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Sharing economy' technology platforms now encompass housing (most prominently Airbnb); transport (from taxi-replacements Uber and Lyft to short-term rental bicycles and electric scooters); to temporary labor (TaskRabbit). Undoubtedly, more such concepts are being developed, funded, and deployed as we speak. 'Sharing' platform creators describe their work as 'disruptive' and 'innovating in the regulatory sphere' and in many cities have been at odds with both planners and residents as well as competing industries. Planning scholars and practitioners have been caught on the back foot due to the rapid speed at which the 'sharing economy' has emerged and the lack of data available publicly for assessing its scale and how it's affecting the cities we plan. We invited authors to discuss how we ought to conceive of the sharing economy, how we might understand its impacts across people and places, and how planning could or should respond to its emergence and growth. The papers we received span two issues of interface. In this issue, the writing focuses on the planning regulatory response to platforms; and in issue 20.2 we will take up the implications of these platforms for work and labor in the city. These authors connect the 'new' sharing economy to older more endemic forms of informality, to reiterate that in some ways we are still dealing with questions around whether or not informality can be regulated, and also if the extractive platform sharing economy maintains some relationship to the other versions of sharing. What the sharing economy has always done, even before the emergence of large corporations as mediators, is to challenge what Brown calls the "status quo." An important question she asks in her piece for this Interface is whether or not the status quo, in this case the traditional taxi industry, was good to begin with. Brown directly compares ride-share platforms to a taxi industry that has presented significant barriers to African American mobility. While digital infrastructure is still uneven, and ride hailing via apps might result in a user's "delayed mobility", the traditional taxi industry for some people of color in some neighborhoods meant no mobility at all. A question I would also like to raise is how the more visible version of ride-hailing has replaced and possibly displaced the pre-existing informal and underground community mechanisms for how African American or Latinx or Asian immigrants solved mobility problems before, through similar but differently accessed informal ride-sharing strategies (Blasi & Leavitt, Driving Poor, 2006). We as planners are asked to think about allowing for, and being comfortable with allowing the informal to exist and to also question planning's primary impulse to regulatechallenged by any version of the sharing economy. Nelson & Ehrenfeucht reflect that the question of the

Public authorities in developing economies typically have to deal with fiscal stress, lack of resources and an underdeveloped real estate industry. This poses a severe challenge at times of rapid urbanisation. Governments typically react to housing demand shocks by introducing policies that support the real estate market’s capacity to supply housing. One prominent policy in this respect is land readjustment. It has been promoted as a best practice and has been extensively discussed from an efficiency perspective; however, little is known about the ecological performance of the urban landscapes that typically emerge with this tool. Therefore, this study developed an assessment framework that allows discussion of the ecological performance of these neighbourhoods as an outcome of the reciprocal interaction between public sector initiatives and real estate market responses. Based on a LEED ND assessment of the cases of Taipei and Seoul, the research identifies four institutional drivers of ecological costs. First, public agencies tend to neglect the ecological costs of greenfield site developments. Second, public agencies to not employ policies that promoe brownfield developments. Third, a weak public sectors’ negotiating position can result in an ecologically inefficient urban pattern. And finally, the public sector’s construction standardisation policies can impose real estate market limitations and wasteful use of resources in the long run.

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