Between the Digital and the Physical: Reinventing the Spaces to Accommodate Sharing Services

Abstract

The sharing economy is based on a mentality shift of the people that are everyday more lean to share their private life through the social networks with a resulting establishment of a collective consciousness and an increase of trust in each other through the act of sharing. Consequently, the physical spaces must also be considered today as new entities involved in the phenomena of sharing, supporting, together with their environmental, functional and aesthetic characteristics, the various sharing activities. Moreover, in the information society, we live simultaneously in different spaces and times and the digital access to services sometimes needs to be transformed into something more physical to permit the real exchange of experience and knowledge, to meet real people in a material arena. The boundary between virtual and physical space is getting everyday thinner and more invisible because, nowadays, digital devices are defining the landscape in the urban scenario, establishing interactions and links regardless of the materiality of a place itself. What happens is a sort of dematerialization of the physical space which supports a no-stop digital flow, filtered by the social system of relationships. People in fact assume the role of the interface between the two spaces, defining urban landscape and spatial relationships through digital systems. According to the principles of sharing economy, people may act as a physical link into the space in order not to lose the relationships that take place in the physical dimension, while the current social life is quickly shifting to a virtual scale. Sharing activities in the public space would transform the city scenario itself into a stage for people aggregation, where users generate an online/offline information’ landscape through physical–digital actions, defining and designing at the same time flow patterns in both physical and virtual spaces. In this context, the aim of this chapter is to analyse how the use of space changes in the different sharing services and how it should be redesigned to accommodate them to the best, according to experts of spatial design.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

1 Digital City and New Urban Behaviours

The well-established structure of the modern European city, realized in the twentieth century, is falling apart and changing quickly under the pressure of global development. Hence, our landscape, both physical and mental, is getting deformed. “Our everyday environment has changed in just a few decades. Feelings, perceptions and imagination are the categories that have been shaken by technological innovations and by the power of the industrial apparatus that makes said innovations widepread”¹ (Augé 2012). This has obliged us—inhabitants, citizens, researchers and designers—to deeply reconsider the logics for defining the urban environments and social behaviours manifested through those categories.

The deep process for separating time and space, started in the early 1990s, is intervening in this new landscape as activator of mechanisms necessary to update behaviours, most of which involved in the uprooting of social institutions (the main categories being: kinship, politics, economy, religion), a phenomenon called disembedding² by English sociologist Anthony Giddens.³ Said behaviours are enabling social relationships to be carried out free from specific places, recombining them through spatial–temporal distances in indefinite zones of space and time. Actually, the space–time compression is entailing the progressive reduction of distances—considered a restriction for social actions—up to reaching what leader writer of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman,⁴ defines the death of distance.

That being said, indeed the reorganization of time and space is deeply transforming the content of our daily lives—both at relational and social levels—causing the fragmentation of personal and social identities. All this takes place within a framework of plurality of belonging—which were characterized by pragmatism and durability—in a continuous extraction of social relationships from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring through indefinite space–time spans.

Niklas Luhmann⁵ described this evolution as the paradox of society: society is made of direct interactions among people, but today’s society is no longer accessible to people through direct interaction. In fact, in time the latter has been substituted by technological innovations that have allowed to reduce or annul distances as evident with transportation and communication technologies, from the steam engine, to the telephone, to the diffusion of the Internet and of social networks.

In this process, the individual—the contemporary citizen—is substantially decontextualized, projected into a new global dimension defined by the age of electronics and by a consequent spreading of social relationships at global level. This has led past certainties and habits—that used to be based on traditions and customs—to be quickly substituted by others, more fit to coexist with the current operational processes, as well as more fit to govern them.

The separation between time and space has been made possible and is activated continuously by all the virtual interaction tools at disposal and used regularly. Moreover, this separation entails an increasing substantial decrease of vis-à-vis interactions, fostering relationships that mostly take place in conditions of distance and simultaneously. Hence, a new type of international community is being produced—unconnected to the physical place and co-presence of people—that dialogues through chats and applications, almost always without a direct knowledge of the true background of those with whom one enters into contact.

