As a city living continuous to grow trendier by the day, new philosophies are emerging about the importance of architecture. Architecture is critical to urban development, it can transform space over time to allow for adaptation. These transformations are taking place everywhere, it’s in the global economics, political, and social structure down to the way people live their everyday life. Urban transformations targets a better social, economic and spatial qualities of urban cities.
Today we share a global culture, yet live out lives in “local places.” Recently a trending social act has been developing rapidly which is shared economy. I ask myself this question, is shared economy is a recent phenomenon? Or was it embedded in us without realizing? I believe shared economy was a part of us that we naturally did without realizing, a simple example is donation it’s sharing your economy to people in need. Another example of shared economy that isn’t human to human relation is building green roofs or green facades, its sharing the economy by creating a habitat for animals and giving back to the environment. However, its not till recently that we realized that shared economy is a successful business model that makes billions of dollars. Therefore, this idea of shared economy was put on steroids to create all these uprising companies like Uber and Airbnb.
As city population grows, leading to densified cities, the shared economy could help reduce the global impact of living as an individual and more so reducing the impact by causing less to none as a whole unit. Shared economy has offered innovation solutions to a lot of matters from reducing food waste, to generating income from unused spaces. For example, during the Rio Olympics this lady rents out her villa for different AirBnb renters to generate a total of $15,000. Because the law of demand and supply dominates here, it is both benefits the owner and the user, where the owner utilized unused space generating income with zero cost. And the users find a competing price from those big chain hotels. This model isn’t just a good at money making, but also allow social communications and interactions between people. As the lady who owned the villa “it’s a social act, I set with them at dinner and learn more about their culture.”
Coming back to the architectural role in these business models. How can the architecture and urban planning help promote this social act of shared economy?. Do we want to promote this idea of shared economy and support AirBnb? How can we merge this idea of share economy with the work space, to be living and working situation without disturbing privacy and security.