The emergency circumstances caused by the spread of the coronavirus has highlighted new needs on behalf of citizens who are faced with much more limited means of using the city and its services. The long period of stoppage and restricted movement they have had to deal with has brought out the increasingly widespread need to receive services and goods at our homes, both to avoid spreading infection and to simplify life within our domestic environments.
That being said, access to this requirement among the primary needs of citizens has, however, highlighted the structural limits of the existing home-delivery system in the city. On the one hand, there are large platforms that make use of riders, only some of whom have signed the Charter of Fundamental Rights for Digital Work in the urban area of Bologna. On the other hand, there are merchants of studios, restaurants, shops, and consumer goods that, to resist the crisis imposed by the closure, have had to implement new home-delivery services, finding themselves forced to refer to a single active system: large platforms that, in addition to lacking on the plane of workers’ rights, are also very costly. To remedy this, many companies have had to organize deliveries themselves. ‘Cantiere Consegne etiche’  - a construction site for ethical deliveries - grew out of this premise within the project ‘Re-Inventing the City’. It is dedicated to interaction between all those companies that, starting from this situation, have had to self-organized to implement innovative solutions in response to these new requirements, with the goal of assessing how to overcome the model of platform capitalism and develop prototypes for collective, supportive devices to respond to the new needs for protection and services.

In May 2020, the Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana began a public process to co-design a proposal that is shared with the city.

Objectives:

• identify and consolidate the network of companies operating in the territory to create alternatives to models of platform capitalism
• create a manifesto of ethics to gather the principles shared by participants in the network
• define the means of communication and network enhancement
• define guidelines for a shared, collaborative home-delivery service
• experiment with the service

Phases

• Initiation phase: public assembly to begin the process.
• Analysis and investigation phase to involve interested companies. Through interviews, we have expanded on the actions implemented, characteristics, criticalities, and possible visions.
• Alignment phase together with all companies involved to note the ethical differences in models alternative to existing private platforms, also with the construction of a shared document (manifesto of values)
• Network and governance co-design phase. Starting with current models, we have identified possible models of collaborative governance to test a shared project for home delivery.
• Service co-design phase. Assessment of the model, identifying possible, even technological, solutions to make the service easily usable, evaluating times, means, costs, protections, and federation of networks.
• September 2020 – Start of experimentation of the ‘Consegne etiche’ service, the first cooperative home-delivery platform composed of local merchants, delivery people, citizens, in the area. Experimentation is done thanks to two cooperatives, Dynamo and Idee in Movimento, with the support of the university training centre and promotion by the cooperative company AlmaVicoo, which are affiliated with the project.

Visit consegnetiche.it.