Governance Models for Sharing Cities: Seoul and Milan. When Cities Enter in Sharing Mode!

The paper offer a first reflection about the governance models applied in two cities that are trying to support the sharing economy in reply to common urban problems like urbanization, pollution, social inequality, isolation. Thanks to the massive diffusion of the information and communication technologies people are always connected and interact in a peer-to-peer way. The Internet of Things and billions of sensors that connect people, objects and data, allow using what they need for the time that they need, reducing the waste of resources. In this context have emerged new, resilient and adaptive answers almost inconceivable few years ago: practices more open, transparent and participatory based on sharing and collaboration; new service models that enable people to exchange and share goods, space and skills, promoting lifestyles based on saving, redistribution of money and socialization. The practices are many and varied: from share workplaces (co-working), sharing mobility (car and bike sharing, carpooling), shared hospitality (couchsurfing, housing swap…) to co-housing and welfare services (like Social Street), from co-designing, co-production (makerspaces, FabLab), shared urban gardens, to the finance sector (peer-to-peer lending, alternative currencies, collaborative insurance, crowdfunding ...), and the education (collaborative learning, open courses...). Practices are so many that is difficult find a common, univocal definition (Botsman, 2013), in addition many limitations and distortions of the original concept of sharing generated doubts about the nature, the perspectives and the impacts of the sharing economy itself. Citizens wonder about the concrete usefulness of these practices, big companies are uncertain about the real hidden opportunities and governments seem perplexed among regulation, promotion and prohibition. The level of the Public Administration is the focus of the paper, considering that PA represents a key player of the system, able to regulate, guide and transform into reality the ideas of collaborative initiatives and to define innovative strategies for the local development. PA can be an enabling actor, a platform, to promote the potential of the collaborative services, spread awareness among citizens and regulate without suffocate the phenomenon. Luckily, PA are more and more interesting in the topic (as demonstrated during the last FORUM PA and in general in the current debate): reflections, experimentations, new tools created ad hoc for public authorities are spreading. This paper provides a glimpse of what are doing two cities, different and distant, but both interested in supporting services and platforms of sharing for the benefit of their citizens: Milan and Seoul. These cities adopted two different approaches, almost opposed: in Milan the reflection has emerged spontaneously from the bottom and has found in the public administration an attentive listener and then a clear supporter; in Seoul the initial push came from the Mayor, Park Won-Soon, who has launched a wave of innovation that is generating a real ecosystem of sharing. The research was conducted adopting the approach of participant observation (especially for the Italian case), monitoring the development of the public discussion and taking part in panels, round table, public meetings, local initiatives, as well as deepening the institutional, popular and scientific materials. In addition, the key players of ‘Milan Sharing City’ and ‘Sharing City Seoul’ has been interviewed in order to retrace the origin of the process, its general framework, current outcomes and future possibilities. The goal is understand the features of the governance models adopted and in what extent we can talk of Collaborative Governance in Iaione words (LUISS “Guido Carli” – LabGov)