing city look like and how does it function? What are the practices, actors, and dimensions of sharing at play? (Proj1)

• What needs to be done to develop and encourage sharing while improving liveability (defined as enhanced wellbeing, lower carbon use and greater resource security)? What are the barriers to creating and maintaining such a sharing city? (Proj2)

The activities conducted as part of the study included:

• a review of literature on sharing and international examples of sharing in cities;

• a series of interdisciplinary workshops in which researchers and expert panellists reflected on the implications of sharing through the Liveable Cities research lenses;

• the development of a dynamic typology as a research and design tool, to support the analysis of existing models of sharing and guide future interventions;

• the development and prototyping of participatory methods for the mapping and co-designing of local scenarios of sharing cities.

For the purpose of this study, I will focus in this chapter on the last activity, and explore how processes and artefacts Visual Conversations on Urban Futures can help supporting

and documenting democratic localised dialogues (Huybrechts et al. 2016) on sharing cities. This means understanding:

• How to design processes and artefacts that help us explore possible futures of sharing cities? (this relates to RQ1 and RQ2)

• What is the value of VCUF in this context? (RQ4)

When discussing the artefacts produced to visualise the outcomes of the workshop, I will provide a short description of the content. However, a full account of the findings of the project is beyond the scope of this dissertation. These are better described in a

forthcoming journal article this chapter draws from (Pollastri et al. 2017), in the “Little Book of Sharing” (C. Boyko et al. 2016), and in the report that can be accessed from the Liveable Cities website (http://liveablecities.org.uk/outcomes/sharing-city-workshop- report).

7.4 METHODOLOGY: MAPPING THE PRESENT AND ENVISIONING FUTURE

As briefly mentioned in the introduction to this section, sharing and collaborating are dynamic activities, the success of which largely depends on the participation of actors directly or indirectly involved. These actors are “local experts” with practical and empirical knowledge on the experiential aspects of sharing in the urban environment. For this reason, after a phase of literature review and discussion with Liveable Cities research teams (that looked at the “Sharing City” through the programme’s lenses22_{), we}

decided to explore the local landscape of sharing and collaborating and speculate on

22 _{During the three months dedicated to the thought experiment, each team produced a document that related the “sharing cities” to energy,} ecosystems, urban flows, mobilities, and governance, respectively.

possible futures through scenario-making workshops with “local experts”. These scenarios are an example of VCUF, as they allow heterogeneous communities to articulate multiple ideas. Unlike the imaginary cities collected in the Atlas, they are a ‘situated practice of future-making’, in which multiple futures are discussed locally (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012; Ehn, Nilsson, and Topgaard 2014).

In summary, in the sharing cities workshops, I designed spaces and infrastructures for conducting democratic dialogues23 _{(Huybrechts et al. 2016) to:}

• map the current landscape of sharing (making sharing visible and tangible);

• create and discuss future visions of sharing cities (building scenarios of possible futures)

Visual methods (as part of the VCUF approach) were used:

• During the workshops, in processes of mapping and visioning, to

facilitate and document conversations bringing together diverse groups of stakeholders;

• In the outcomes, to describe and map project ideas, themes, and semantic and relational networks.

23 _{The term “Democratic Dialogues” has been recently used by Huybrechts et al. (2016) to define the broad range of dialogues that} participatory designers engage in. According to Huybrechts and colleagues, types of Democratic Dialogues incude: Strategic Dialogues, (ii) Committing Dialogues, (iii) Questioning Dialogues, (iv) Agonistic Dialogues and (v) Expressing Dialogues. The type of dialogues conducted in this project aligns with the model of “Agonistic Dialogues”, “visually confronting different positions and stories on the issue at stake” (Huybrechts et al. 2016, 108; drawing on DiSalvo 2010)

7.5 PROCESS

As we gathered to discuss how to design the methods to adopt in the workshop, we reflected on what we learnt during the design and prototyping sessions and when running the Future Visions workshops, in particular with regard to the design of scenario-making activities.

Similarly to the Future Vision workshop, we wanted to enable participants to create and explore possible scenarios, potentially bending the range of possible futures beyond what we (as research team) could expect. Once again, an important challenge consisted in designing a set of generative tools (E. B.-N. Sanders 2000) to be used by participants to explore divergent ideas, rather than to structure the conversation.

Unlike the previously organised activities, the Sharing Cities workshops were to include moments of mapping and discussing the landscape of existing collaborative practices. The tools that I designed to support the activities in this phase of the workshop were a combination of mostly prescriptive tools (for the mapping of the landscape, to allow us later on to build an accurate map from which to derive a typology) and less-prescriptive tools (to be used by participants when discussing their experiences).

7.5.1 Workshop structure

We conducted two workshops, which adopted the same methods. Each workshop was divided into six activities across two sections:

1. Mapping the sharing city. In this section, which took approximately 1.5 hours, participants mapped and outlined current, local initiatives of sharing, thus making sharing visible and tangible. The activities included:

a. Building the map of sharing. Participants were given one hexagonal card and a form, and asked to write an example of sharing in which they partake. The card would have only the example whereas the form would include more details (e.g., who shares, what is being shared, and why). The card would be added to a wall that already contained different categories of sharing (e.g., sharing food, sharing things).

b. Participants were asked to connect their card to the category that best reflected their example of sharing. This revealed a local ‘map of sharing’ (Figure 38).

c. Learning more about sharing. A facilitator introduced the Liveable Cities project to provide some context, and delivered a short presentation on sharing in cities.

d. Understanding the map. In groups of 4 to 7 people, participants took turns to describe their examples of sharing to each other, using the forms they received at the start of the event as a canvas. One or two members of the Liveable Cities team were seated at each table to encourage listening and discussion, and took notes of what participants said.

e. Finding the links. Once all participants shared their examples at their tables, team members asked a series of questions to the group about making connections. Specifically, the team probed for existing, missing and potential connections between groups and sharing examples.