Developing a first local lab

During the workshop, participants split into groups organized around specific urban environments and community focus areas, developing distinct ideas for sharing services and resources:

• Residential Neighborhood Integration: Centred on bridging an existing residential area with a newly constructed neighborhood. The group developed ideas around sharing living rooms, courtyards, parks, repair cafés, playgrounds, and dog parks, leveraging key local figures (like dog walkers and parents) to trigger spontaneous interactions and community cohesion.
• High-Rise / Large Building Ecosystems: Focused on integrating sharing systems within multi-storey buildings using a tree metaphor. In this model, the basement holds communized tools, equipment, and shared budgets, the ground floor acts as a shopfront “archive of needs”, and upper floors host pitched community projects (such as pierogi-making workshops).
• Elderly & Intergenerational Care: Focused on tackling social isolation and meeting the needs of older residents by treating seniors as valuable community resources. Their sharing concepts included intergenerational skill and story exchanges with young people, a pet-sharing system (where residents could temporarily rent pets like cats, rabbits, or dogs for companionship), and a creative idea for trained “Swiss dogs” to deliver pharmacy medication via dedicated street lanes.
• Community Gardens: Centred on courtyard gardens, moving beyond tool sharing to share water, seeds, plants, harvest, and agricultural knowledge. The group aimed to learn from older residents who were already tending small patches of land, offering support to transform those spaces into sustainable community gardens over time.
• Public Markets: Focused on markets as fluid third spaces for commercial and social exchange. Ideas included sharing physical market stalls, sound equipment, and promotional/sales knowledge between experienced and younger market traders, while evolving markets into health, well-being, and circularity/recycling hubs.

From local experiments to city policy

The first-lab exercise connected directly to the wider policy work of GOOD CITIES. A central question for the project is what role public authorities can play in developing the sharing economy of goods.

Eutropian is developing tools including a Social Business Model Canvas and Governance Toolkit to support cities and stakeholders in envisioning, planning and governing sharing-economy initiatives. The project is also working towards policy plans that bring together a city vision, positioning, good practices, KPIs, timelines, implementation budgets and procurement considerations that can foster circularity.

The workshop therefore connected the development of a sharing service in a particular place with the wider question of how cities can create the conditions for such services to develop and become part of longer-term urban policy.