Planning and the So-Called ‘Sharing’ Economy / Can Shared Mobility Deliver Equity?/ The Sharing Economy and the Ongoing Dilemma about How to Plan for Informality/ Regulating Platform Economies in Cities – Disrupting the Disruption?/ Regulatory Combat? How the ‘Sharing Economy’ is Disrupting Planning Practice/ Corporatised Enforcement: Challenges of Regulating AirBnB andOther Platform Economies/ Nurturing a Generative Sharing Economy for Local Public Goods and Service Provision

Abstract

Sharing economy' technology platforms now encompass housing (most prominently Airbnb); transport (from taxi-replacements Uber and Lyft to short-term rental bicycles and electric scooters); to temporary labor (TaskRabbit). Undoubtedly, more such concepts are being developed, funded, and deployed as we speak. 'Sharing' platform creators describe their work as 'disruptive' and 'innovating in the regulatory sphere' and in many cities have been at odds with both planners and residents as well as competing industries. Planning scholars and practitioners have been caught on the back foot due to the rapid speed at which the 'sharing economy' has emerged and the lack of data available publicly for assessing its scale and how it's affecting the cities we plan. We invited authors to discuss how we ought to conceive of the sharing economy, how we might understand its impacts across people and places, and how planning could or should respond to its emergence and growth. The papers we received span two issues of interface. In this issue, the writing focuses on the planning regulatory response to platforms; and in issue 20.2 we will take up the implications of these platforms for work and labor in the city. These authors connect the 'new' sharing economy to older more endemic forms of informality, to reiterate that in some ways we are still dealing with questions around whether or not informality can be regulated, and also if the extractive platform sharing economy maintains some relationship to the other versions of sharing. What the sharing economy has always done, even before the emergence of large corporations as mediators, is to challenge what Brown calls the "status quo." An important question she asks in her piece for this Interface is whether or not the status quo, in this case the traditional taxi industry, was good to begin with. Brown directly compares ride-share platforms to a taxi industry that has presented significant barriers to African American mobility. While digital infrastructure is still uneven, and ride hailing via apps might result in a user's "delayed mobility", the traditional taxi industry for some people of color in some neighborhoods meant no mobility at all. A question I would also like to raise is how the more visible version of ride-hailing has replaced and possibly displaced the pre-existing informal and underground community mechanisms for how African American or Latinx or Asian immigrants solved mobility problems before, through similar but differently accessed informal ride-sharing strategies (Blasi & Leavitt, Driving Poor, 2006). We as planners are asked to think about allowing for, and being comfortable with allowing the informal to exist and to also question planning's primary impulse to regulatechallenged by any version of the sharing economy. Nelson & Ehrenfeucht reflect that the question of the

Online rental housing market representation and the digital reproduction of urban inequality

“…Housing technology platforms today forge emerging institutions with the capacity to reshape urban economies, human interactions, and information landscapes. (Wegmann and Jiao, 2017;Shaw, 2018;Kim et al, 2019;Fields, 2019;Jiao and Bai, 2019). These information landscapesand any asymmetries or segregation within them-are central to housing search outcomes and residential sorting (Levitt and Syverson, 2008;Kurlat and Stroebel, 2015;Garmaise and Black adults, but usage remains lower today among older, less-educated, and lower-income Americans (Pew Research Center, 2018, 2019.…”

Citizen Perceptions of Government’s Resistance to Shared Parking

“…However, many local governments have started to regulate sharing economy services such as shared parking, in order to manage the disruptive effects they may generate (Kim et al, 2019;Hong & Lee, 2018). Extant laws and regulations to manage safety, workforce, privacy, and tax issues in such communityoriented distributed systems are either inapplicable or differently applicable for sharing economies (Leung et al, 2019), and which are therefore in need of being updated (Greene & McGinty, 2016).…”

“…However, Novikova (2017) argues that there is still need for research in a related sector, namely, at the intersection of shared mobility and physical infrastructure, such as buildings, roads, and parking. In fact, shared parking, which refers to matching seekers with available parking spaces on demand by lending or renting out unoccupied parking space such as residential driveways and private parking spots (Boysen et al, 2019;Kim et al, 2019), is an exemplary but under-researched area of sharing economies (Xu et al, 2020).…”

Online Rental Housing Market Representation and the Digital Reproduction of Urban Inequality

“…Housing technology platforms today forge emerging institutions with the capacity to reshape urban economies, human interactions, and information landscapes (Fields, 2019;Jiao and Bai, 2019;Kim et al, 2019;Shaw, 2018;Wegmann and Jiao, 2017). These information landscapes-and any asymmetries or segregation within them-are central to housing search outcomes and residential sorting (Ben-Shahar and Golan, 2019; Garmaise and Moskowitz, 2004;Kurlat and Stroebel, 2015;Levitt and Syverson, 2008;Metzger et al, 2019).…”