Enhancing Sharing Capabilities

Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic has led households to find creative ways to share resources to address isolation, stress, and anxiety. We build on these social experiments to suggest that sharing in housing and neighborhoods can lead to better mental health and wellbeing. The capabilities approach, popularized by philosophers Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, provides a theoretical perspective for integrating sharing options into housing and neighborhood design, regulation, and investment. We offer a framework delineating dimensions of sharing that has the potential to encourage more sharing and shift planning emphasis from housing as an outcome to one that promotes sharing.

Keywords:

• capabilities approach
• health
• housing and neighborhood design and regulation
• sharing

Acknowledgments

We thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no disclosures to report.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vinit Mukhija

VINIT MUKHIJA ([email protected]) is a professor of urban planning at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studies informal housing and the built environment.

Lois M. Takahashi

LOIS M. TAKAHASHI ([email protected]) is the Houston Flournoy Professor of State Government and director of the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy in Sacramento, where she studies social service delivery and health disparities.