Back when I worked in Brisbane City Council I worked with a very clever man called Frank. Frank was the Manager of City Assets, responsible for overseeing management of Council's vast portfolio of land, buildings, infrastructure, equipment and so forth. I was responsible for housing and homelessness initiatives and Frank organised for Council to donate some fabulous parcels of land for the Brisbane Housing Company, a new affordable housing company we were kicking off alongside the State Government. He also handed over a small stock of spare houses to homelessness organisations to use for short-term housing until they were needed for their original purpose.
Frank decided it was time to solve this problem. He persuaded Council to adopt what seemed like a radical solution. Instead of each team having its own cars, all the cars in each location would belong to a single pool, bookable by any staff member. In the central office where I was, the pool was managed by a relatively junior administrative assistant who sat in the building foyer and combined the job with directing confused members of the public to the right floor.
The result was like magic. Before the reform, the car-park was full and people were catching taxis all over town. Afterwards, I never used a taxi again. Even if I had to go out at half an hour's notice, there was always a car available. When I got back to the office I would have the choice of dozens of car parks because the cars were out, being used, as they were supposed to be. The problem wasn't solved by buying more cars, despite us all asking Council to do this at every budget. It was solved by sharing them better. In the process, we changed our mindset, from one focused on scarcity ('we need more cars', but also 'I will book this car in case I need it, otherwise it won't be available') to one focused on abundance ('it's so great that we have easy access to cars now!').
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As well as celebrating the cleverness of a former colleague, I'm telling this story because it's very similar to a problem we have in our wider society. Just sticking with cars for a moment, our cities and towns are overrun with them - driving along the roads, but more so parked on our road-sides, in massive car-parks, and in individual garages on people's properties. The street outside our home is always littered with at least half a dozen of them, sometimes un-moved for days on end, even though each residence also has at least one off-street car-park.
Cars aren't the only things subject to this dynamic. I have a lawnmower under my house that I use maybe ten times a year. I have shelves full of books that have been read once. I have an extendable ladder which I use maybe half a dozen times a year. I have a suit-coat I wear to the occasional family wedding or funeral. And so it goes on.
Why do I own all these things, some of them (like the car) quite expensive, which I only use occasionally? The main reason is that I know I will need them sometimes, and when I do it is easiest to have then sitting there waiting for me. If I didn't own a car, then when I needed to drive somewhere I would need to borrow or hire one - this would involve booking it, collecting it from wherever it is (usually a long way from me), using it, then taking it back and getting home. It would cost me money and time. Otherwise, I could adjust my life around not driving - this would involve either using taxis or Uber drivers (also expensive and needing pre-booking), or allowing extra time for a complex bus, train or bike journey on Brisbane's patchy public transport or bikeway networks. It would be possible, but harder.
If we were to take a 'Frank's-eye-view' of my neighbourhood we could easily see another solution. If we combined all the cars in our neighbourhood into a single pool, available for booking by any neighbour, we would most likely collectively be able to sell half of them and still have plenty of cars for whenever any of us needed them. Some with lawnmowers - we could easily get by with one or two for the neighbourhood. As a community, we don't just have more stuff than the planet can supply - we objectively have way more than we need.
Of course the problem Frank solved was practically much easier because all the cars ultimately had the same owner, a large, well-resourced local government. Although each team had exclusive use of certain vehicles this was merely an administrative arrangement. Although the change took creative thinking and a certain amount of management determination, the barriers to making it were comparatively low. Not so with my neighbourhood car problem.
The problem to be solved is not primarily technical or economic, it is social and cultural. I barely know my neighbours. Some I've spoken to about things like trimming trees that hang over their properties. I've lent a few tools to my immediate neighbour. Some I have occasional polite conversations with. Some I have never spoken to and some I wouldn't recognise if I met them elsewhere. We are a long way from being able to jointly manage collective assets, be they lawnmowers or cars.
