As part of the Urban Sharing and Sharing and the City projects, IIIEE researchers Oksana Mont, Yuliya Voytenko Palgan, Andrius Plepys and Ana Maria Arbelaez Velez conducted an online Mobile Research Lab to explore the landscape of the sharing economy in the city context and produced a report “Urban Sharing in Melbourne”. The report focuses on sharing in three sectors: space, mobility, and physical goods. For each sector, drivers and barriers for the sharing economy are explored, associated sustainability impacts and impacts on incumbent sectors are discussed, and the institutional context is analysed. The researchers have also investigated the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on sharing economy organisations and their response strategies. The role of selected municipal governments in Melbourne in engaging with the sharing economy and specific governance mechanisms employed by them are discussed.

In Spring 2022, Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan together with the Urban Sharing Team at Lund University finalised the case study on the sharing economy in Melbourne. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak the researchers had to postpone the physical visit within the Mobile Research Lab to Melbourne. However, they have conducted 29 interviews and literature review produced a full report (forthcoming). The findings from the case study are summarised in a snapshot on “Urban Sharing in Melbourne”.

Sharing and the City PI Yuliya Voytenko Palgan and Thea Ohlander Arfwidsson, a project leader for Climate Neutral Lund at Lund municipality, supervised the research performed by three students from the University of Virginia, USA, on the sharing economy in Lund. Elsa Jensen, Anna Mollen and Elly Zarzyski conducted a survey and intercept interviews with Lund residents to evaluate their interest to participate in the sharing economy activities to reduce consumption. Elsa, Anna and Elly in their report provide recommendations to Lund municipality on how to strategically advance the sharing economy by undertaking regulator, host, matchmaker and communicator role from the municipal governance framework by Yuliya Voytenko Palgan.

On 11 June 2021, Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan presented her research done together with Urban Sharing project leader Oksana Mont at the III International Conference European Dimensions of Sustainable Development, which was held online in Kyiv, Ukraine. The presentation “Municipal Governance of the Sharing Economy: Insights and Examples from Gothenburg, Sweden” was well-received by the audience, who asked questions and provided insightful comments comparing the sharing economy development in Sweden and Ukraine.

On 10 June 2021, Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan presented at the International Jean Monnet Summer School and Roundtable “The European Green Deal and the Circular Economy: Challenges for Ukraine” organised online from Kyiv, Ukraine. In her presentation “Sharing Economy: Definitions, Examples and Sustainability” Yuliya introduced the sharing economy concept and its multiple definitions, and discussed the design and business models of sharing economy organisations.

Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan was invited by the City of Gothenburg to present her research on “Municipal Governance of the Sharing Economy: Local and Global Insights” at the webinar series “Sharing City Gothenburg” on 6 May, 2021. The webinar was organised by the City of Gothenburg in the framework of the Sharing Cities Sweden innovation programme, and it was primarily targeted at politicians and government officials.

Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan presented her latest study “Municipal Governance of the Sharing Economy: Global Insights” done together with Prof. Oksana Mont at the 7th International Workshop on the Sharing Economy (7IWSE), which was organised virtually on 24-27 February 2021 by the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Barcelona, Spain, in collaboration with the Dimmons research group. The presentation has been well-received and triggered a lively discussion. In particular, several future research directions have been identified. For example, future studies could explore in depth one or a few governance mechanisms and roles and compare them across several cities. Another future research direction could focus on the temporal aspect of governance mechanisms and roles by analysing the evolution of those and seeking for explanations why certain ways of governing have been exercised in different cities at certain points in time.

Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan contributed to a report “The Future of Sharing: A Roundtable for Horizon Scanning on Sharing Cities”, which was produced by Sharing Cities Sweden and Sharing Cities Alliance after the “Sharing Cities - Shaping Tomorrow” roundtable. Specifically Yuliya commented on the future of sharing in cities and communities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in which ways our cities can “build back better” using the sharing economy.

Sharing and the City PI Yuliya Voytenko Palgan and Urban Sharing PI Oksana Mont presented their work “ON THE FUTURE OF SHARING CITIES: CRISES, CITIES AND COMMUNITIES” at the Sharing City Forum held at 2020 Seoul Innovation Week on 27 November 2020. They also participated in the panel discussion “The Era of Coronavirus: Sharing City Strategy that Strengthens the City Resilience” on the direction of cooperation among sharing cities for better resilience in the pandemic and Seoul’s suggestion. The panel was moderated by Neal Gorenflo, the Head of Shareable.

