Democratic by Design: How Carsharing, Co-ops, and Community Land Trusts Are Reinventing America
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Democratic by Design: How Carsharing, Co-ops, and Community Land Trusts Are Reinventing America
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Overview
Americans have, since our founding, participated in a variety of alternative institutions--self-organized projects that work outside the traditional structures of government and business to change society. From the town meetings that still serve as our ideal of self-governance, to the sustainable food movement that is changing the way we think about farming the land and feeding our families, these secondary structures have given rise to many of our most exciting and important innovations. Yet most people still know little about them, even as their numbers and their influence increase.
In today's climate of widespread economic inequity, political gridlock and daunting environmental challenges, we sorely need a fresh approach to social and political change. In Democratic by Design, Gabriel Metcalf sketches out a strategy that starts with small-scale, living examples of a better society that can ultimately scale up to widespread social transformation. Using examples like car-sharing organizations, community land trusts, credit unions, workers co-ops, citizen juries, community-supported agriculture farms, mission-driven corporations, and others, Democratic by Design shows how alternative institutions can be the crucial spark for a broad new progressive movement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466879287 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Gabriel Metcalf serves as executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), one of the leading urban planning organizations in America. He is a frequent writer and speaker on these topics. He has been profiled in national media, including the Wall Street Journal, and in the San Francisco Examiner and other local media. He has a degree from University of California, Berkeley in City and Regional Planning. He lives in San Francisco.
Gabriel Metcalf was one of the founders of car-sharing in North America and serves as executive director of the SF Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), a premier urban planning organization. He is one of the leading voices on urban policy, social change, and organizational strategy. He has a degree from the University of California, Berkeley in City and Regional Planning and lives in San Francisco.
Read an Excerpt
Democratic by Design
How Carsharing, Co-ops, and Community Land Trusts Are Reinventing America
By Gabriel Metcalf
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 Gabriel MetcalfAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7928-7
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Things aren't right in America today — the emergence of a more unequal class structure; the corruption of our democracy by unlimited campaign spending; our inability to do anything about climate change; the wasteful sprawling of suburbia across the landscape; and the general sclerosis of our political system, which seems to preclude solution-seeking.
But this is not a book about what's wrong. This is a book about what to do about it — specifically, about an approach to social change that involves building alternative institutions.
The idea is to create living examples of a better society. These projects can then be seen, studied, improved on, and copied. People can join them or support them. If the alternative institutions are good enough at what they are trying to do, they will expand and multiply. Eventually, some of them will actually begin to out-compete the mainstream institutions that they stand alongside.
Participation in alternative institutions has been one of the most widespread forms of progressive activism, yet it remains undertheorized and poorly understood. Through this book, I hope to change that. My goal is to provide a more substantial intellectual underpinning for the institution-building strategy of social change — to examine the historical precedents, explore how alternative institutions work, and suggest some principles that will be useful for activists.
Many of the existing alternative institutions in the United States trace their roots to two waves of activity — the first in the 1920s and 1930s, which centered on consumer cooperatives, including food co-ops, rural electricity co-ops, and credit unions, and the second in the 1960s and 1970s, which included free schools, alternative media, community health clinics, and communes. A more recent wave of activity includes developing local currencies, community land trusts, and carsharing cooperatives.
A THEORY OF PIECEMEAL CHANGE
The central idea of the alternative institution strategy is that we should focus on creating elements of a better society today, one institution at a time. This approach means that we do not have to convince people to agree with a comprehensive critique of society's ills or have the same view of what a better society would look like. We simply have to find people who agree with us about better ways to achieve specific ends.
This is an important distinction. It is simply not possible to convince a majority of people to adopt a progressive analysis wholesale. It wouldn't be possible even if all progressives suddenly agreed with one another. There are just too many topics, and it is hopeless to try to win over a majority of people with a long list of platforms, proposals, and critiques.
The strategy of alternative institutions proceeds in an entirely different, and more achievable, manner. It suggests that we can work one project at a time, with as many people as we can get to join us on each project. We can work with people to create new institutions even if they have different motivations than we do. Alternative institutions are a strategy of minimum consensus. We only need to build agreement about what we want to create next. And this is hard enough. It takes years of work and strong organizing skills to build support for changing even one institution in a community. It takes wisdom and foresight to know which institutions are ripe for changing, which ones to take on first, and which ones to leave for later.
Underlying this approach to social change is skepticism about the usefulness of the concept of "social systems." Of course, many of us try to understand social problems in a systematic way — to perceive the underlying or structural causes of the problems we would like to solve. But there is not just one system; there are many. The military-industrial complex. The intertwined structures of race and class. Corporate agribusiness. Suburbia. Patriarchy ... This list could go on and on, huge topics with oceans of ink written about them, each in need of change.
