Civic sector 2013: The collaborative local economy

We asked six experts to give their verdicts on the events of 2012 and suggest ideas for progression in 2013. In our third instalment, Julian Dobson looks at how an emerging collaborative economy is boosting local economies and renewing civic life.

I’ve tried Airbnb, and it works. If you haven’t, it’s an alternative to a hotel. Instead of spending the night in a soulless Travelodge, you rent a room from an ordinary individual or family in the place you want to visit.

What happens when you use Airbnb? Rather than supporting a hotel chain, most of your fee goes directly to the people whose home you’re sharing for the night.

That money is more likely to stay within the local economy. In San Francisco, where Airbnb began, it’s been estimated that Airbnb hosts have contributed $56m of spending to the city, of which just over $43m has supported local businesses near the hosts’ homes.

Airbnb is possibly the most well-known example of what’s been termed the sharing economy. There are other phrases associated with this phenomenon: ‘collaborative consumption’, the ‘civic economy’, or even the ‘gig economy’.

The language is chasing the reality. Some of the emerging economy might be compared to the makeshift practices of developing countries: informal, marginal activities that may or may not be on the right side of the law, but are driven by the need to survive.

As the pincer of public spending cuts and more draconian private employment conditions tightens, many are resorting to the informal and makeshift: self-employed bakers, repairers, coaches, therapists or social media consultants are finding ways of managing on the edge of the mainstream economy.

For many, this is necessity, even if it’s dressed up in sexy lingo. The reality of the sharing economy could mean living on a lot less: there are now more working age people in poverty who are in work than there are people without jobs living below the poverty line.

But many are also creating a new economy out of choice – or, having been pushed out of the formalities of public or corporate employment, are finding no desire to go back. The sharing economy may be driven by austerity, but it is testing more creative, social and resilient ways of living and working.

Car sharing, for example, can save a family many hundreds of pounds a year – and is building new business opportunities for car clubs like Zipcar, which now has more than 760,000 users worldwide. In most cities car clubs don’t yet work at a viable scale, but Car2Go has 300 cars available to hire in Ulm, Germany, and similar numbers in a growing number of cities from Vienna to Vancouver.

In the UK, Marks & Spencer has launched its ‘Shwopping’ campaign where customers return unwanted used clothes, which are then recycled and used to raise money for Oxfam. More than two million items of clothing have been diverted from landfill.

Crowdfunding is another example of this collaborative economy. The Association of Town Centre Management has teamed up with Spacehive, an online fundraising platform for public space projects, to invest in town centres.

Local people and businesses pledge funds for projects they want to support. In Mansfield, the town is three quarters of the way towards raising £36,000 to provide free wi-fi in the town centre. In Edinburgh, £1,700 has been raised to turn a redundant phone box into a ‘light box’ displaying local artworks.

This is a new take on an old form of civic improvement. Walk around any substantial town or city in the UK and you may find a monument or building with the inscription, ‘erected by public subscription’. Our Victorian predecessors knew how to tap into civic goodwill; those skills are now being relearned for a digital age.

Perhaps inevitably, there has been a lot of hype about the sharing economy. At its worst, it provides a veneer for poverty and an excuse for civic institutions to curtail their support for places and people. These risks have not always been taken seriously.

But at its best, the sharing economy offers a chance for people to create new forms of exchange that work around and beneath the monopolisation of economic opportunity by those who hold financial and corporate power.

Introducing his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes that ‘the weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them’. As austerity bites deeper in the next few years, we are likely to see much more of this.

• Read the rest of our annual round-up: Neil McInroy on the need for a new economic narrative and Phil Baker on the future for public services, John P. Houghton on the need for a third way in regeneration, Keren Suchecki on welfare and poverty and Richard Caulfield on the challenge ahead for the community and voluntary sector