During the last decade, it has become more and more common to use online platforms and smartphone apps to stay in somebody else's house, drive someone else's car, rent the city bike when exploring new surroundings, or borrow a garden tool from a neighbor. There are many examples of sharing economy organizations. These are global players, like a short-term home rental platform, Airbnb and the right air platform Uber, as well as more local actors like clothes libraries. This change has been facilitated by digital technology, which helps us connect with strangers and borrow their apartments, cars, tools, clothes, accessories, and even toys. It also helps us to share the items that we ourselves might not use very often with others. Most of the things we own stay idle for most of their lifetime. For example, an average European car is used for only 29 minutes per day. In the UK and the US, 80 percent of all the items owned by people are used less than once per month, and 30 percent of clothes sold in the UK are never worn. Other developed countries show similar trends. The fact that our possessions stay idle for most of the time is called the idling capacity, and the sharing economy is one way to capitalize on this. Sharing economy, peer to peer economy, or collaborative consumption are among several terms used to describe a variety of initiatives. Some of these are bottom-up initiatives, some are public-private people partnerships, others are business startups, and some are local government schemes, but all of them aim to help us better utilize the idling capacity of our possessions. With increasing urbanization, cities now face numerous sustainability challenges. The major ones include climate change, pollution, waste generation, resource use, social segregation, unemployment, and poverty. To address these challenges, many city governments work with a variety of different approaches, one of which is the sharing economy, and cities play an important role in shaping the landscape of the sharing economy. They often define the conditions for success or failure of sharing organizations. But how would the city governments engage with the sharing economy, which governance mechanisms do they employ, and which roles do they play? Based on our research in Amsterdam, Berlin, Guttenberg, London, Malmo, and San Francisco, it is possible to define five principal mechanisms in which municipalities govern the sharing economy. Regulating, self-governing, providing, enabling, and collaborating. Each of these mechanisms includes several governance roles through which municipality engage with and shape the sharing economy in cities. In this course, there will be five short films, one on each of these five governance mechanisms. We will explain the roles through which municipalities engage with sharing economy organizations under each governance mechanism, and provide examples from different cities.