Cities and the sharing economy

During my last days as a paid industry analyst on smart cities there was a flurry of interest from a few city administrations on how they should respond to the sharing economy. As often seems to be the case, here cities seem to have very little awareness of what efforts have been made by their peers in response to common issues or problems. It wasn't too hard to find out which cities had made a big effort to develop a strategy for dealing with the impact of the sharing economy (some of which might be better characterised as to how they could respond to the incursions of powerful platform economy companies), but few of them seem to have done this.

So this guide for municipalities prepared by the Canadian city of Guelph looks to be really useful - particularly since it sets out six decisions that municipalities need to make, and provides a handy set of resources.

And while we're on the subject, the Belgian city of Ghent has prepared a report (and a wiki) about commons-based initiatives in the city. The report is in Flemish...