These big systems are not likely to be subject to sweeping transformation of a revolutionary or reformist variety. When the Left ascends, as historically it has done from time to time, it's not in a position to summarily remake any of these systems. It's only when we can address the individual parts of our social order that we can realistically hope to change them.
That's the basic theory of alternative institutions: society is composed of smaller institutions or organizations that are subject to change. Activists work to create new institutions, one at a time — each one building on the last, each new institution opening up possibilities for further changes.
This book is grounded in a very personal experience. For six years, I worked to establish a carsharing cooperative with two of my best friends. We had worked on other projects together and talked about the potential of alternative institutions for a long time. We agreed that the existing alternative institutions, at least as far as we had experienced them, were not living up to their potential — in particular, because of their inability to involve people who were not already politically active. We set out with the explicit goal of building something that could become mainstream — that could successfully involve regular Americans of any political stripe.
It was a lot harder than it looked. In some ways, we met with incredible success: we helped bring carsharing to North America! In other ways, we fell far short of what we wanted to accomplish. We faced difficult choices about how much to compromise our ideals in order to allow the project to grow. And we learned a lot about the practical realities of building an alternative institution in the real world.
When it was time for me to step away from the carsharing project, I decided to write this book. It's my chance to share some of what I learned, as one activist trying to effect social change in a nontraditional way — in the hope that my experiences might be useful to others who can, with luck, carry the work farther than we did.
In addition to my experience with City CarShare, I have worked for more than twenty years in the field of city planning. While this is not a book about urbanism, my own interests in transportation, housing, economic development, regional planning, sustainability, and the other disciplines of urban policy will come through.
I develop the ideas in this book through stories about social movements and alternative institutions. Through exploring the divergent histories of many different kinds of these efforts, I try to discover the possibilities and the limitations of alternative institutions as a social change strategy and to develop a set of ideas that can inform future practice.
I use my own experiences with carsharing as the opening story in chapter 2. While acknowledging that I am far from an objective observer of this project, I hope that by beginning with this first-person story, I make the broader themes in this book tangible and relevant.
The next three chapters explore distinct types of alternative institutions. Chapter 3 discusses the institutions of democratic decision-making by reinterpreting the origins of the American Revolution. Chapter 4 examines economic institutions, and chapter 5 looks at place-based institutions. Through the lens of these different domains, we come to understand a broad set of circumstances in which alternative institutions can be effective.
Chapter 6 discusses the tricky concept of "selling out" and the dilemmas faced by organizations as they grow and become more mainstream.
Chapter 7 serves as a synthesis chapter, looking at three stories of progressive movements that managed to include alternative institutions as part of a broader set of strategies.
Finally, in conclusion, chapter 8 attempts to develop a "sociology" of historical change by drawing on the ideas presented earlier in the book.
My own values will be clear throughout. I am in favor of a society that is more democratic, more egalitarian, and more ecologically balanced. But my intent is not to lay out a detailed vision for a better society or even a critique of the current arrangements. This is a book about the means, not the ends. It speaks to one of the timeless questions faced by anyone who aspires to a better world: How do you change society? This book doesn't have all the answers, but it has some of them. My hope is that it will inspire a new generation of activists and theorists to carry these ideas in new directions and perhaps open up some new possibilities for American idealists, at a time when new possibilities are much needed.
CHAPTER 2THE STORY OF CITY CARSHARE
In 1997, my friends and I began to organize a carsharing cooperative in San Francisco as a way to test our theories about alternative institutions. We first learned about carsharing from an article published in 1994 in RAIN Magazine. Two brothers in Berlin had started an organization called Stattauto Berlin, which literally translates to "instead of cars." The general idea is this: A co-op owns a fleet of cars and keeps them all over the city. Members of the co-op can use a car when they want. They pay based on how much they drive. It's that simple.
In the case of Stattauto, which started in 1988, members made reservations by phone; an employee of the organization took calls and kept track of reservations. Keys were kept in a lockbox at each parking location, and members had the combination. People wrote down in log books how far they drove. There was an hourly fee and a mileage fee — the idea being that the hourly rate roughly covered the capital cost of the car and the mileage rate roughly covered the gas and the wear and tear. Membership in the organization included insurance.
City CarShare operated largely the same way, except that we automated the process of reserving a car, both because we came along a decade later and got to take advantage of new technology and because we thought the high-tech approach would be more appealing to our San Francisco audience.
One way of thinking about the economics of carsharing is that it converts most of the fixed costs of car ownership into variable costs. Under private ownership, the insurance, the purchase price of the car, and, depending on where you live, the parking are all fixed costs, regardless of how much you drive. In a sense, having already committed to those costs, most car owners think the only "real" cost of driving is the gas, so there is no economic incentive to minimize car use. In contrast, when you pay each time you use a car based on how long you use it and how far you go, there is a pricing incentive to be mindful of how much you drive.
