Special Issue & Book

Special issue for Built Environment
Space-Sharing Practices in the City

Guest Editors: Ye Zhang & Jeffrey Kok Hui Chan

Editorial: Space-sharing practice in the city

Throughout history, the city has been quintessentially a shared space. But today, with the increasing urban population density and the ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT), the city has become an even more conducive site for complex sharing activities (Cohen and Munoz, 2016). One such complex activity is what we term space-sharing practice: an emerging urban phenomenon that has so far accreted in new forms of sharing spatial resources, the creation of new shared spaces, and the production of new socio-spatial sharing relations (Chan and Zhang, 2018). Central to space-sharing practice is the recognition that the physical space can be designed and configured into a shareable resource, and that there are certain resources that would be more effectively shared in actual and spatial environment (see Katrini, 2018; Piccinno, 2018). Following this, it may be possible to specify further space-sharing practice through a threefold distinction: the space of sharing (i.e. the different ways of sharing spaces and the different typologies of shared space), space in sharing (i.e. the different roles that space plays in facilitating or enabling sharing activities and practices), and finally, space for sharing (i.e. how environmental design can create affordance for sharing and enable social transformations).

Nevertheless, our understanding of this phenomenon remains nascent, uneven and incomplete. Existing literature mostly centres around the Sharing Economy, which focuses on the social, business, political, organizational and regulatory dimensions of this form of economy (e.g. Botsman and Rogers, 2010; Schor, 2016; Frenken and Schor, 2017; Slee, 2015; Schor and Attwood-Charles, 2017), at the exclusion of acknowledging space, let alone the systematic investigation of space of sharing, space in sharing and space for sharing. In the views espoused by the Sharing Economy, sharing activities are often narrowly understood or primarily framed on the basis of economic transactions, and space is merely presumed as the background reality that accommodates such transactions. As a result, the spatial dimension of sharing has yet to be recognized as an essential variable in elucidating the phenomenon of sharing. Clearly, this also means that the important examination of emerging space-sharing practices in contemporary cities has so far remained elusive.
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Sharing by Design

Authors: Jeffrey Kok Hui Chan & Ye Zhang

This book connects sharing with design. Even when sharing has been widely studied as a cooperative practice and a distributive strategy, sharing has yet to be examined from the perspective of design. Sharing may offer a new approach to sustainability in an urban milieu increasingly characterized by resource scarcity and its associated conflicts and hardships. However, under these pressing circumstances, it has become implausible for sharing systems to evolve on their own. Instead, sharing systems may have to be deliberately designed. And if we are to design for sharing, then what should we consider? What are the precedents, issues, questions, variables, conditions, and methods that may be relevant and useful for the design of sharing systems? Moreover, if a sharing system can be designed, what are the moral ecology and ethical principles that are necessary to sustain such a sharing system? In addition, we also discuss how to teach, or transmit, the design of sharing systems to others (which ineluctably, is the definitive spirit of sharing), at a time when this knowledge is increasingly critical for the long term flourishing of cities. In an artificial world where even the human condition has become a subject of design, the design of sharing systems has become paramount— especially in the present when there is an urgent need to reduce emissions and over-consumption of nonrenewable resources.

While sharing has been studied from different angles in the (digital) humanities and the social sciences, and has received extensive treatments from the social, economic, and cultural disciplines, sharing has yet to be systematically examined from design studies. And while there is know-how today on how to build business models that employ sharing tactics and digital technologies, a systematic body of knowledge for designing a sharing system, in particular in the urban environment, that can reinforce sharing behaviours and practices remains lacking. Our book aims to fill this gap in the present literature and practice by providing a concise, yet systematic, guidebook for the prospective ‘designers’ of sharing systems from different disciplines. This book also departs from the literature on the Sharing Economy by positioning sharing as a social relation by design—a relation formed of a common need to satisfy basic needs and dignity in an epoch of diminishing resources, which is anticipated to be more effectively facilitated by design. In sum, our book presents a novel
cross-hybrid between a ‘how to design’ book and a ‘theory of sharing’ book set against the contemporary backdrop of urgent environmental issues and scarce urban resources.

Please refer to the E-book for more details.

Sharing Cities | 共享城市

Authors: He Huang, Ye Zhang, Martijn De Geus, Yue Zhang and Teck Kiam Tan

The rapid pace of change in the cultural and economic landscape of China compels us to rethink the nature of the built environment afresh. While modes of production and consumption undergo breakneck speeds of transformation, the city and buildings remain unmoved, and innovations in building technology and perception crawl in snail pace by comparison. With the advent of smart phones ten years ago and the tens of millions of Apps that were developed since, urban living had changed dramatically. Is it possible for the physical environment to re-conceive in tandem with such changes in lifestyle, habit, social cohesion and other pertinent issues. How can we conceptualize the city of today and perhaps of tomorrow?

These are the questions grappled by architecture students from Tsinghua University and National University of Singapore in the Sharing Cities workshops and studios. The collaboration not only brings students from different international backgrounds together, but also young talents to imagine the future. They share the concerns of the current development in Beijing and Singapore as two of the most exciting and rapidly developing mega cities in the world and also project the future of urban and building designs in these cities that would embrace co-sharing as a practice for urban life. Studio is the key arena for postulations, debates, expressions and substantiations of ideas and collaborative studio, such as this one presented in the book, deepens the experience further.

Abstract: Sharing today is both a social practice and an economic institution. As the former, sharing practices have been found throughout historyand across the world in many different forms. But as for the latter, sharing is a somewhat novel phenomenon in the so-called Sharing Economy. And sharing practices have been exemplified by the recent emergence of rapidly growing enterprises such as Airbnb, Uber and Mobike. Nevertheless, the marriage between the time-honoured social practice of sharing and the enterprises found in this relatively new ‘Sharing Economy’ has been an uneasy one. This is because many of the practices found in the Sharing Economy exploited the approbative image of these time-honoured practices of sharing—for instance, altruism—even when they have little in common with actual (i.e., unremunerated) sharing practices. After all, are enterprises offering shared meeting spaces or the shared car services, about sharing, or more pointedly, more about for-profit rental services merely masked by a high-sounding rhetoric? But barring unproductive cynicism and presuming a more charitable reception, these new ‘sharing’ services integral to the Sharing Economy are likely to become a major driver of future urbanism, and for this reason, demand serious attention from architects, planners and urban designers. In turn, this ought to beg the following important questions: how do we design better sharing systems that can effectively address the spurious notions of sharing exploited by the market economy on the one hand, and on the other, design better sharing systems that are self-reinforcing and therefore, also self-sustaining? In short, how do we design for authentic and ethical sharing systems?

Read a sample chapter of the book: