Peer2Politics

Transition Streets is a toolkit for neighborhood transformation—a catalyst for action, dialogue, and community building. A project of Transition US, Transition Streets is as simple as neighbors coming together for seven meetings to explore carbon-saving and resilience-building actions in the areas of food, water, waste, energy, transportation, all the while building relationships with each other and a stronger sense of community.

On November 6-7 in Bologna, Italy, leading scholars, researchers, policymakers, practitioners and social innovators will gather to further the discussion and movement around the urban commons.

Imagine going to a shop, borrowing anything you like, and returning it when you're finished. This is the idea behind SHARE: a Library of Things. Opened in late-April in Frome, a town in northeast England, the aim of SHARE is to enable people to spend less, waste less, and connect more. The first of its kind in the U.K., SHARE has already sparked interest from other communities.

Have you started a summer reading list? For those of us interested in the sharing economy, there is no shortage of great reads. Whether your interests lie in collaboration, sustainable cities, community-building, simplicity, or work in the new economy, there is something for everyone. We’ve rounded up the top 21 books for summer to inspire, empower, and inform.

Images and excerpt from the Sustainist Design Guide: How Sharing, Localism, Connectedness, and Proportionality are Creating a New Agenda for Social Design, by Michiel Schwarz and Diana Krabbendam with The Beach Network. Design: Robin Uleman.

How much thought do you give to pavement? Our cities are covered with it, but it’s not exactly a hot topic of conversation—though it should be. Pavement causes all sorts of problems including the fact that water can’t soak through it and instead runs across it, collecting pollutants and biological contaminants that make their way into waterways, plants, animals, and ourselves.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / Foter / CC BY. Article cross-posted from On the Commons. Written by Peter Barnes.

In a just published study, researchers investigated the motivations driving users to peer-to-peer services like timebanks. (10,000 People Blog)

While the struggle between taxi companies and ridesharing startups like Uber grab all the headlines, a pioneering group of cabbies are combining the best of traditional taxi service and new ridesharing systems, but with an important twist. These cabbies are creating cabby-owned taxi cooperatives, sometimes with the help of unions, and offering smartphone taxi hailing on top of a traditional service. This new setup gives drivers more job security, better pay, ownership of and a say in their company as well as the ability to offer more convenient smartphone hailing taxi service to customers. This is part of a surge of experimentation in democratizing ownership in enterprises, including, appropriately, in the sharing economy.

With the rise of the sharing economy, people are sharing cars, houses, sports equipment, clothing, toys, meals, surfboards and much more. There's an intuition among sharers that sharing is not only good for the pocketbook, it’s good for the planet. The thinking goes that sharing helps us reduce consumption and keep usable goods out of landfills.

Ten years ago this month, coworking was born in San Francisco when Brad Neuberg set up some card tables and invited people to work alongside him. There are now over 3,000 coworking spaces worldwide.

Cooperatives represent a growing segment of the economy with an estimated 30,000 enterprises and 100 million members in the U.S. alone. A great way to bring democracy into the workplace, coops can be built from scratch, but they can also be created by converting existing businesses into worker-owned cooperatives. For retiring business owners as well as entrepreneurs, selling a business to employees is a way to strengthen the business while getting a return on investment. 

Article and image cross-posted from the SUMC blog. Photo credit: Mariordo.

If you care about the future of public media and don't follow the work of Melody Joy Kramer, you might consider checking her out here and here.

Tucked away in the basement of Denver’s Smiley Library Branch is the Northwest Denver Toy Library. Founded in 1980, the toy library has been serving the community entirely through donations and volunteers. Last week, I sat down with Margie Herlth, who leads the operation and has been volunteering since 1996, to learn how the toy library works.

Recently, Causa Justa::Just Cause (CJJC) released a report titled Development Without Displacement: Resisting Gentrification in the Bay Area. The 112-page document, prepared in collaboration with the Alameda County Public Health Department, goes beyond describing the public health implications of gentrification to proposing steps that cities like Oakland can take to stop displacement of historic residents.

What role do complementary currencies play in alleviating poverty, creating income equality, and building sustainable communities? According to John Boik PhD, a vital one. Founder of the Principled Societies Projectand author of the book Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being, Boik designed a multi-faceted framework for local democratic systems of which a complementary currency is a key element. A computer simulation model that describes the book’s proposed local-national currency system saw median and mean take-home family income more than double, income inequality nearly eliminated, and the unemployment rate drop to 1 percent over the 28-year simulation period.

Rainbow over Brattleboro, Vermont. Photo credit: Professor Bop / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND. Article cross-posted from Yes! Magazine. Written by Alexis Goldstein.

What began as a childcare coop in Seoul, South Korea has grown into a cooperative, urban village and sparked a national movement of urban villages.

Article cross-posted from Bollier.org. It is always refreshing to read Peter Linebaugh’s writings on the commons because he brings such rich historical perspectives to bear, revealing the commons as both strangely alien and utterly familiar. With the added kick that the commoning he describes actually happened, Linebaugh’s journeys into the commons leave readers outraged at enclosures of long ago and inspired to protect today's endangered commons.

In The Tragedy of the Private | The Potential of the Public, a new booklet co-published by Public Services International and the Transnational Institute, Hilary Wainwright argues that now is the time to turn back the tide of public services privatization. As local authorities around the world begin to reincorporate public services outsourced during the Reagan and Thatcher years, anti-privatization activists have an opportunity not just to accelerate the trend toward public recapture, but also to democratize public services providers from within. Written primarily for union activists, the booklet asks how public services unions can accomplish these goals in the face of opposition from powerful local, national, and international actors. The answer—drawn from real-world examples of anti-privatization campaigns in South Africa, Brazil, Greece, and elsewhere—is at once straightforward and profound: Public services unions are most likely to be successful in fighting privatization when they form meaningful, lasting alliances with the communities in which they operate.