The core work of organizing an alternative institution, just like other kinds of political organizing, is talking to a lot of people to find supporters who will help make it happen. We talked to hundreds and hundreds of people, from neighborhood leaders to bicycle groups, from developers to technology firms, from elected officials to more experienced activists. And from these conversations we found supporters, members, funders, volunteers, and — the core of the organization — board members.
We had a wonderful board. It organized itself into committees to deal with operations and technology, fund-raising, marketing, and — once we had staff and money — human resources and finance. Later, we organized committees for each sub-area of the region where we wanted to operate. This leadership model allowed us to distribute the workload and involve large numbers of people while still preserving the overall direction of the project.
People got involved for a wide variety of reasons. Some were committed environmental activists. Some cared about local economic development. Some were motivated by the negative impact of cars on cities. There was little ideological or political unity among us. In fact, we made sure to recruit board members who were connected to both the right and the left of the political establishment. We were confident that our institution would do its job if it succeeded in getting large numbers of people to abandon private car ownership (or at least to reduce the number of cars they owned) and switch to carsharing.
Ultimately we organized City CarShare as a traditional nonprofit, rather than a co-op. This allowed us to go after some important funding sources. And more important, we believed that the nonprofit form provided the greatest likelihood for the organization to stay true to its mission over time.
We had some unexpected early success with fund-raising, and one of us (not me) quit her job to be the full-time director. We leased one car to try out the technology in it. We first signed up five friends, and then fifty, to test the system. We leased five cars, then another five. Once we were up above a hundred "testers," we launched. The story hit the newspapers, and members poured in faster than we could sign them up. The amount of time from our first efforts at serious organizing to our launch was about three years.
Each location where we kept cars was called a "pod." We lined up mostly free parking, relying on support from the city government, transit agencies, and businesses. Over time, as the project got bigger, we reached the limits of the free-parking strategy and had to rent spaces, but the contributed space from supporters was crucial to getting started.
Our outreach strategy at first was simply to contact the people we had been signing up for the previous three years and tell them they finally had their chance to join. Only gradually did we start to do "real marketing."
We immediately felt the stress of rapid expansion, especially never having enough money. We needed more staff to do the work than we could afford to pay, and we needed to put more cars into service than we could afford to lease. Demand was not a problem. The ability to service the demand was the problem.
The technology didn't work nearly as well as we had hoped. Eventually we got it right, but only after many false starts and spending way too much money. It was an area that none of the organizers knew well — a crucial mistake, in retrospect. Our dream had been to give away our software and hardware for free — to create open-source carsharing technology — but the set of software engineers we finally brought on board to fix all the problems refused to work in open source. We were still able to serve our members and grow the organization, but we did not succeed in starting open-source carsharing technology.
For a long time, we were also not sufficiently staffed to handle the demands on customer service. Staff members took turns being on call for emergencies, carrying around a pager and a laptop. As the organization grew, we did in fact get more efficient, and we were able to add staff, while still serving an ever-growing number of members per staff person. This was simply a function of the fact that our operation required us to be at a minimum size in order to work right, and we had to grow into stability. We got through it by having staff members work seventy-plus hours a week; having board members who served as de facto unpaid staff, putting in huge amounts of time themselves; and having a committed set of early users who were patient with us.
We learned quickly how to identify the right places to expand. Not surprisingly, the key is density: you need enough people within walking distance of the pod to support it. In areas that are too spread out, it's not convenient for people to walk to the car, and the cars don't get driven enough to cover their costs.
Meanwhile, there were major operational priorities tied to bringing down costs: getting a better deal on insurance, getting a better deal on the cars, improving the technology so that we could grow without adding too many staff members. Each of these projects is a story in itself, but we eventually managed to make them all happen. We had an incredible staff that was able to solve enough of the key problems to make the project work.
FUNDING STRATEGIES
Throughout the early phases of the project, there was tension between the desire to make the service as attractive as possible — and thereby out-compete the private automobile — and the limits of our funding. The goal of attracting people away from private ownership would suggest having fewer members per car (so people could always get a car when they wanted one, at a location close to them) and having prices that were as low as possible. But the imperative of breaking even financially would push in the other direction, toward more members per car and higher prices. This situation is, essentially, a version of the same dilemma all businesses face — or it may perhaps just be a fact of working in a world with finite resources. Nevertheless, each of us weighed these trade-offs differently. This question — of how high a service "quality" to provide — probably caused more disagreement during board meetings than any other issue.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Democratic by Design by Gabriel Metcalf. Copyright © 2015 Gabriel Metcalf. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Story of City CarShare
Chapter 3: Alternative Institutions and American Democracy
Chapter 4: Transforming the Economy
Chapter 5: Caring for Place
Chapter 6: Success, Failure, and the Fear of Selling Out
Chapter 7: Putting the Pieces Together
Chapter 8: The Mystery of Social Change
Sources Cited
Index