Sharing Cities: Catalysts for Developing New Models for Urban Spac

"Sharing city" is a prevalent worldwide term now in the context of the emerging sharing economy. This thesis will refine the term of "sharing economy" first and keep investigating the possible current and potential future social effects and spatial implications of sharing activities in urban space. The goal of this paper is to anticipate the major shift of urban space' usages in the process of increasingly sharing economy growth. Landscape architects can positively help the transformation of urban space to provide higher flexible spaces so that people can image possibilities. This thesis will focus on three major questions. The first section will address the question of how sharing activities will impact urban physical fabrics. In the first part, the paper will focus on investigating a wide range of sharing activities' current and future possible spatial implications. The second question of this thesis is that how sharing activities reshape the city of social life. The key to the second question is to find the social effects of various sharing activities. The first two questions are intertwined. Literature review and design case studies will be conducted to address them. Finally, diving into landscape architect's perspectives, the following question is eventually to be addressed "how landscape designer should design urban spaces coordinating with sharing economy?" This thesis will take Seattle's University District as a case study for exploration, as Seattle is entering the era of "sharing city"-potentially a catalyst for more environmentally sustainable and culturally innovative urban space. The final result of this thesis will be several scenarios of design proposals that show the possible transformation of urban space by applying conclusions from the former two sections of the thesis.