The Role of Cities in the Sharing Economy: Exploring Modes of Governance in Urban Sharing Practices

Exploring total economic values in an emerging urban circular wastewater system

Circular water management has the potential to close resource and material loops within and across value chains. In the water industry, circular municipal wastewater management through industrial urban symbiosis (IUS) is recognized as a solution to overcome water scarcity in urban environments. IUS involves collaboration between actors with different organizational backgrounds, which can lead to inherent risks of conflicting goals. This study explores how different values drive various organizations to participate in an emerging circular wastewater collaboration. The study comprises a literature review of 34 scientific articles and a case study of a potential circular wastewater system through IUS in Simrishamn, Sweden. It presents an interdisciplinary framework based on the total economic value concept and organizational archetypes for examining actor values in circular wastewater management. This framework provides a novel approach for assessing different values and how they may compete or align. It can also identify the absence of certain values, enabling the achievement of a minimum level of value coherence amongst different actors, and thereby increasing the sustainability and effectiveness of circular wastewater collaborations. Therefore, careful planning and stakeholder interaction, in accordance with economic value perspectives, can enhance the legitimacy and policy development of circular solutions.

Achieving the Circular Economy: Exploring the Role of Local Governments, Business and Citizens in an Urban Context

The urban context is an experimentation space to accelerate the transition to a circular economy [...]

Emergence of Carsharing Business Models and Sustainability Impacts in Swedish Cities

The sharing economy has become prominent in the policy, business and academic discourse as a way to achieve greater levels of resource efficiency in sustainability transitions. An example is carsharing, which is regarded as a potential lever for change in sustainable mobility transitions. In this article we, apply the “ecologies of business models” perspective to investigate how carsharing initiatives have coevolved in Sweden. We focus on the city context as a useful unit of analysis to investigate carsharing in four Swedish cities: Gothenburg, Malmö, Stockholm and Umeå. Through qualitative case research, we investigate the following: How did carsharing business models coevolve in the studied cities? It was found that early notions of carsharing date back to the 1970s, but the concept has changed significantly over time, particularly with the emergence of (Internet) technology-based platforms. The findings suggest that carsharing is complementary to existing private car usage in cities, rather than a replacement. Based on this, we suggest pathways for local policymakers to consider when implementing sustainable carsharing solutions. The contributions are threefold: providing an empirical study on the theoretical ecologies of business models concept; understanding how carsharing coevolved in Swedish cities and in relation to wider sustainability and mobility trends; and giving novel insight into the role of local governments.

Urban Development Index (UDI): A Comparison between the City of Rio de Janeiro and Four Other Global Cities

One of the methods to assess the urban development of a city is to allocate indicators that quantify its efficiency in performing various functions, such as urban mobility, security, sustainability, and economy, among others. The motivation of this work is the fact that the city of Rio de Janeiro, although widely known and admired around the world for its natural beauty, has a wide negative notoriety regarding its urban functionality. There is a critical need for investment in the city’s infrastructure in order to improve the quality of life of its population. The novelty of this work is in proposing an index that quantifies the urban functionality of the city of Rio de Janeiro and that represents urban development. The research focuses on optimizing investments in infrastructure and hence increasing the urban performance offered by the city of Rio de Janeiro. In the proposed methodology for modeling the Urban Development Index (UDI), this work presents the model structure made from a knowledge-based urban development assessment model (KBUD/AM), the determination of the indicators, the selection of the cities, the data collection from primary and secondary sources and the use of statistical techniques for data normalization and scaling. The research aims to quantify, compare and evaluate the level of urban development of Rio de Janeiro, performing benchmarking with other four global cities (Stockholm, Shanghai, Boston, and Cape Town). Cities are ranked for their UDI to make the comparison more straightforward. Based on the results, Rio de Janeiro ranks second to last among the five cities studied, with an UDI of 0.395, only slightly better than Cape Town. The results confirm that the city of Rio de Janeiro has several deficiencies, especially in the education, safety and health sectors, and is very far from most of the other developed cities. The city of Rio de Janeiro should promote investments in research and development. Finally, this work confirms that Rio de Janeiro must tackle security problems as a matter of priority.