Imagine a city where everyone’s needs are met because people make the personal choice to share. Where everyone can create meaningful livelihoods. Where fresh, local food is available to all. Where affordable housing and shared transportation are abundant. Where the poor are lifted up, the middle class is strengthened, and the rich are respected because they all work together for the common good.
Imagine a city where the people decide how the city budget is spent. Where the people own the banks, control credit, and create their own money. Where the people own the utilities that make green energy and internet access available to all.
Imagine a city where all this is possible without relying on the government or big banks. Where we don’t have to beg leaders for change or sell ourselves out to “make it” at the expense of others. Where the more we share, the more we have. Where everyone wins.
Our dream at Shareable is that everyone gets to live in such a place. While ambitious, our dream is grounded in reality. Everything that’s imagined above already exists. We know this because we’ve written about these pockets of sanity nearly every day for the last five years.
What’s missing is there’s no single city where all these models are brought together. And until now there’s been few efforts to create such cities.
This is a call to change that.
Because there are proven solutions, there’s no need to doubt that it can be done. Because these solutions can be created by ordinary people, there’s no need to ask permission to start. Because there’s great need, there’s no reason to wait.
The time to build sharing cities is now.
So, today Shareable launches the Sharing Cities Network — a grassroots network for sharing innovators to discover together how to create as many sharing cities around the world as fast as possible.
To kick off the network, Shareable is hosting a Sharing Cities Map Jam October 12-26th. The goal of the Map Jam is to map the sharing economies of 25 cities with 25 local teams.
While there’s no complete sharing city yet, we’ve found that every city has a much bigger foundation to build on than people think. There are cooperatives, community gardens, tool libraries, timebanks, bike kitchens, coworking and maker spaces, credit unions, farmers’ markets, or their ilk nearly everywhere.
We believe that making these oases of sharing visible will be an empowering first step for the network. After the Map Jam, we’ll post the maps on Shareable for anyone to use, share, or copy. The network’s next steps will be worked out together.
Please fill out the form below to learn more. We’ll be in touch soon.
This article is cross posted with permission from Shareable.net.