Nowadays, the social dimension of people who gather together takes place paradoxically, and practically, at macro level, in large assemblies of young people (and not only the young), for example, on the occasion of important music events. To give an idea of the size of the phenomenon, more than 250 thousand people were present at Rolling Stones’ concert held in the Cuban capital of Havana in March 2016. For its relevance and social-historical phenomenon, it was compared to Roger Waters’s concert in 1990, The Wall, held in Berlin at Potsdamer Platz, to celebrate the fall of the Wall. These collective gatherings, mass meetings, are governed by the global phenomena of belonging and media, where the strength is given by the fact of being present and participating in a common experience, often connected to epoch-making events, which can then be diffused individually as personal experiences, but that become once again collective through the widespread social networks and social media (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Linkedin, etc.).

This triple decentralization process (the city, the place where the individual lives, the individual) is generating the extension of what Augè defines “empirical non-places”, that is spaces of circulation, consumption, communication; it “represents a change of scale that modifies, both for individuals and groups, the definition of context, which basically is always global”.⁶

2 Analogical/Real Space and Digital/Virtual Space

The human perception of the real space (concrete, tangible, recognizable)—to which I personally acknowledge a rediscovered and renewed analogical quality—has acquired, in this extremely diffused global condition and on the increase, a different and renewed role. In fact, there is the need to develop projects for a new relevant category of urban places, capable of mediating the continuous online/offline condition that guides our daily behaviours. Places thought and designed for realizing a connection between the analogical/real space and the digital/virtual space.

Therefore, the accelerated process updating cities and behaviours at global level spurs to investigate the various logics, with reference to needs and methodologies, for the “intelligent” use of spaces of the diffused urban territories, so as to propose to citizens quality “models of places”; places in which the aims are to give back meaning to the real experience, to define local fields and dimensions, to rebuild—although with different criteria—the proxemic need of meetings and of the value of direct experiences. When space stops being meaningful to citizens, it no longer defines fields or local dimensions, becoming devoid of attractiveness. On the contrary, experiences express the value of the place and its meaning intensely.

This deep transformation process of the urbanized territories is also generating a new condition of geographical balance deriving from the fact that the well-established concepts (correlative and historical) of centre and outskirts tend to be incredibly equivalent and to swap. This is generating what can be defined a new intermediate landscape between the city and the countryside, proposed to us today as total landscape,⁷ in which the elements belonging to the two environments ever more overlap and substitute each other. Consequently, the places in which the city is lived are more hybrid, and their functional destination is increasingly uncertain or at least open to continuous updates. However, this also depends on who “lives” these spaces, on the time of the day in which they are used, on the season, and on the different hypotheses of use, etc.

The European city is defining a variable identity of itself, still clearly made of fixed points defined by the historical and well-established architectural city, together with the recently structured city and the one in phase of evolution, which update spontaneously. However, it is also made of areas that are interstitial, intermediate, open, flexible, renewable, implementable, reversible, changing. Environments which, in their whole, are defining the network of what I believe will be more and more a Wi-Fi city, regulated by conditions ever more connected to the logics of Ambient Intelligence & Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT).⁸

In the upcoming future, both Ambient Intelligence and Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things, due to their pervasiveness, will radically modify the use of urban spaces, as well as—consequently and necessarily—the criteria for designing them. Apart from the variety of names and definitions, these infrastructures aim at “disseminating” network connectivity in the domestic and extra-domestic environments, extending from devices up to now considered fit to carry out said function (computers and smartphones), to surfaces and objects of daily use. Therefore, they entail an accurate design of the transition from the physical to the digital, from materiality to immateriality, from visibility to invisibility, mixed realities that emerge as a continuum between digital spaces and real spaces.