On 16 November, 2020, Sharing Cities Sweden and Sharing Cities Alliance organised a roundtable on “SHARING CITIES: SHAPING TOMORROW”. Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan commented on the future of sharing in cities and communities. The roundtable focused on the topic ‘From challenges to chances for change’. The purpose of this roundtable was to share insights and ideas on the future of sharing in our cities and communities. In this time of pandemics and crises (including the impacts of the corona virus and how we emerge from this pandemic as well as the global climate and biodiversity crises), it is not only about finding short-term answers to all the challenges we face today, but also developing robust and engaging long-term visions to find our way towards a better and brighter future than before.

Sharing and the City researcher Associate Professor Yuliya Voytenko Palgan and Principal investigator of Urban Sharing project Professor Oksana Mont, together with the IIIEE aluma Simo Sulkakoski, have recently published an article in the international peer reviewed journal Cities. In their new article “Governing the sharing economy: Towards a comprehensive analytical framework of municipal governance”, the authors developed a comprehensive analytical framework for municipal governance of the sharing economy, comprising five municipal governance mechanisms: regulating, providing, enabling, self-governing, collaborating, and eleven roles. The framework is informed by literature and rich empirical data from 139 interviews with diverse sharing economy actors in seven global cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, Gothenburg, London, Malmö, San Francisco & Toronto.

Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan together with the support from Urban Sharing team has developed a blog The World of Urban Sharing and published it on Shareable website. Shareable is an award-winning non-profit news, action and connection hub for the sharing transformation. In this blog, we have summarised our academic publications and our outputs oriented at different societal actors including municipalities, sharing economy organisations, knowledge institutes, sharing economy lobby groups, NGOs, other experts and broader society. This blog offers a quick catalogue of e-resources that Urban Sharing team has developed during the past two years.

On 14 October, Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan participated in a workshop on Sharing Economy and Urban Sustainability together with her Urban Sharing colleagues from Lund University and Chinese colleagues from the School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University, China and Sectional Committee, Sociology of Consumption at the Chinese Sociological Association. Yuliya presented the research performed by her, Oksana Mont and Simo Sulkakoski on how municipalities govern the sharing economy and why their governance approaches differ. The work builds on extensive empirical data from 8 cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, Gothenburg, London, Malmö, Shanghai, San Francisco and Toronto.

In Spring 2020, Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan together with the Urban Sharing Team at Lund University started collecting data to explore the sharing economy landscape in Shanghai. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak the researchers had to postpone the planned Mobile Research Lab to Shanghai. However, they have conducted a number of interviews and literature reviewes as the first step in analysing Shanghai case study. Initial findings from the case study are summarised in a snapshot on “Urban Sharing in Shanghai”.

In this article, Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan together with her colleagues Kes McCormick and Charlotte Leire at the IIIEE, Lund University, present the ambitions and design of a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on five ways to shape the sharing economy in cities.

Lately, municipalities have been facing multiple socio-economic and environmental challenges brought by the sharing economy. Earlier Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan and Urban Sharing researcher Oksana Mont identified a need to systematically explore the differences in the governance approaches, strategies, instruments, mechanisms and roles chosen by various municipalities in relation to the sharing economy in general, its specific segments (e.g. sharing of accommodation, mobility or physical goods), and different types of sharing economy organisations. A new upcoming book chapter by the researchers “Municipal Governance of the sharing economy: Global insights” addresses this research need as it aims to deliver a cross-case and cross-sectoral comparative analysis of municipal governance of the sharing economy in eight global cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, Gothenburg, London, Malmö, San Francisco, Shanghai and Toronto. The book chapter is submitted for a publication in the edited book “The Sharing Economy: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges” by Babak Taheri, Roya Rahimi, and Dimitrios Buhalis.

Launched in May 2020, check out the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) by Sharing Cities Sweden and the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE) at Lund Univerisity. Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan is one of the key educators in this MOOC. Sign up for free!

Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan together with researchers from the IIIEE at Lund University and Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) Oksana Mont, Karin Bradley and Lucie Zvolska published an Editorial for the Special Issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production on the Sharing Economy providing an overview of a decade of research on the sharing economy in terms of conceptual developments, users of the sharing economy, business models and actors and governance issues.