Sharing Mobilities

Questioning Our Right to the City in the Collaborative Economy

Davide Arcidiacono, Mike Duggan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429574849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

This book examines contemporary urban sharing mobilities, such as shared and public forms of everyday urban mobility. Tracing the social and economic history of sharing mobilities and examining contemporary case studies of mobility sharing services, such as Car2go, BlaBlaCar, and Uber, the authors raise questions about what these changes mean for access to and engagement with the public spaces of transport in the city. Drawing on the thought of Lefebvre, the book considers how contemporary sharing mobilities are affecting people's 'right to the city', with particular attention paid to the privatised, frictionless practices of movement through the city. In addition, the authors ask what has happened to earlier forms of shared mobility and illustrate how some of these practices continue successfully today. Considering the potential that modern incarnations of shared mobilities offer to urban citizens for engaging in meaningful shared mobilities that are not simply determined by the interfaces of technology and market forces, this book will appeal to sociologists and geographers with interests in mobility and urban studies.

1 Welcome to the age of sharing

The rise of the sharing economy

Since The Economist signalled the rise of the sharing economy on its cover in 2013, the notoriety of this reportedly novel form of collaborative economy has increased exponentially. Today, the term “sharing economy” is widely known by the ways that it has redefined how we consume goods and services, and for many it is now simply a part of everyday life for facilitating a broad range of daily practices.

When we talk about the sharing economy, we tend to speak broadly about a new socio-economic model based on collaboration, access, use of idling capacities, and the socialisation of value production facilitated by digital technologies (Botsman and Rogers, 2010; Rifkin, 2014). Nevertheless, as Juliet Schor (2014) warns us, the semantic ambiguity behind the concept of sharing is problematic. She suggests that this umbrella concept covers a sprawling variety of digital platforms and off-line activities, including those facilitated by multinational companies, such as Airbnb, Uber, and Deliveroo, as well as those facilitated by small, local, and informal initiatives of repair and collective exchange such as tool libraries, book clubs, and rail ticket-sharing collectives.

The academic and non-academic debates seem stuck in the so-called “share wars”,¹ where efforts are made to separate the “good” sharing economy from the “bad” sharing economy. On the one hand, the sharing economy has been hailed as the future of business and society, praised for its possibility to usher in new forms of life and work (Rifkin, 2014). On the other hand, its ability to blur the lines between life and work, create precarious working conditions, and propel an always-on(line) prosumer lifestyle has called for some to label it as disruptive and damaging to society (Edelman and Luca, 2014; Reich, 2015; Schor and Fitzmaurice, 2015).

The European Commission of the EU offers a useful taxonomy for understanding the spectrum of different ways that the sharing economy has recently been conceptualised.² It identifies four ways to distinguish the practices that constitute this economic paradigm:

• The access economy: an economic model involving the exchange of goods and services based on access rather than property.
• The “gig” economy: an economic model based on single or multiple tasks (gigs) activated on request via online platforms or apps.³
• The collaborative economy: an economic model in which customers also become producers and form communities.
• The pooling economy: an economic model based on proprietary initiatives or collective management over how transactions take place.

Building on this, The Digital Commons Research Group at the Open University of Catalonia has created a framework that is useful for identifying the differences between what it sees as democratic (or “good”) sharing economy platforms and capital-based (or “bad”) sharing economy platforms (Fuster Morell and Espelt, 2018). It suggests that democratic platforms operate on the following four principles, which act to separate them from capitalist platforms:

• Governance: there is community involvement in decision-making processes.
• Economy: profitability is not the primary objective. Instead, the project must be sustained through ethical financing, value redistribution, economic transparency, fair payment criteria, and respect for workers’ rights.
• Social responsibility: the platform promotes the reduction of environmental impact, the inclusion of socially disadvantaged groups, and inclusive gender/race policies.
• Knowledge and technology: the platform is developed using free/open-source software and distributed technological architecture; algorithms, programmes, and data are transparent; personal data is protected, and all users have a right to the portability of their data.

Running parallel to the debates on its definition and the necessity to distinguish the different forms that the sharing economy takes, other analysis shows the rapid growth of the phenomenon worldwide. According to one regularly cited report by PwC (2015), the European market was expected to be worth 83 billion euros in 2018 and 570 billion euros by 2025. Nevertheless, the levels of participation in the sharing economy are not accurately known, with estimates varying significantly. Andreotti et al. (2017), for example, found that only 18.7% of EU citizens reported having consumed a sharing service. Other studies showed more optimistic rates. For example, it has been estimated that there are 105 million people active in the sharing economy in the US, 14 million in Canada, and 23 million in the UK (Owyang, 2014; Owyang and Samuel, 2015). Studies by Nesta (2014) and the Observatorie de la Confiance (2014) have been some of the most optimistic, suggesting that 60% of people in Britain and almost 50% of people in France already participate in the collaborative economy, respectively. It is Asia however, where the most significant growth is predicted. A study by Nielsen (2013) found that 68% of the Asian-Pacific region were willing to share their assets in a sharing economy, which was contrasted with almost 50% of North Americans and Europeans. The study pointed to China as the country which is set to pioneer the growth of the sharing economy. It suggests that up to 94% of consumers can be expected to become part of the sharing economy in the future. Moreover, the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (2017) estimates that the sharing economy will grow by an average annual rate of 40% over the next few years. When we look at how far ahead China is in embracing the sharing economy, we can begin to see why these numbers are so high. The popularity of peer-to-peer fintech services such as Lufax; umbrella-sharing service, Molisan; and the power bank-sharing service, Shenzhen Laidian is all illustrative of the kinds of sharing economy services that are prospering in China, but not yet elsewhere. Added to this, we can also see the massive growth in ride- and bike-sharing services that we see all over the world.

