Wicked Problem Of Urban Sustainability

The wicked problem of urban sustainability poses a large challenge for share economy businesses in the present and future. The nature of a wicked problem and its impossibility of being solved is being constantly appropriated by share economy business that are increasingly aware of the need to please as many of their stakeholders as possible. Share economy business such as Uber, Monkey Parking and Airbnb attempt to resolve the need for public transport and purchasing new goods or using existing services, whilst also emphasising the positives and negatives that come from collaborative consumption. The way that such businesses attempt to resolve the overarching wicked problem is by inviting consumers, suppliers, the media, the government, the

Urban sustainability, as stated by the World Commision on Environment and Development in 1987 (University of Technology 2013) is the idea that development needs to be sustainable to meet the needs of the current environment but also must not compromise the ability of the future to meet their needs. The stakeholder mix creates a challenging situation that urban sustainability cannot overcome as there is such a large pool of differing values, opinions, morals and preferences that there is “no easy way for people to assign a priority to a way of tackling the issue at hand.” (Troy. P 2013) . This highlights the predicament that share economy businesses, an idea rehashed as a “collaborative consumption” (The Economist 2013) of goods and services, face in the urban setting. Share economy businesses are developed with the intention of tackling a wicked problem, however their success lies in the interaction and critique of a varied mix of opinions that stakeholders

The taxi-cab hailing company Uber invites drivers and the general public to become their stakeholders as independent contractors to fuel their own business and successfully provide a transport service that (Leib 2014) describes as “so simple and easy”. Uber has identified transportation within the city as a focus of their business model, thus pleasing the needs of everyday people who firstly need to use the App to travel and secondly; those who wish to provide that service. A non-market stakeholder from the media reports that Uber offers “more support and infrastructure services to the people upon whom its business depends”, praising it as a latest example of a company operating in the share economy (Bradshaw 2013). Airbnb, a share economy business company that provides a platform for homeowners to rent out their homes or rooms to accommodate other paying customers had been praised in 2011 by a Wall Street Journalist, as a newest edition to the “billion dollar start-up club” (Fowler, 2007). It’s sustainably developed idea of sharing existing housing, rather than developing new housing, with people all over the world contributes positively to the notion of resolving the wicked problem of urban