Many of the physical spaces that architects, landscape architects, urbanists, and engineers design are inherently locales of joint access and participation. Such long-existing typologies of sharing include plazas, living rooms, libraries, waiting areas, museums, and cohousing schemes. The built environment serves as the platform within which myriad sociological, cultural, and technological forces share legal parameters and broader audiences. Today, digitally-based platforms, supported by vast physical infrastructures, facilitate new types of exchange. Such platforms bring about liberating possibilities to actualize transnational networks that coalesce around food, shelter, transportation, and talent. Yet, for every emancipatory path an equally restrictive one exists. Digitally-mediated sharing can serve as a mask for diffuse forms of financialization and extraction in spatial domains that traditionally conducted their day-to-day operations outside of the flows of global capital.
At the scale of the body and cognition, we are encouraged to share content, documents, and thoughts. We share a massive wake of data with corporations and governments every time we surf the web, ask Alexa a question, or allow our phones and wearables to trace our steps. At the architectural scale, home and ride sharing companies possess household name status; all the while various jurisdictions contest their legal standing. Coliving companies aspire to create global networks of buildings with flexible contracts, using sophisticated online tools and apps that allow residents to book rooms, plan events, and correspond with building operators, thus increasingly blurring physical and digital realms. For many new parks, public squares, and infrastructure projects, sharing becomes an operative word for navigating late-capitalist spatialities which vacillate between public and private. Such semantic equivocalness finds company in equally complex funding strategies typified by innovative permutations of public-private partnerships (PPPs).
