Fifty cities around the world began mapping their shared resources in October and November during Shareable's worldwide Map Jam. This is just the beginning of the Sharing Cities Network – an ambitious project to create one hundred sharing cities by 2015.
A Sharing City is a city where housing, food, transportation, energy, and money are locally owned and democratically governed. Where we create our own meaningful and dignified work together and creatively play in community centers, urban farms, makerspaces and art collectives. Where we share material resources and skills through peer-to-peer exchanges, lending libraries and gifting.
The Sharing Cities Network is a grassroots network for sharing innovators to discover together how to create as many of these sharing cities around the world as fast as possible. The network will knit together a community of local sharing city network nodes, modeled after nature's decentralized, resilient and productive networks. Participants will be readers like you – people just getting started with sharing, as well as those founding, leading, and participating in sharing projects, organizations, and businesses, as well as city leaders.
Shareable will facilitate the Sharing Cities Network and help set up infrastructure, but in order to succeed it will operate as an independent network – with a decentralized structure, shared leadership, and multiple communication platforms – and will rely on its members to take action in their cities. Shareable will amplify the creative actions that network members take so that others can re-mix, adapt, and reuse those ideas in their own cities.
The Sharing Cities Network will scale up and replicate successful sharing models by:
- increasing collaboration between sharing projects
- spreading best practices among members
- catalyzing new sharing projects
- ultimately, creating complete sharing cities.
To accomplish this our initial plans are to:
- host peer learning through online classes and forums
- help you create local sharing actions, such as share fests, gift circles, and skillshares
- facilitate network-wide projects and campaigns
- assist you with getting sharing-friendly policies in your city.
This is a collective effort that will be informed by swarm organizing, so these plans will evolve as we learn together as a network. Click here to take a survey to help us develop the network.
Here is the list of cities that are already on board with links to their Sharing City maps:
- Melbourne, Australia
- Graz, Austria
- Brussels, Belgium
- Elora, Ontario, Canada
- Helsinki, Finland
- St. Etienne, France
- Paris, France
- Munich, Germany
- Berlin, Germany
- Athens, Greece
- Thessaloniki, Greece
- Budapest, Hungary
- Rome, Italy
- Napoli, Italy
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Lisbon, Portugal
- Ljubljana, Slovenia
- Barcelona, Spain
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Mountain View, California, USA
- Los Angeles Area, California, USA
- Atlanta, Georgia, USA
- Berkeley, California, USA
- Sonoma County, California, USA
- Corvallis, Oregon, USA
- Oakland, California, USA
- Austin, Texas, USA
- Denver, Colorado, USA
- Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
- Kansas City, Missouri, USA
- Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Louisville, Kentucky, USA
- Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA
- Minneapolis/Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA
- Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
- Boulder, Colorado, USA
- Eugene, Oregon, USA
- St. Louis, Missouri, USA
- Stamford, Connecticut, USA
- Asheville, North Carolina, USA
- Arab Countries
- Ireland
- Toronto, Canada
- Detroit, Michigan, USA
- Rochester, New York, USA
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Enschede, Netherlands
- Lincoln, UK
- Portland, Oregon, USA
- Lawrence, Kansas, USA
- Adelaide, Australia
You can join the Sharing Cities Network by adding yourself to our Facebook group, giving us your feedback through this survey about how the network can help you with your local work to create a sharing city, and supporting the network's crowdfunding campaign, which will provide crucial support for network infrastructure. We can't do this without you, it's your network!
