My name is Siarhei Manzhynski. I'm a researcher at Umeå School of Business Economics and Statistics. It's a full affiliation I'm working on sustainability and tech innovation issues, but I'm also involved in sharing economy issues. Frankly speaking, I have a bit ambivalent feelings when it comes to sharing economy because on the one hand, it's a unique opportunity to use unused capacities from people, from firms, sectors, companies, but on the other hand, we need to be very careful because my firm belief is that sharing economy or sharing services are part of the general way towards sustainability and sustainable development. We need to know if it makes sense in terms of sustainability, that's why evaluation processes are very important for such projects. Umeå now is a very rapidly growing city and we have ambitious goals to increase population. Of course, we're in a city and sharing economy facilitates could have a unique opportunity for us to provide services to our people and on the other hand, to become more sustainable or at least to save our sustainable way. One of the examples is a digital platform where people could share whatever they own from a power drill to summer houses. But for me, a more interesting example is a service hub that we're trying to develop in new districts of our city, and to provide in the same place, different services based on digital platforms. The other goal of that is to decrease environmental impact. One of the examples is mobility services. Instead to own a car, to use mobility as a service, to develop some sharing platform where people could rent a bike, call a taxi, or to use public transport in one place, in one subscription. Moreover, our city is like a student city, a university city. A lot of young people live temporarily in Umeå, and of course, we need to provide them a good opportunity to share their services. It's well known fact that young people are more engaged in such things like a sharing economy and facilities. They're more open to new things. The most general challenges are, sharing services could lead to good results in terms of the economy, but these results could contradict to environmental outcomes or societal outcomes. That's why it's very important to evaluate in a proper way these facilities and make sure that we don't increase environmental impact and don't increase social issues as well. A quite well-known example in the usage sphere is called the rebound effect. For example, we're organizing something like a mobility service because it's less costly for them. Probably, you would want to use it more and more, and as a result, the general consumption of fossil fuels or usage of cars is increasing. City governments are on their way to support, rather support with services. Our opinion from our research side is to be careful from the side and to conduct a comprehensive estimation or an evaluation of that, and after that, to make a decision if it makes sense to support that. Sharing assumes to do something together. If we're doing something together, but have own and probably different interests, it could also induce tensions between individuals, between providers, between other stakeholders. That's why we need to take into account interests or aims of different stakeholders, and that's why different stakeholders must be involved, but it's very hard to involve all parts in the process. I guess sharing economy, sharing services are unique opportunity for our city, for our growing young cities. It's also education process I would say because, if we're sharing not only services, we're sharing knowledge about that and young people know more and more about our society and about each other. It's a good social innovation and social process of engaging all together now In the city through co-building, co-creating. I'm very exciting to hear other cities' examples and aspirants in this sphere. Maybe it's not very relevant to our city because we're not so big as Stockholm or Gothenburg, but at the same time, it is a good example and I would like to share these information with my colleagues and other stakeholders, we're organizing different seminars and other events in order to share our resources and knowledge about sharing cities.
