Sharing Neighbourhoods - The role of digital sharing platforms in social interaction in neighbourhoods

In the project "Sharing Neighbourhoods", we study how digital sharing can contribute to local and social urban development. Several factors in societal development, e.g., increased people mobility, changes in family structures and individualistic trends, tend to result in social isolation. A proactive approach to promote social inclusion is therefore important. Our main hypothesis is that digital sharing platforms can help solve a number of societal challenges threatening future cities. Reaching isolated people is difficult. Voluntary and ideal organizations have long experience in providing social services and organizing inclusive activities. At the same time, organizations face challenges in their daily work. Therefore, SINTEF and NTNU are collaborating with Trondheim Red Cross, Saupstad Frivilligsentral, Fretex and Seniorbett in Sharing Neighbourhoods. Through case studies about the services offered by the organizations, we found that achieving long-term and sustainable participation in voluntary activities is challenging. Several factors inhibit participation. For example, many only have the opportunity to participate sporadically and there is a lack of common meeting places that are easily shared. Digital sharing platforms can support flexible participation and therefore have the potential to engage more people. Sharing Neighborhoods has evaluated various themes and platforms. Our study of Nabohjelp, an app for sharing with neighbours, shows that the app can strengthen social relationships between users, and that it is relevant to people of all ages despite the app being marketed to young adults. Our study of sharing public spaces for social purposes shows that organizational challenges are the most challenging. From this, we have drawn recommendations on how best to design rooms and use digital platforms for sharing. Covid-19 has affected our work and forced us to postpone an experiment on personal follow-up towards work at Fretex. At the same time, we see that the situation has led to more users of sharing platforms used in a local context, e.g. NyBy and Nabohjelp. We therefore conducted a study about the usage of Nabohjelp during the confinement. Based on data collected before and after the lockdown, we conclude that Nabohjelp proved to be a useful channel for coordinating social and tangible resources during the lockdown. This indicates that digital sharing platforms can play an important role in the robustness of local societies in times of a pandemic. Despite the confinement, we conducted a study of "Strengthened to work", a career guidance and mentoring program conducted in collaboration between the non-profit organizations Fretex Pluss and Catalysts. The program targets foreign jobseekers with higher education from home. The study shows that the program works well even when meetings with job seekers became online. This type of mentoring scheme provides the opportunity to make contacts and seek advice from people who have a broader career competence than themselves. It has a motivating effect. We also found that participation in volunteer work is important in order to build networks and obtain references. We identified the need to develop a professional network and recommend more support to participants to acquire skills for using LinkedIn.

Main outcomes: - Recommendations for organising voluntary work at Røde Kors. - Knowledge about enablers and barriers for digital sharing in local contexts. - Recommendations to the mentoring programme "Styrket til arbeid" conducted by Fretex Pluss and Catatlysts. - Knowledge about digital barriers for seniors. Two new projects: - Engage (H2020) coordinated by SINTEF aims to engage citizen in response to emergencies. Trondheim Røde Kors leads a pilot. - COLDIGIT (Nordforsk) studies digital approaches to citizen participation in governance processes. Collaboration with NESTA from the advisory board. Two new proposals: - INCLUDE (JPI Urban Europe) aims to enhance community participation in urban transformation. Collaboration with OBOS. - "In charge of my own life 2.0" (IPO) aims to develop a new model for coordinating senior care. Collaboration with NyBy. Participation to the digital exclusion network set up by the Trondheim Library.

In today's technological societies, there is an emerging interconnection between city development and modern digital platforms. Sharing Neighbourhoods will exploit digitalization towards a socially inclusive and caring neighbourhood. The project addresses two thematic areas for the development of future cities: the social city and the economic city. It will study the impact of collaborative sharing platforms (CSP) on social inclusion and investigate the new economic models that these platforms enable in the neighbourhoods. Sharing Neighbourhoods is a knowledge production project: It will conduct case studies of existing social services, set-up CSP-based experiments building on knowledge from current practice, and derive requirements for a future digitalized care infrastructure and policies. Research in Sharing Neighbourhoods is multidisciplinary. The partners bring in knowledge from practice (voluntarism, unemployment, social care) and several research disciplines (ICT, social and cultural studies, urban development, applied economics). Sharing Neighbourhoods follows the adopter-oriented dissemination framework from D-Cubed. Beyond the transfer of outcomes, a main goal is to identify, understand and engage potential adopters. The project will organize events in public spaces and relevant organizations. It will involve adopters in co-creation of new concepts and elicitation of requirements for a future care infrastructure. Sharing Neighbourhoods has the potential to provide social and economical benefits to the city and society. In particular, the project will increase awareness of social challenges and community involvement, and motivate for citizens participation towards inclusive neighbourhoods. It will enable the society to exploit the unexploited work capacity, revitalize neighbourhoods and reduce social services provision costs. The project duration will be 36 months with a total budgeted effort of 71 PM including 1 Postdoc.