… I like ubiquitous computing, when technology almost disappears, and you can afford to forget it. It’s similar to the Supermarket of the Future that we designed for Expo in Milan: the product talked about its history, but the technology making it possible was invisible… Information has a great transformation power. It allows to understand the consequences of our actions. (C. Ratti, 2016)⁹

3 Sharing Economy and New Virtual/Real Behaviours

The Age of Access¹⁰ represents, in actual fact, an imminent future in which property will be substituted with forms of access to any kind of goods or services or cultural experiences (for a fee and/or through the various sharing experiences). Sharing will be much more frequent, and ownership will be much less present. The gap between who is connected to the Internet and who is not will be wider and wider. However, said age will also allow a greater diffusion of knowledge, democracy and well-being. It will spur the transit from an economy governed essentially by the market and from the concepts of assets and property to an economy based on values such as culture, information, relationships and sharing.

Indeed, the relational aspect, both virtual and real, is the decisive element for the new project, an aspect capable of intervening in territories, environments and users as activator of new experiences. Said experiences can produce value through a process that can become virtuous, generating attractiveness and interest for citizens that are becoming more and more wandering and international. Hence, they can rebuild local relationships and social exchanges, also owing to sharing processes, physically activating the connection between the virtual and the real, which in time has gone lost.

As highlighted by Cristina Bianchetti, who in collaboration with the Politecnico di Torino has given life to a blog on Shared Territories/Territori della condivisione, “…when referring to territories, sharing is not meant in ecumenical terms, but it refers to a thickening of social relationships which produces places where individuals recognize themselves. It is also interpreted as a meeting experience that produces visible signs in space and time”.¹¹

In particular, the unresolved urban interspaces—previously defined as in-between spaces (Piccinno 2012)¹²—assume, within the city renovation process in progress, the meaning of connection elements, actual hot spots of a network that can be updated, and within which the most varied activities can be hosted, even those connected to the powerful and developing sharing economy. In fact, in recent years there has been an increase of social behaviours, economic models, institutions and rules that have shared public responsibilities, resources (work tools, spaces, equipment, competences, time, other tangible and intangible resources), lifestyles and productive processes of goods and services.¹³ In actual fact, the “sharing economy”¹⁴ is being implemented.

Jeremiah Owyang—founder of Crowd Companies, an Innovation Council established to put into connection major brands with leaders, start-ups and communities within the scope of the Collaborative Economy—wrote in 2014: “the sharing economy allows people to obtain what they need from their community”.¹⁵ This condition has been made possible owing to a deep change of mentality, according to which individuals, since they are used to share and available to share their private lives through the social networks, have developed a collective conscience and an increased mutual trust.

It is interesting to notice what Alessandro Brunello observed to this regard in his text Il Manuale del Crowd Funding (2014). In fact, he highlighted that the IT culture, through the social media, has been able to transmit the new value of sharing owing to the well-established habit of showing scenes of personal life as well as contents and knowledge with continuity and to a very broad public. This has led people to a new philosophy …

… which has been the propulsive engine of radical social changes and of the development of individual sensitivity over the last years.” In fact, “the true revolution took place when we passed from a passive download to an active upload …, an actual turning point toward the democratization of society and individual empowerment, as now anyone can share, be heard, and reach a very vast public.”¹⁶

4 Sharing Economy and Pooling Economy

Despite the great diversity of services shared, these use common languages, values and operational modalities preferring access to goods instead of ownership, exchange instead of purchase, trust instead of mistrust, the short distribution channel instead of the long one. Therefore, the sharing of goods, know-how and experiences has laid the basis for the new economic model defined sharing economy, which according to recent estimates is likely to reach a worldwide turnover of 300 billion Euros within 2025.¹⁷

Many of the activities giving life to the sharing economy have a common aspect, that is the peer-to peer-relationship,¹⁸ whose organizational model is the network. In fact, the fundamental element of the sharing economy consists in single individuals that enter into contact with other single individuals, owing to the “network of networks”, the Web. Today this takes place for exchanging houses, for car pooling, when searching for advice, when exchanging opinions and knowledge, when searching for a partner, wanting to share dinner with strangers, exchange time with services, share passions, etc.

