Sharing Cities. Governance Models and Collaborative Practices in the Urban Contexts

The dissertation describes and investigates the collaborative practices and the governance model adopted by cities that choose the sharing and collaborative economy as frontier of experimentation to try to solve some of the main urban challenges in economic, environmental and social terms. The widespread dissemination of ICTs, among the other effects, is generating solutions more open, transparent and participatory, based on sharing and collaboration and voted to savings, money redistribution and socialization. More and more cities are wondering about the potential of the emerging new service models, reflecting on their organizational and cultural weight and on how to integrate them into existing regulatory frameworks without limit or stifle their development. The work starts from an in-depth analysis of the concept of sharing economy, given its innovative nature that makes difficult to find a clearly, established and shared definition. The research highlights its benefits, potentialities, weaknesses and limits trying to offer a better understanding of the phenomenon and an overview of its intrinsic features, what, who and how to share in the city. The second part is dedicated to the analysis of the city context that is better able to embrace this type of alternative economy. The focus is on the smart and slow nature of the so-called sharing cities, on its governance model and on the role of the public administrations, extensively discussed. The third part presents two cases of cities that in a well-shaped way are supporting sharing economy services and platforms and are promoting themselves as sharing cities: Milan in Italy and Seoul in South Korea. These cities adopted two different approaches: in Milan the reflection has emerged spontaneously from the bottom and has found in the public administration an attentive listener and a strong supporter; in Seoul the initial push came from the Mayor and his administration, that launched a wave of innovation that is generating a real ecosystem of sharing. Even if the city are different for culture, features and dimensions, the same rhetoric, labels, epistemic communities and strategies can be detected. The research was conducted adopting specific methodological tools: the analysis of the institutional and scientific materials and of other sources on the topic; the adoption of the participant observation’s approach in the study contexts; the administration of a questionnaire and the tool of the semi-structure interview to the key players of ‘Milan Sharing City’ and ‘Sharing City Seoul’. All these elements allowed retracing the origin of the process, its general framework, current outcomes and future possibilities. The dissertation aims to reconstruct the phenomenon in its constituent factors, given its recent insurgence, the momentum that is gaining and the lack of a mature scientific reflection on the topic. The ICTs penetration, the civil society engagement, the openness of the government, together with the emphasis on social innovation and the growing attention for the social economy, seem to be key ingredients to build a collaborative and sharing city. Local solutions adopted in the two cases study show the importance of the above ingredients and the absence of a “one-fit-all” solution. Instead, it is possible to build customized solutions, starting from the key ingredients, because the phenomenon allows to renegotiate with the local communities alternative governance practices more suitable for the context, and overcome established practices but less efficient.