Articoli taggati con ‘sharing economy’
Regaining Spaces and Territories. Reflections about the blank side of Italy
Just few years ago, Italy was a Country with more people than spaces. Nowadays, we’re living the opposite conditions: Italy is a Country full of spaces but without people. In Italy we build 8 meters per second, the urbanization rate grew of the 400% between the Post-War period and the 2000, in the same period, the population grew only of the 27%. Depreciation of real-estate goods, due also to the increment of the supply-side of the market, generated an over-production crisis that, as occurred in Spain and in US, has been the origin of other and more complex difficulties of the entire economic system, generating other structural crises. It is not a case, thus, that this economic phase is lasting since 2008 and that today in Italy we have more than 6 million real-estate goods that are unused or underused (that is two times the city of Rome completely uninhabited). These goods are residential buildings (5 millions), public, semi-public and private buildings as, for example empty factories or abandoned industrial buildings, abandoned schools, buildings owned by mutual aid societies or People’s House cooperatives, Winemaking Cooperatives, colonies, and other closed spaces owned by municipalities (hospitals, neighborhood branches, schools and other spaces donated by private citizens as e. g. bequests), abandoned rail stations, buildings confiscated to the mafia, ghost towns, unused road worker’s houses, and many other cases could fill in the list of the parts of Italy that we let go.
Sharing Economy: All of Us in Wonderland
Obviously, innovation is seen as very fashionable these days. With no surprise, we can search for “top innovators under 30”, “top start-ups to watch” and “top-gadgets” that can improve the way we live. These characterize the private sector well as the risk-friendly, creative, and flexible incubator, where the tendency for “ready-to-play” wealthy investors and ambitious entrepreneurs to gravitate to Silicon Valley dreamland has become the driving force for the birth of innovative solutions. Since Professor Clayton Christensen began using the term “disruptive innovations”, which refers to the selling of cheaper products that can eventually disrupt an existing market, it seems that everyone is now “disrupting” and that every day is seen as an instance of innovation. Similar to Professor Christensen, the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas pointed out that our complex societies are clearly susceptible to interferences and accidents and that these offer ideal opportunities for a creating prompt disruption of normal activities. It seems to be natural, then, that while millions of innovative applications based on principles of sharing have proven to be of high economic value the Sharing Economy platforms predict to generate revenues of 335 billion by 2025, shaking the future of many traditional economic sectors. For example, UBER, the Sharing Economy prodigy child for transportation network, possessing no cars and without officially employing has already managed to disrupt taxi industry in over three hundred cities worldwide, bringing about lawsuits and causing employee protests. Though, in this emerging scenario of disruptive innovations and the Sharing Economy, it is obvious that the effectiveness of the public sector is diminishing, leaving important services uncovered and without innovation hopelessly leaving the sector of society impaired. As described in the latest innovation report on European Public Sector Innovation, the public sector is stereotyped as an “outdated infrastructure that lags behind the needs of modern citizens and today’s businesses”.
Culture and Citizenship
Most Italian cities, both big cities and small cities, are experiencing a sort of identity crisis, which is the result of different but convergent factors. The failure of the urbanistic vision as a virtuous urban development model. The unresolved relationship between historic city centre and the peripheries. The bureaucratic resistance to the implementation of mid and long-term strategic plans. The tendency in concentrating the cultural production only into the main cultural production centres. The distance between the University and the places where the urban change process take shape. The lack of intercultural and intergenerational integration processes. The underestimation of the change potential expressed by culture and cultural and creative activities. These are all issues that affect the real development of a culture-oriented society. Furthermore, there is also another point to underline: the rise of an interpretation of cultural and creative phenomenon as a specific tool of the tourism economy: during last decades, this vision shaped both public and private intervention in culture, realizing processes into a “touristic attractors” perspective. Because of the scarce resources, the touristic addressed interventions the implementation of mid and long term strategies mainly addressed to a change and to a cultural-driven urban renewal.
The Booking Challenge: Tourism and the Sharing Economy
Today, the Internet plays a key role in the tourism sector. Contemporary travelers use the Web during all phases of traveling process: before the departure for inspiration, research, and booking; during the travel for local services and information; and after the journey in order to share impressions and give suggestions to other travelers and communities. From a practitioner’s viewpoint, this contribution offers an insight into online tourism market, trying to emphasize how the sharing economy model could shape the future trends and habits of tourists and professional operators.
