Collaborative living: A city is still not a tree.

Collaborative living is believed nowadays to be a Trojan horse within the uncontrolled capitalist system. To share instead of to possess has settled a new social and economic revolution.

According to MIT collaborative living is nowadays moving 26.000 millions of dollars and it is expected to be the next economic boom with an increase to 110.000 millions The city network is not a hierarchized network anymore. We have reached a network in which each node has the same importance. Digitalization and the Internet-of-Things have created a new way of consuming. Answering the capitalism inefficiency collaborative thinking and living has opened the future cities structural form question.

As Christopher Alexander argued in 1965 in “A city is not a tree”, city structure, is not a tree. Both centralized and decentralized tree planning city models are out of date. We have entered an era in which the Internet-of-Things and Big Data technology have made every node in the city network have the same value. City Planning should be based on the idea of social innovation and empowerment, on the new idea of a network in which all nodes have the same value, and, considering of course the citizen, a node of equal value on the net.

Discussing the proposal of the new cities as the “global Post-Industrial Cities” its recently debating the validity of Western urbanism traditional methods. This new behavior, collaborative living and consuming, affects all aspects of any citizen’s life. Crowd lending as Kickstarter or Lendingclub affect direct monetary institutions as banks and loan companies.

Others like Uber or Airb&b crash directly with the interest of some important aspects in the city as taxi transport or hotel bookings. being also the law, not ready yet to establish a new policy for this type of collective living. With DogVacay your pets will always have a walking and hosting friend. Share your meal offers you the possibility to share your cooking with people in your neighborhood.

In “What’s mine is yours” Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers analyze the future and present implications of collaborative consumption dealing with the main economical global questions arising from this new way of living.

Unprecedented collaborative services allowed by the software industry will influence the next city typology. A large collection of many small systems, citizens in our case, makes up a large and complex system and that system behaviour is not of an easy prediction.