The sharing economy is most prevalent in cities, where people live close to each other and where most of the resources are. This thesis examines how the sharing economy becomes normalised in cities as a way for urban citizens to access resources. Since there are disagreements about its impacts on cities, the thesis also explores how municipalities and sharing organisations argue, using sustainability claims, about its development.
“When sharing organisations emerge on the market, they change the way people access resources. For example, there is no need to own a car and worry about insurance and maintenance when it can be easily rented with a sharing app. Conversely, a privately owned car sits idle most of the time, so money can be earned by renting it to strangers when it is not being used by the owner”, Lucie Enochsson explains.
By creating this new way of accessing resources, however, sharing organisations are disrupting old, established systems. Shared cars may start slowly replacing privately owned cars, and shared accommodation may replace hotels. At the same time, these changes do not happen automatically just because a new technology has entered the market.
“It takes a lot of work by sharing organisations to explain how their platforms work, why they are beneficial to society, why they should be supported, and why they are better than the old systems. Only then can they become accepted”, says Lucie Enochsson. Her thesis shows what sharing organisations can do to normalise the sharing economy, and how they can disrupt the old practices. Based on data from London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Malmö, San Francisco, and Toronto, it finds that many large, for-profit organisations engage in lobbying or filing lawsuits, but this does not guarantee help with their development.
This study explores how municipalities deal with the arrival of sharing platforms and explains why they support or resist some of them. It shows that municipal governments react to sharing organisations by regulating them, promoting them, or enabling them, or they may even set up their own sharing initiatives to cover a specific demand.
The results of the dissertation can be useful to sharing organisations that want to learn how to upscale sharing practices in collaboration with city governments. Municipalities can also benefit from it because it introduces a toolbox for governing sharing platforms.
About the dissertation:
Friday 18 June, Lucie Enochsson, the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, Lund University, defends her thesis entitled “The Sharing Economy in Cities – Institutionalisation and Sustainability”. The defense will take place online at 13.15. The faculty opponent is Professor Christina Öberg, Örebro University School of Economics.
For more information, please contact:
Lucie Enochsson
Phone: +46 46 222 0227
E-mail: lucie [dot] enochsson [at] gmail [dot] com