Peer to Peer Relationality

* Essay: Peer to Peer Relationality: The City and Networked Innovation, Daniel Araya & Michel Bauwens

Source, from the Book: Smart Cities as Democratic Ecologies. Ed. by Daniel Araya. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Abstract

"Anonymity is nothing new in cities. What is more unusual and perhaps even contradictory is the convergence of sociability and anonymity in the city. Through an analysis of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, we consider the growing value of systems for sharing and combining individual efforts on the Internet into collective tasks. If we look at the historical development of relationality, this may lead us to challenge any simplistic identification of P2P collaboration with anonymity. What is the potential of P2P for urban development, democratization and innovation? P2P has to be seen as an objectoriented sociality, where person-fragments cooperate around the creation of common value. What connects individuals who participate in open and shared knowledge? How does this collaborative logic seen in software and design projects connect individuals to some transcendental collective goal? How might building a universal operating system, constructing a universal free encyclopedia or constructing an open source car reshape the way we construct our cities?"