We also don't live in a culture in which sharing is normal, at least not outside extended family. In fact, the mower that sits under my house for all but ten hours a year was once shared with a few different family members, but people's circumstances changed and now I'm the only one who uses it. I could share it with someone else, although it's getting near the end of its useful life, but who?
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To me, this is just a little snapshot of one of the reasons it's much easier to preach the necessity of degrowth than to achieve it. To summarise, we live in an atomised, individualised culture. We have mostly superficial relationships with all but a few people, often scattered far and wide. This leads to a scarcity mindset in which the need for an item usually results in us buying one for ourselves and then keeping it for the odd occasion we might need it again. This culture is reinforced by our society in numerous ways.
Yet we do actually have ways to overcome them, some of them well developed, others green shots which could potentially flower into flourishing trees. One way to think about them is to think about books (which, as regular readers will know, are a big part of my life), Council libraries and street libraries.
I am a regular customer at my local Council library. If I read a review of a book I'd like to read, the library is always the first place I look. If they have it, I borrow it instead of buying it. A large proportion of the books reviewed on this blog (including both the books on degrowth with which I started this series) were borrowed from there. The Council library is well-resourced, has a large collection, is easy to access and costs me nothing. It's a fantastic service. It does have limitations though. It only has a certain amount of resources and shelf space. It only buys books that it thinks might have a fairly wide appeal. Often the books I want to read are fairly obscure and specialised - for instance, no-one who's not a social policy nerd would have much interest in Mark Considine. Hence, I still have a house full of books.
This model applies to various other areas of our lives. For instance, one part of the solution to the car dilemma is public transport. If I want to travel into the CBD or to some other locations it's actually easier to take the bus or train than to drive myself, and the fares have recently been reduced to 50c. This is possible thanks to a considerable public investment over many years. Yet Australian cities, including mine, are not well serviced by public transport. Our urban sprawl is largely facilitated by car ownership rather than dense bus or train networks. The weekly trip to care for the grandkids, which takes about 20 minutes each way in the car, would be a tedious multi-legged bus trip taking about an hour and a half (or the best part of an hour on the bike).
This model can apply to other stuff, too. People regularly leave furniture or other items on the footpath for anyone to take who wants it. I often see these things advertised on our community Facebook page and usually someone will take them. It's a more productive alternative to leaving them gathering dust in the garage, or taking them to the dump. This process is also a little more formalised through local 'buy nothing' groups, where people will advertise things to the group to give away and also request items they are looking for that others may have gathering dust.
These two pathways - the Council library and the street library - represent good beginning points for using shared items as bridges to degrowth. They are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. One builds a solid foundation of public services which can provide all citizens with basic services that improve our collective quality of life. The other builds a local habit and spirit of sharing and can help create community relationships. These give us something to build on. You wouldn't start to build a sharing economy by suggesting to your neighbours that you all pool ownership of your cars because they would think you had lost your mind. But you could build good neighbourhood relations by offering a set of books to loan, or some basic tools, and this can encourage others to do the same. Starting at this level, the risk is low - at worst, you lose a few books or a screwdriver - and you can then build step by step to bigger things.
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The reason I am focusing on this is because when you say 'degrowth' it's likely that what most people hear is 'austerity'. We've all seen the impact of government austerity measures. Pensions and benefits get cut, public infrastructure slowly crumbles, patients wait for hours in hospital emergency departments, your call to Centrelink or the tax office is directed to a never-ending queue. 'Degrowth' sounds like it will be like this only more so, leading into the heart of our daily lives - our homes, kitchens, bathrooms and garages. It is a tale of woe.
We need to flip this script. Degrowth needs to mean abundance - not of stuff we don't need, but of relationships, networks, sharing and collective security. But I don't currently know how to do this - I lack the skills and the network of relationships to make it happen. Most others in our society are the same. If we are to bring our global resource use down to a sustainable level, these are the skills, relationships and systems we need to grow. Otherwise, it will be too easy for our billionaire oligarchs to simply scare us off. Speaking of whom....
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