Therefore, sharing means finding new ways of expression within expanded scopes of action involving also spaces in the city, real physical, public and private. In fact, these spaces are recognized as ideal containers for hosting, in places open to all, new social behaviours that are putting back together pulverized relationships, reduced to a grid of relationships one at a time.

According to sociologists and town planners, “to make the city” means to build a thick fabric of bonds, exchanges, solidarity and even conflicts. Vice versa, a city that “falls apart” according to the theories of Olivier Mongin (1999) and Jacques Donzelot (2008) “… is a city where the logics of distance, separation and fracture prevail. Logics that deeply undermine the common sense of the urban condition where mixture, integration and pluralism are central. The issue is whether sharing can actually intervene against these processes that create distance, in other words if it can ‘make the city.”¹⁹

5 Spatial Design and the Value of Its Action on the Urban Territory

Spatial design is an activity that intervenes in spaces according to configurative, light, progressive, regressive and even systemic modalities. Its value and power on the urban territory lie in the fact that it can create a quality connection between the analogical/real space and the digital/virtual space, particularly necessary today for the community.

In many cases, the virtual access and digital sharing of services and knowledge—today irreplaceable and unstoppable—can aspire to be supported by a physical component, the real space, completing an exchange of experiences and knowledge even face to face, in a true arena. These designed places, with their countless and unusual typologies of environments, can host new sharing behaviours owing to their different “programmed” qualities: relational, environmental, functional, aesthetic and perceptive, with reference to a logic of belonging to communities and a logic of branding. But they can also, and especially, give back to citizens the sense and value of common goods.

Today it is possible to identify various typologies of tangible and intangible common goods—natural resources, rural common goods, urban common goods, intellectual common goods, etc.—that are placed under different interlocutors—institutions, single citizens, groups and associations, the third sector, social enterprises, philanthropic institutions, etc. Within this dual relationship between common goods and interlocutors, designers place themselves as activators transforming a social need into a social space, recovering the abovementioned value of making the city.

As highlighted by Christian Iaione, Professor of Governance of common goods at the University Luiss Guido Carli, to manage common goods does not only mean to involve citizens in decisions concerning the management of the territory, but it also means:

… to totally redesign the way of thinking our cities …, to create a new governance of the territory where institutions meet citizens, universities, private subjects, associations and the third sector within a new model of shared design, to recover abandoned or degraded areas and to manage these as well as other public spaces.²⁰

It is a different approach, a different way of conceiving the city, which many think of. It does not want to fight the territorial institution, be it municipal, provincial or regional or the private subject that wants to invest. On the contrary, it is an approach that tries to realize something new with the two interlocutors, both public and private, that can be of public utility. It is based on a co-design broadened to anybody who has ideas and time to rethink the city, and on governance paths that aim at innovation and at the enhancement of unused or underused resources to create a new value. Therefore, it means outgrowing the sharing economy which thus becomes, on the territory, pooling economy. The starting point is sharing something; then, the aim is to create well-being by designing or redesigning what exists. Starting from the bottom, actions are expressed with the purpose to contribute, initially, in the regeneration of the single spaces, and then—in the best hypotheses—of entire parts of the city, aiming at the efficiency and functionality of what is shared.²¹

In this complex phenomenon in progress, the aspect falling within our competence, as interior and spatial designers, is to understand which fields—and consequently which spatial logics—are involved in the phenomenon connected to the various activities of sharing and pooling, starting from those already widely implemented and experienced (co-working, car pooling, food sharing, etc.), up to the less obvious sectors still being developed. It is necessary to investigate how to catalyse in specific public/private urban spaces activities connected to the network, in a process aimed at completing the “sharing relationship” seen as a natural transit from logical to analogical. All this leads to a mental change, and not only physical, which is fundamental for passing “from the shared public space”—a type of the modern city of the 1900s—“to the space that shares sharing”, which can be put into practice in the emerging Wi-Fi city.

Two urban cases selected among the most recent and experimental ones are worth mentioning.

