The Sharing Economy and the co-creation of value
"..a dangerous new tool that can be used by elites to undermine democracy and manufacture public support for their interests."
We don’t need to claim that all cults are bad to ask if it is wise to use them as a model for corporate marketing. Cults may be harmless in many cases, but when they aren’t, the results can be catastrophic. They seem to be uniquely vulnerable to corrupt and exploitative people who put themselves in leadership positions.
"Cults will flatter you. They will make you feel special and individual in a way that you are unlikely to have felt before. They will celebrate the very things that make you feel different from everyone else; the members will get to know you deep down, and they will love you for what they find you. And you will love them."
Having determined what motivates cult members, Atkin delivers a strategy for brand managers. To attract people who feel different, cult brands also have to be different. It’s a four step process.
- First, determine your brand’s sense of difference.
- Second, declare your difference—the belief system that set you apart.
- Third, demarcate the cult from the status quo by creating symbols, rituals, jargon, texts, clothing—a tangible way for cult members to live their difference, to mark themselves as apart from the mainstream
- The final step is demonize the other.
If a cult is first a community and then an ideology, it follows that fostering social interactions and the formation of ties among members of a cult brands is crucial. To build cult brands, businesses should build community, and Atkin thinks businesses are well-suited to building just the kinds of communities that modern people want: looser, more ad hoc communities that require less commitment and where members are bound together less because of a shared geography, and more because of common interests and ideas.
"Tactical Urbanism" an Alternative to Neoliberal Urbanism?
tl:dr Tactical urbanism may narrate itself as a self-evident alternative to neoliberal urbanism; but we must ask the question: is this really the case, and if so, how, where, under what conditions, via what methods, with what consequences, and for whom?
Uneven Growth = the shift from urbanizations benefitting the many into models of urban profit for the few.
Neoliberal urbanism, it should be emphasized, is not a unified, homogenous formation of urban governance, but rather represents a broad syndrome of market-disciplinary institutions, policies, and regulatory strategies... Across all the contextual diversity and evolutionary mutation, however, the common denominator of neoliberal urbanisms is the market-fundamentalist project of activating local public institutions and empowering private actors and organizations to extend commodification across the urban social fabric, to coordinate a city’s collective life through market relations, and to promote the enclosure of non-commodified, self- managed urban spaces.
This essay contains a criticism of the work 'Uneven-growth' and explores systems of urban repurposing. This reading is intended to promote reflection on the efficacy of urban space take over and encourage an imagining of healthy, densely populated cities and shared spaces. Is “Tactical Urbanism” an Alternative to Neoliberal Urbanism?
"the crisis of planetary urbanization” is intensifying. Megacities, and the broader territorial economies on which they depend, appear to be poorly equipped, in both operational and political terms, to resolve the monstrous governance problems and social conflicts that confront them. Under these conditions, Harvey grimly declares: “We are [ . . . ] in the midst of a huge crisis—ecological, social, and political—of planetary urbanization without, it seems, knowing or even marking it.” David Harvey
• Tactical urbanism arises in the context of a broader governance crisis in contemporary cities in which both states and markets have failed systematically to deliver basic public goods (such as housing, transportation and public space) to rapidly expanding urban populations.
• Tactical urbanism is not a unified movement or technique, but rather a general rubric through which to capture a broad range of emergent, provisional, experimental, and ad hoc urban projects.
• Tactical urbanism is mobilized from below, through organizationally, culturally, and ideologically diverse interventions to confront emergent urban issues. Professional designers, as well as governments, developers, and corporations may participate in and actively stimulate tactical urbanism. But its generative sources lie outside the control of any clique of experts or any specific institution, social class, or political coalition.
• Tactical urbanism proposes immediate, “acupunctural” modes of intervention in relation to local issues that are viewed as extremely urgent by its proponents. Its time horizon is thus relatively short, even impulsive or spontaneous. Likewise, its spatial scale tends to be relatively circumscribed—for instance, to the park, the building, the street or the neighborhood.
• Specific projects of tactical urbanism are said to evolve fluidly in relation to broader shifts in political-economic conditions, institutional arrangements, or coalitional dynamics. These qualities of malleability and open-endedness are widely praised in discussions of tactical urbanism, generally in contrast to the comprehensive plans, formal legal codes, and rigid blueprints that were characteristic of modernist-statist projects of urban intervention.
• Tactical urbanism generally promotes a grassroots, participatory, hands-on, do-it-yourself vision of urban restructuring, in which those who are most directly affected by an issue actively mobilize to address it, and may continually mobilize to influence the evolution of methods and goals. For this reason, tactical urbanism is often presented as an open-source model of action and as a form of reappropriation of urban space by its users.
There are at least three highly plausible scenarios in which tactical urbanism will have either negligible or actively beneficial impacts upon a neoliberalized urban rule-regime.
Subversion: Tactical urbanism interrupts the basic logics of growth-first, market-oriented urban governance and points toward alternative urban futures based on grassroots democracy and social justice.
Reinforcement: Tactical urbanism alleviates some of the governance failures and disruptive socio-spatial consequences of neoliberal urbanism, but without threatening its grip on the regulatory framework governing urban development.
Entrenchment: Tactical urbanism internalizes a neoliberal agenda (for instance, related to a diminished role for public institutions and/or an extension of market forces) and thus contributes to the further entrenchment and extension of neoliberal urbanism.
Neutrality: Tactical urbanism emerges in interstitial spaces that are neither functional to, nor disruptive of, the neoliberal project. It thus coexists with neoliberal urbanism in a relationship that is neither symbiotic, parasitic, nor destructive.
Contingency: Tactical urbanism opens up a space of regulatory experimentation that, under certain conditions, contributes to the subversion of neoliberal programs. But, in other contexts, with many of the same conditions present, this does not occur. The impacts of tactical urbanism on neoliberal urbanism are thus contingent; they hinge upon factors extrinsic to it.
Tactical urbanism may be narrated as a self-evident alternative to neoliberal urbanism; but we must ask the question: is this really the case, and if so, how, where, under what conditions, via what methods, with what consequences, and for whom?
Thoughts form the group
- Promotes governmentality (when people are taught to govern themselves, shifting power from a center authority, like a state or institution, and dispersing it among a population)
- Even a good strategy can be absorbed by neoliberal tendencies.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right\_to\_the\_city