The success of the sharing economy is based mainly on an organisational structure which we can call the platform model. This term does not refer simply to a technological infrastructure or a device, but to a new and pervasive economic paradigm that radically reconfigures the organisation of work and consumption in the service economy (Degryse, 2016; Kenney and Zysman, 2016; MIT, 2017). The platform represents a boundaryless organisation based on a core system that engages and coordinates diversified production systems and networks of human and non-human cooperators (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Although platforms distribute and intermediate work, goods, and services, many openly refute their labelling as producers and intermediaries, preferring instead the term of “enablers” to describe their role in facilitating exchanges or sharing between people. We might say that they act as “heterarchies” (Stark, 1996) or “möbius organizations” (Stark and Watkins, 2018) based on the co-optation of assets and resources without any fully formalised constraints. This follows the lean strategies and disruptive philosophies of businesses looking to generate surplus value from efficiency savings in the workforce by leveraging a greater reliance on networked technologies and the labour of consumers. The value of this new economic paradigm is in the enabling of idle capacities and assets, including them in the productive process in what has been defined as an industrious economy where consumers act as “prosumers” (Bruns, 2008; Toffler, 1980). Through this paradigm, the amateur skills of the prosumer become a crucial factor of competitiveness, leading some scholars to talk about the “professional amateur” (Leadbeater and Miller, 2014). In effect, this re-intermediates the relationship between supply and demand and redefines the traditional social and economic barriers of the market.

The platform model, argues Srnicek (2016), has created a new form of capitalism, platform capitalism, where the ultimate goal is profitability generated through the renting of products/services and from digital interactions where data can be extracted and monetised. Nevertheless, along the way the sharing economy has also become part of the strategy for so-called “lifestyle movements” (Haenfler et al., 2012) through which citizen-consumers (Arcidiacono, 2013) try to resist top-down control (De Certau, 1998) by re-embedding the possibilities of this economic model through a proactive and socially conscious use of digital technology (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012), relaunching also the idea of the cooperative platform governance as a viable alternative to platform capitalism (Scholz and Schneider, 2017). In the following chapters of this book, we will examine sharing mobility through the lens of platform capitalism but also through this latter lens of sharing cultures and lifestyles.

Sharing mobility

Sharing mobility, popularised through car and ridesharing services such as Uber, Didi, and BlaBlaCar, but also including micro-transit systems, docked and dockless bicycle-sharing schemes, and scooter services are amongst the most developed of the sharing economy services. Over the past decade, the sector has grown significantly according to international analysis (Owyang and Samuel, 2015). A study by Andreotti et al. (2017), for example, found that 18.2% of consumers in Europe are now users of shared mobility services, which when compared to those using food-sharing (7%) or goods-sharing (7.9%) services represents a significant market.⁴

Following the Observatorio Nazionale Sharing Mobility in Italy (ONSM, 2016: 5), we can define sharing mobility as a socio-economic phenomenon that has affected both the practices of mobility and the consumer attitudes towards mobility. In short, the ONSM characterises sharing mobility as follows:

• The affirmation and diffusion of an extensive and varied number of transport services using digital technologies to facilitate the sharing of vehicles and journeys.
• The ability to create flexible, scalable, and original mobility services.
• The ability to enable interactivity between users/operators and/or collaboration to maximise the use of underutilised mobility assets.

Within the sector today, we can find many types of services; from those that offer different vehicle choices (whether car, scooter, bicycle, or bus), to those that offer different configurations of exchange (e.g. peer-to-peer and on demand), to those that offer alternative types of relationship with customers (e.g. individual or community-based interactions), and those that adopt various business models (e.g. per-trip pricing, hourly rental rate, percentage commissions, etc.). As we will demonstrate in this book, the size and variety of sharing mobility services makes it one of the most fertile test-beds for the sharing economy to experiment in regulation, innovation, and technology (Berger et al., 2014).

