"Robin Chase's Collaborative Economy and Peers Inc" are aligned with CAF's Comprehensive Transportation Program

CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, brought together transportation leaders, representatives of the Government of the city of Buenos Aires, young students, and teachers of the UTDT, to comment, jointly with Robin Chase, her book "Peers Inc". She is a global referent in collaborative economies and cofounder of Zipcar (world car sharing platform).

In her presentation, Chase recommends the generation of new organizational structures to take advantage of the idle capacity of products and services through sharing (joint use), highlighting recent successful cases such as Airbnb and ZipCar. In addition, she emphasizes the importance of combining the individual forces (Peers) of people, NGO's, and local companies, with the industrial forces (INC) of companies, institutions, and governments. 

This new "Peer Society" enables the combination of platforms available in industries with the diversity and innovation of individuals, using the idle capacity that is commonly wasted. She stated, "Thanks to the Internet, a collaborative economy is appearing where it is not important who the owner of something is, everything is built in collaboration".  

When highlighting innovation for both public and private transportation and the challenges for large cities, Chase recommends that cities start implementing and promoting collaborative economies jointly with clean transportation systems that are autonomous and shared. In this respect, she stated, "Every day, you are creating the world in which you want to live. Collaborative economy is the future, it is changing capitalism as we know it today".  

Chase's statements are aligned with CAF's comprehensive transportation program, which in the case of Argentina, includes support to the government in coming up with a technological structuring to take advantage of bid data and its use in the intelligent management of transportation in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. 

After finishing her presentation, there was a panel open to questions, with the participation of Juan José Mendez (Transportation Secretary of the City of Buenos Aires), Angie Palacios and Nicolás Estupiñan (CAF, Development Bank of Latin America), Roberto Agosta (UTDT): Gabriel Lafranchi (Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento) (Center for the Implementation of Public Policies for Equity and Growth), and Verónica Raffo (World Bank). From CAF, Angie Palacios commented "an agenda is recommended for governments to identify how the collaborative economy may generate social inclusion, using transportation as a tool, considering the peculiarities of Latin America. When thinking about collaborative economies, the nuances that characterize the region must be understood, and not simply copy a model as applied in other countries. As a multilateral bank, it is here where we can contribute". 

Responding to a question from one of the students, Juan José Mendez commented, "from the City, infrastructure and mobility projects are developed (example, Paseo del Bajo), supported by multilateral and financing organizations such as CAF, to implement dynamic rates according to passenger route, as well as more sustainable spaces addressing the needs of society. 

At the same time, Verónica Raffo highlighted "the importance of gathering information that is useful to address the urgent needs of cities, by incorporating systems such as the Single Electronic Ticket System (SUBE, for its acronym in Spanish) that helps to understand mobility and flow of passengers to apply intelligent solutions. 

With respect to how collaborative economies work from his organization, Gabriel Lafranchini stated, " Transformations are arriving fast, and the greatest challenges are climate change and inequity. Technology must help us generate more sustainable and inclusive societies, and at CIPECC we are focusing on going to different regions to work with leaders and talk about how this change should take place". 

In addition, Nicolás Estupiñán referred to how important it is that "multilateral organizations can take risks that sometimes governments on their own cannot take, to start financing proposals with a long term vision" in terms of sustainability and inclusion.

To conclude, UTDT teachers expressed their gratitude for the participation of the assistants, and for CAF's contribution to enable the presence of Robin Chase, and reminded of the importance of "planning to be able to anticipate", both for the development of alternative proposals for the economy, as well as for innovation in transportation.