Smart City Innovation within the Sharing Economy: Urban Innovation and Collaborative Consumption

With the increase of population and the increasing expectations of said population, urban environments require modern solutions for old and new problems alike. Technological and institutional innovation have both alleviated or solved many of the problems of modern cities. When we speak of smart cities, we tend to imagine solutions that focus on big data and its potential to help direct policy in a top-down approach whereas the sharing economy evokes bottom-up solutions where groups of people get together to solve community issues. Modern cities face a large number of challenges ranging from housing to air quality, to education, healthcare and emergency services or parking and traffic management. The list is virtually endless. They do, however, also present certain advantages over smaller, spread-out communities as having large numbers of people in a relatively small geographical space allows for innovative resource sharing solutions that would not be possible or might not be efficient otherwise. In a sense, population density is one of the biggest challenges of modern cities but also one of their greatest opportunities. We set out to analyse current and potential intersections between smart city technologies and solutions arising from the sharing economy. We look at existing smart city technology and the potential to expand its applications by giving more control to the citizens themselves and we examine a mathematical model that assess the viability of sharing cities. If we desire our future cities to be human-friendly, eco-friendly and sustainable it’s important to understand which solutions have the greatest potential to lead us down the path of sustainability.