[News] Sharing City Seoul: a Model for the World
Mayor Park (directly in front of the sculpture) and Seoul citizens hear the call for a sharing city.
Citizens the world over are rallying around the sharing economy as a solution to the pressing challenges they face. Cities, which are perfectly positioned to enact big changes on a human scale, have the potential to lead this movement.
Seoul, a city of 10 million people, is a shining example of how to do just that. The city government has officially embraced the sharing economy by designating Seoul a Sharing City and is working in partnership with NGOs and private companies to make sharing an integral part of Seoul's economy.
Last year, Shareable reported on Seoul’s Sharing City initiative shortly after it was launched. Announcements had been made and initiatives were seeded, but Sharing City Seoul was brand new.
Now, over a year into the execution of the Sharing City project, we checked in to see how things are progressing. What we found is a city, led by Mayor Won-soon Park, a political independent who spent 30 years as a human rights activist, that is committed to the official implementation of the sharing economy. Other city leaders take note: this mind-bogglingly dense city is creating an official sharing ecosystem and, led by the Seoul Innovation Bureau within the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG), they are seeing promising early results.
Tool libraries are one of dozens of Sharing City projects.
Setting the Sharing Stage
Now one of the world’s most modern mega-cities, Seoul was leveled during the Korean War. But it has grown at a blazing fast rate to become a global leader in many dimensions since.
The rapid industrialization of Seoul, and the more recent economic slowdown, however, have come with a heavy price including high unemployment, housing costs, and air pollution. Within Seoul, there has been little peer-to-peer exchange of goods. Like other economies marked by high levels of consumption, people tend to buy things new rather than share. This consumption mindset has led 49 percent of households into debt and created a massive waste management challenge as nearly 9,000 tons of trash is generated by Seoul every day.
Along with environmental problems, rapid growth also created social challenges. As Seoul expanded into a megacity, people became more and more isolated. In the last 10 years, the number of seniors living alone in Seoul has grown from 90,000 to 230,000 and the suicide rate in Seoul has nearly doubled from 1,376 to 2,391, which has contributed to South Korea leading OECD countries in suicide per capita. The fast pace of life in Seoul has contributed to South Korea ranking second in hours worked and having one of the lowest happiness scores among OECD countries.
Taken together, it's obvious there's a pressing need to reinvent the city. Seoul is certainly not the only city with these issues. It is, however, fertile ground for the sharing economy to take root. Seoul has built world-class IT and civic infrastructure; it has the highest fiber optic broadband penetration and fastest Internet in the world; it offers free WiFi service in all outdoor spaces; and has the highest smartphone penetration rate in the world at over 67 percent. It also has one of the best subway systems, also wired for high speed Internet.
Using this infrastructure, in addition to strong public-private partnerships, the Sharing City project is working to connect people to sharing services and each other, recover a sense of trust and community, reduce waste and over-consumption, and activate the local economy.
Inside the Sharing City
Mayor Park is leading a wave of social innovation in Seoul and opening a new chapter in the city's history. The Sharing City is a sharp turn from the rapid growth of the last 40 years, but it’s one that the city government is fully embracing. And one that has the potential to transform "The Miracle on the Han.”
Shareable’s co-founder Neal Gorenflo, who recently visited Seoul, points out that this ability to change quickly could catalyze their sharing economy. “If the South Korean people decide this is where they want to go,” he says, “I think they'll move quickly—just as they were able to move quickly to become a modern country.”
The city’s density, its tech-enabled citizenry, and world-class infrastructure can support Seoul’s plan to become a global leader of the sharing movement. As Su Jeong Kim of the Social Innovation Division explains, Seoul has a unique environment with 60 percent of its inhabitants living in apartment buildings. The city is leveraging this by catalyzing the formation of lending libraries in apartment buildings. There are now 32 apartment building lending libraries. While this is a small number for a mega-city, apartment building lending libraries have the potential to become social hubs for Seoul's many vertical communities.
Source & full text : https://www.shareable.net/sharing-city-seoul-a-model-for-the-world/