Moreover, we might also add that sharing mobility consists of a general behavioural transformation in individuals who tend to favour temporary access to mobility services rather than using their own means of transport. This is a narrative that has been picked up by advocates of sharing mobility as a way to promote these services as technological transport solutions for those that want to reduce their environmental impact. Indeed, sharing mobility has been especially popular amongst those that favour the idea of a smart, sustainable city, where the focus has been on prosocial inclusiveness and environmental sustainability. However, the social and environmental impact of these practices belongs very much to the storytelling that has supported their development. Much research has questioned the virtuous link between the collaborative economy and its environmental and social sustainability, suggesting that it is a form of green- or share-washing (Heinrichs, 2013). This is to say that positive attitudes towards sharing in this context are said to distract us from the mostly technologically deterministic and capitalist ways that many of these services operate.

Despite the recent enthusiasm for sharing mobility facilitated by digital technology, this phenomenon has a long-rooted history in many countries, where it has been a practice of informal social networks between families, neighbours, colleagues, friends, and strangers. For example, slugging, which represents early forms of informal ridesharing, became part of urban mobility policies in the 1970s, particularly in US cities such as Washington, Houston, and San Francisco and on the Interstates 95, 66, and 395 between Washington and Northern Virginia. During the 1980s and the 1990s, these practices grew further thanks to the diffusion and evolution of highway technologies and carpooling policies. Nevertheless, the successes of these initiatives were limited by the difficulty in matching itineraries and timetables between commuters (Furuhata et al., 2013). In recent years, with the evolution of communication technologies and especially the diffusion of mobile geo-locatable devices, these difficulties have been largely overcome from a technical perspective. Most notably, they have improved user experience and ultimately ushered in dynamic carpooling and e-hailing to replace casual carpooling and informal vehicle renting.

Mobility as a Service

The recent rise of sharing mobility is also linked to the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), which represents something of a paradigm shift away from the dichotomous concepts of public and private transport. Although there is yet to be a shared universal definition, Kamargianni and Matyas define MaaS as “a user-centric, intelligent mobility distribution model in which all mobility service providers’ offerings are aggregated by a sole mobility provider, the MaaS provider, and supplied to users through a single digital platform” (2017: 4). Under this premise, the fragmented mobilities and citizen behaviours of everyday mobility are intended to be unified by a single multimodal service. The MaaS concept aims to overcome these critical elements by reinterpreting the relationship between transport operators, means available and their potential users, sharing of information and access infrastructures, guaranteeing the ideal combination of transport modes, and optimising supply and demand matching.

The promise is that MaaS represents a new ecosystem for mobility that integrates transport operators and providers, data providers, platforms and technology providers, ICT infrastructures, insurance companies, regulatory organisations, and research institutions. In 2015, The MaaS Alliance was born in Bordeaux, from a public-private partnership involving the Intelligent Transport Society of America and Europe (ITS), with the aim of developing and implementing this paradigm in Europe. Since then, the first experiences of MaaS have been developing in Scandinavia, where ICT-led innovations in environmental sustainability have generally been better supported. In Finland, MaaS Global aims to develop MaaS around the world through the app, Whim. Already active in Helsinki, Whim offers three types of subscription: monthly passes giving unlimited usage of all public transport, taxis, and car- and bike-sharing services; 30 days prepaid passes with full access to public transport and limited access to private sharing mobility services; and pay-as-you-go style passes. Other MaaS initiatives that allow similar integrated access to public/private travel services include UbiGo in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Go in Denver, US.

These experiments show how MaaS is also an experiment in novel forms of mobility management strategy, which are designed to appeal to the dynamism of urban mobility practices. MaaS recognises the diversity of mobility practices and understands that transport solutions are not universal, but instead should take a networked approach that accounts for the specific needs of different citizens, at different spatial and temporal scales. For this reason, the concept of MaaS directly relates to contemporary sharing mobility, which is interested in using networked technologies to find dynamic multimodal solutions to the issues of transport. This is also the reason why sharing mobility services have become an integral part of the MaaS concept and a key area for policymakers and mobility providers interested in MaaS to focus on.

Nevertheless, whilst MaaS has been designed with public mobility goals in mind, large parts of the sharing mobility sector have become key to the development of platform capitalism over the past decade (Srnicek, 2016), where the primary goals of acquiring users, generating revenues, and (eventually) profit are different. Using Srnicek’s taxonomy of digital platforms, we can see that many of today’s sharing mobility services fall into two categories – product platforms and lean platforms. The former includes car-sharing services such as Zipcar and Drive Now and bike-/scooter-sharing services such as Ofo and Lime, where revenues and profits are generated by transforming products into services that can be rented. The latter includes ridesharing services such as Uber, Lyft, Ola, Didi,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Welcome to the age of sharing
• 2 The successes and failures of shared urban mobility
• 3 Sharing mobility, mobility justice, and the right to the city
• 4 Regulation, platform governance, and the labour practices of shared urban mobility
• 5 Empowering connections: relations, collaborations, and community in sharing mobility
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index