STWR - Share The World's Resources

A growth in collaborative consumption is transforming people from passive consumers to active citizens who are engaged in their communities. From collective gardens to social lending, a new economy is emerging based on openness, sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration, writes Rachel Botsman.

8th February 2011 - Published by RSA Journal

On a trip to San Francisco in May 2006, 24-year-old Anthony Eskinazi went to watch a Giants baseball game. The queues into the stadium garage were a kilometre long and the prices were extortionate. As he drove around looking for alternative parking spots, Eskinazi couldn’t help noticing the number of empty neighbourhood driveways a stone’s throw from the stadium. He began to wonder whether he could create an easy-to-use online platform that instantly linked ‘space owners’ wanting to make extra cash by renting out their unused driveways and garages with ‘parkers’ wanting to book spaces close to their destination. Four months later, Parkatmyhouse.com, a ‘parking dating agency’, launched in the UK.

In October 2010, Parkatmyhouse had more than 100,000 members, with 10,000 spaces available across the UK. Parking-space owners decide what to charge for the use of their space, while the company takes a 15 percent commission of the total profit. Parkatmyhouse is one of thousands of businesses that are founded on the exchange of assets, from cars and skills to parking spaces and time. New technology, including social networking sites and mobile devices, is enabling old market ideas – traditional practices such as swapping, trading, renting, bartering, sharing and lending – to be reinvented in ways relevant to the Facebook age. This emerging culture and economy – collaborative consumption – is starting to reinvent not just what we consume but also how we consume it.

People are discovering that there are idle assets all around them that hold untapped economic, social and sustainable value – the average car, for instance, sits idle for 23 hours a day – and that offer people everyday opportunities to become ‘micro-entrepreneurs’. This kind of shift in behaviour may serve to ensure that the UK government’s ‘Big Society’ agenda has traction on the ground. It exemplifies a change to a culture in which, as the prime minister has declared, people “don’t always turn to officials or government for answers to the problems they face, but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities”.

One potential advantage of collaborative consumption is that, by bringing people and assets together in new ways, it enables one benefit to feed into another across a network, making the cumulative impact more widespread. During the economic downturn, All Saints Church in London’s King’s Cross had been struggling to raise funds for community projects. Reverend Martyn Saunders heard about Parkatmyhouse and realised that the church’s unused parking spaces, a walk away from St Pancras station, were a valuable asset. In two years, All Saints Church has made more than £70,000, which it has used to fund projects benefiting a range of local people. As well as the non-churchgoing commuters who can now park at All Saints, the scheme has helped parents from surrounding council estates whose children can now make use of the church’s large play space through the newly funded ‘stay and play’ project, and homeless people who can now attend the weekly free breakfast event.

Parkatmyhouse is a deceptively simple example that shows how network technologies make collaborative consumption work in ways and on a scale never before possible. We are now able to match ‘haves’ with ‘wants’ online, reducing geographical boundaries. This has the potential to create an opportunity for efficient exchanges and generates the social glue to build trust between strangers, eliminating the need for middlemen and bureaucratic barriers.

Collaborative consumption is not a niche ‘sharing’ trend and it’s not a reactionary blip following the economic downturn. It is thriving across sectors as diverse as finance and travel, agriculture and technology, education and retail. There are thousands of businesses and public-sector ideas based on this model, and they can be organised into three main groups.

First, there are product service systems: services that enable people to pay for the benefit of using a product without needing to own it outright. These enterprises, which include car-sharing systems such as Streetcar and peer-to-peer rental marketplaces such as Ecomodo, are disrupting traditional industries based on models of private ownership.

Second, there are redistribution markets, such as swap-trading platform Swapcycle or networks such as craigslist, which redistribute used or pre-owned goods from somewhere they are not needed to somewhere they are.

Third, there are ideas that encourage collaborative lifestyles by bringing together people with similar interests to share and exchange less tangible assets such as time, space, skills and money. Examples include co-working spaces such as The Hub, which provides free spaces in which teenagers can pursue interests and hobbies, and time banking such as Camden Shares.

Collaborative consumption represents a fundamental change in the relationship between producers and consumers. It is fuelled by a range of drivers: the rise of online social networks, which enable people to communicate and act together for a purpose; a renewed belief in the importance of community; pressing environmental concerns; and a widespread questioning of the health of an economy dependent on buying and selling. Together, these factors are moving us away from the top-heavy, command-and-control forms of consumerism and towards decentralised ideas based on openness, sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration.

At the heart of collaborative consumption is a move to transform people from passive consumers to active citizens who feel empowered to shape the world around them. From sharing a garden with a neighbour to renting out a parking space, we are starting to experience how millions of small contributions can accumulate to create a new kind of wealth, where commerce and community meet.

The Big Society involves moving an unsustainable super-tanker economy in a new direction, so that we are defined not by what we consume but by what we contribute. This shift will take time, but the rapid pace of technological advancements, combined with a change in people’s values, presents an opportunity to transform industries, reinvent public services, leapfrog over wasteful forms of consumerism and change the way we live.

Rachel Botsman is a writer and social innovator. What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, is published by Harper Business.

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