Are Shared Economies Exploiting Our Cities?
We spent the last few seminars talking about great ideas in Tech And The City, and the relationship of technological advancement with urbanism. Our group discussed the implications of Autonomous Vehicles, Emergent Technologies and how we see ‘Urban Design’, and Big Data’s impact on cities’ socioeconomic challenges. Perhaps a common thread tying all these ideas together is the phenomenon of shared economy — the millennial-driven economic model that relies on sharing resources to maximize efficiency, summarized in a one-liner.
As for every topic I have spoken about in my reflections, this one is no exception in its growth. Shared economy is organically growing, adapting to demand, re-adjusting, and re-prioritizing target customers. My very passionate colleague (the same one I mentioned in my earlier reflection) even argued shared economies today are, in essence, a continuation of capitalism by dominating the market, and is a series of conflicting forces. I find that a compelling idea, but I am not sure how far one can push it through.
I did understand, however, that this is a scenario of exploiting the city. To put it simply, cities provide the platform for the business model of sharing economy to thrive — these businesses rely primarily on a platform where there is dense (and free) accumulation of customer-base, labor-base, and the infrastructural means for them to function — they provide the ideal foundations for the businesses to run.
Today, shared economy has gone ,naturally, through layers of complexity that would make it seem to have capitalist nature — the same one my colleague was arguing for. The businesses operate on revving up the concentration of capital through technology, they provide fewer barriers to entry to first users, and more for second users at the business model, as well as the platform. It is important to note that the strong difference, and perhaps what made services like Uber become so popular, is the market acquisition of first users, that almost has no barriers compared to the conventional economic business models.
Unlike Ricardo Jesus, our moderator for the seminar and a brilliant mind, I am skeptical on the ownership in a shared economy, especially in the long term. Ricardo bets his money on the notion of ownership being part of humans’ intrinsic nature, that it would continue to be present as the shared economy becomes dominant. I thought of shared economy in terms of cultural acceptance (and cultural evolution) where our values of possession change, we can think of the ‘American Dream’ — perhaps one of the strongest American cultural forces that affect city morphology — today, the response to getting education is shifting from achieving that dream of material gains towards building experiences, travel, and developing familial relationships.
Right now, cities are playing catch-up with shared economies by following up with regulations. I was most intrigued by the question of “where the shared economy is going in terms of production”. We have only known shared economy in terms of consumption, but labor today is shifting from long-term contracts to temporary subcontractors. Would ‘shared economy’ offer a lighter model of subcontractors, and be a strong force in the production of the city? More importantly, would one think sharing economies a fair and equitable system?
To answer this question, we would have to address the primary element that makes these models function in the first place: the data. Privatization (and in some cases free distribution) of data poses many problems, as we have discussed in a previous seminar. To assume we are being equitable by providing data freely to users is preposterous, as that has the tendency to widen the gap of gentrification. More people have smartphones, but few who I call the ‘technological elite’ know how to use, manipulate, design, and monetize this data, and in the process, one can see there would be many problems that already have proved concerning in Harvey’s criticism of Informal Markets’ emergence in cities.
