Degrowth 2014 - ShareEconomy, P2P, Transition Town - What do they share?
We are looking at what these models and projects share in common and what is different between them and why.
Astrid Lorenzen from Hamburg FabLab.
One project created a lab in a public park where people could create their own mobile phones, it was a popular project and demonstrated that people have an interest in knowing what goes into what they own. It appealed to a broad audience in Hamburg and was widely reported upon.
XYZ Bike that people can create and assemble themselves.
The Fab Lab is encouraging people to make their own 3d printers instead of buying them, so that people understand how they work and what they do.
Benjamin Tincq from OuiShare
The Share economy is an appealing concept that can be found across the media though the different terms can be confusing, i.e. Collaborative Consumption, Share Economy, Crowd Funding etc. They allow for transactions between individuals which is attractive to many. Other less well known ideas are ’
The new space for the sharing economy to investigate is collaborative production, moving beyond collaborative consumption, for example The People’s Supermarket.
Bike sharing schemes, Co-Working spaces all help reduce travel impacts on the environment. Also the WikiSpeed open source car that aims to be as efficient as possible through agile production methods.
Tony Greenham from the New Economics Foundation and Transition Network
Trying to summarise the Transition network is hard as everywhere is different and that’s a good thing. It’s a bottom up approach that doesn’t follow any particular template and can appear quite ad-hoc to outside observers. Its main focus is on relocalising economies, encouraging enterprise and regaining control over local communities. One of the successes of Transition movement in Totnes is that it is playful, celebratory and doesn’t take itself too seriously, i.e., creating a 21 Totnes pound note.
Many of the Transition projects start with food and go from there, it’s an obvious first step that people can identify with, food sharing, farmers markets , etc.
A great transport example is one from Bristol in the UK where old bike parts are refurbished into new bikes. Workers are from poorer backgrounds who learn new skills and gain experience. This then spreads bike usage and all the positive affects of that.
Brixton energy is a scheme that has been installing communal solar panels onto social housing that can be cheap enough for many to buy into, even if it’s a small amount.
P2P, B2B, B2C, are they united?
They all share mutualise resources between individuals (or collections of individuals in the case of businesses). These resources may be tangible or intangible. These may cross over, for example Businesses sharing resources to then share with consumers.
General Questions / Answers
There needs to be more time allowed and research to see what potential these various projects can accomplish. One particular point of interest is into how some could be owned by their users, i.e. through crowd funding you own a share of the start-up, or Equity crowd-funding.
Many of these projects (especially the more commercial ones) need to be careful of becoming to capitalistically motivated or swayed / influenced by capitalist funders or other ‘negative’ outside parties. An alternative to funding to keep a project sustained is users contributing back their time, for maintenance for example.
Discussions on land use and ownership come up a lot in the sharing economy, especially transition towns. However, no one has got any concrete policies or frameworks for this quite yet, there are a few existing alternative financial models for land tax around the globe.