The first case is that of Seul, currently considered the world capital of the sharing economy. In 2012 the city’s mayor, Park Won-soon, passed a plan to solve the various problems of the megalopolis (one of the most inhabited of the planet, with more than 25 million inhabitants), based on sharing spaces, products, services. Since then, with the support of the metropolitan council, more than one-hundred start-ups and apps have been created, among which: condominium car parks open to the public so as to optimize spaces unused during office hours; Kiple, a start-up that organizes the exchange of children’s clothes; Kozaza, a platform for sharing apartments that also pursues the social aim to help the elderly feel less lonely, fostering the rental of empty rooms to young people, besides incentivizing the preservation of the hanok, the traditional house rented to tourists.

The second case concerns a recent project by Carlo Ratti—based on the sharing of spaces and ideas—who transformed a former American military village in Germany, the Patrick Henry Village in Heidelberg, into a 2.0 futuristic commune.

The designer and director of MIT Senseable City Lab in Boston said:

… the project was created and developed within the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA), an initiative that has been promoting cutting-edge architecture in Germany for more than a century now, and that is currently involved in creating in Heidelberg a new idea of city based on knowledge. We started the project asking ourselves how would a “commune” be like today, based on the principles of the sharing economy. This led to the idea of a co-working and co-living village, where new housing dynamics can be tested.²²

The Patrick Henry Village commune aims at hosting about 4,000 people interested in experimenting a different type of lifestyle: students, researchers, families and whoever shares the principles (mutuality, solidarity, democracy) of the “good sharing economy” at the basis of the project. Actually, this “contemporary commune” envisages not only the sharing of physical spaces, but also and especially of services and ideas. The designers considered the value of an extrovert place capable of starting a dialogue with the rest of the city. A village in which relationships are formed dynamically, both in physical space and in digital space, through the sharing of ideas and services both in physical environments and on a digital platform.²³

Therefore, the typical environments of the 1950s—houses, schools, garages, stores—will be reconverted, preserving the American suburban design. The idea is to maintain the small houses with garage, but to connect them with other houses. The ruined structures will become farmhouses: nature will be an integral part of life at the Patrick Henry Village. Common spaces and infrastructures will be the hinge of the project, which aims at realizing flexible environments. The most representative building of the project will be the Maker Palace, a large open source space that users may adapt depending on needs, whereas garages will become creative laboratories, since even mobility will be shared, thus limiting the idea of private cars and creating new lifestyles.

6 Interior and Spatial Design for Sharing Spaces

While architectural projects are bound to the urban structure, the advantage of Interior and Spatial design is to be very agile, expressing itself on a minor scale that can be disseminated in several episodes. It is systematic, often aiming at a possible condition, even removable and/or transferable, and can be updated. It also acts at environmental level and sometimes prizes on performance and ephemeral aspects connected to temporariness or virtuality (sensitive environments, integrated and increased reality). It dialogues perfectly with the most diverse environments: from the historical and precious environment, to the industrial one to be refunctionalized, to the most neglected and dirt space,²⁴ identifying each time appropriate characters, ways and languages.

It is an approach characterized by its ability to put in relation, synthetically and through variables, the most exquisitely configurative aspects of the urban spaces with those, each time, functional, symbolic, conceptual, temporal, cinematic; basically, with all the mutable elements that constitute a large part of the contemporaneous widespread urban scenarios. Therefore, it allows to dialogue perfectly with the complex virtual reality, made of apps and networks that defines the precious collective intelligence.

SERSE (www.serse.polimi.it) with the Spatial Design Studio # Sharing.Lab Milan + London studied these potentialities through an experimental approach, verifying how the physical condition of particular public/private spaces can become the place chosen to share sharing activities. In other words, how to attract in shared urban spaces activities that for the nature of the actual phenomenon are considered mainly digital, belonging to the big Web. Through the analysis of more than 130 apps and start-ups, various scenarios and project situations were simulated for sharing urban spaces that mediate the service offered on the Web face to face, as shown in Chap. 12. This has enabled to create a connection—through the qualitative action of design—between the digital/virtual space and the analogical/real space and consequently between the digital behaviour and the analogical behaviour.