Chapter 7: Real Estate
Making Space for Makers
Real Estate Connects the Dots between Creativity and Value Creation in the Maker City
The form our cities take has always expressed what we value most in society. Cities of the middle ages gave us great cathedrals and castles, prior to the age of enlightenment, when God and king were central to our universe. In the twentieth century, cities built out cathedrals to commerce and production in the form of skyscrapers and industrial plants.
Co-working. Innovation centers. Makerspaces. These forms of real estate are not only relatively new, they are startlingly different than past expressions of commercial real estate. Each is designed to break down barriers between people, build a sense of community, embrace technology, and encourage experimentation and the creation of new forms of economic value inside our cities.
What kind of space will best serve the Maker and innovation economy is suddenly an important topic in urban planning. Major companies are abandoning the suburbs in favor of cities. GE is moving from suburban Connecticut to urban Boston. The center of gravity of Silicon Valley has shifted north to San Francisco and Oakland. Portland is turning its considerable strengths in technology and urban manufacturing into unprecedented growth.
In this chapter, we look at zoning, land use policies, and policy hacks that can be used to make room for Makers inside America’s cities.
Real estate is of interest to the Maker City for four main reasons:
- Makerspaces. Makerspaces. Makerspaces can range from 5 thousand square feet to 150–200 thousand square feet. There is no average or “best size” for Makerspaces. Larger spaces are prized both because they support the widest variety of tools and functions and because they can be divided into many smaller spaces, as needed to support small workgroups, multiple classrooms and workshops, even co-working. Increasingly, we are seeing Makerspaces placed in innovation districts, as discussed below.
- Urban manufacturing. Americans are showing a renewed preference for buying locally made goods in a wide variety of categories. Astute retailers like West Elm and Etsy are getting in the act, curating goods locally and selling them through both virtual and real storefronts. The sum of artisanal manufacturing plus advanced manufacturing (as discussed in Chapter 6) adds up to a big need for space. Adaptive reuse of older shipyards and factories is the most promising approach.
- Innovation centers. City, business, and nonprofit leaders often seek guidance from experience design firms when commissioning creative space. When cities devote an entire neighborhood to innovation it’s called an “innovation district” or sometimes an “innovation zone.” (We prefer the first term.) When a single company or nonprofit builds out a facility for innovation it is called an “innovation center” or “innovation lab,” depending on its size. This can get confusing. Adding to this confusion is that many cities in the U.S. are pursuing ways to turn whole areas of the city into living laboratories for urban innovation in order to test the impact of sensors and other “smart city” technologies.
- Live/Work housing. Makers require support in the form of affordable housing, ideally with adjacent studio space.
In this chapter, we’ll showcase what is possible when underutilized real estate is put to use for startups, artists, Makers, and manufacturers through three case studies: Brooklyn Navy Yard, Manufacture NY, and the Chicago 1871 Project.
We’ll follow these case studies with a discussion led by three experts in real estate:
- Adam Friedman, Executive Director, Pratt Center for Community Development. Its mission is to provide technical assistance, research and policy on land use, economic development, and community organizing in New York’s low-income communities. The Center is a founding member of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, which does research and work to strengthen the urban manufacturing sector on a national level.
- Kim Mai Cutler, Writer, TechCrunch. Kim Mai has written extensively about the affordable housing crisis in San Francisco. Here she discusses policy hacks that cities like New York and San Francisco can use to reserve space for Makers.
- Heather King, Managing Director, Eight Inc. Eight Inc. is the experience design firm behind the Apple Stores, which have proven to be an inviting destination for both city residents, commuters, and visitors. Most relevant to us in this Playbook is what Eight Inc. does when working with cities to creating innovation centers like Future Cities Catapult (FCC), an Innovation Lab based in London. We asked Heather King from Eight Inc. to tell us how they create innovative spaces that capture people’s imagination while getting diverse stakeholders to work together.
Together, these experts provide a nuanced view of how cities can make space available to Makers and then design it in such a way that people come together to do their best, most imaginative work, the kind of work that adds economic value to the city. No space exemplifies this more than the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard
Learning What Works
David Ehrenberg has served as Executive Director of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) since 2013. For 20 years the economic development approach of choice to revitalize the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or any other former factory or shipyard for that matter, was to bring back a single big employer or a factory, preferably a shipyard or an auto plant. Efforts to do so repeatedly failed. It was only through the involvement of a mission-driven nonprofit, the BNYDC, that the Brooklyn Navy Yard started to make a comeback as a community housing many smaller businesses made up of Makers, artists, artisans, and manufacturing concerns.
Today over 330 business and 7,000 people work out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 3.5 million square feet growing to 5.0 million square feet by 2018.
According to David Ehrenberg:
“[W]hat we’ve been able to curate here, because we have such a large footprint, is a wonderful chaotic mix of tenants doing sandblasting, doing robotics work, doing just pure arts, doing pure architectural design. And they all find each other and collaborate, and create this kind of gestalt of the Navy Yard that is extraordinarily hard to find anywhere else in New York.
“[I]t was kind of a natural organic process where, because we were on-site managers and heard from tenants all the time that what they needed was a five thousand-square foot or a two thousand-square-foot unit. And they didn’t need that 60- or 100 thousand-square-foot unit. We were hoping, frankly, that we would be able to find a huge manufacturer who would take 200 thousand square feet. Who wouldn’t want that, as a landlord? We were just hearing over and over and over again from tenants, ‘No, what I really need is 500 square feet so I can produce my art,’ or whatever it is.
“We’ve been 100 percent full for ten years. We’ve added very little new space here at the Yard, and we finally cracked that code here. Over the coming two years, we’ll be adding almost two million square feet of space to the Yard, and then additional space over the coming five years.”
Starting Small; Scaling Up
The true promise of a space like the Brooklyn Navy Yard is to allow smaller manufacturing firms to flourish side-by-side with larger companies like Crye Precision, producers of high tech body armor. Started by two graduates of Cooper Union with a background in engineering, Crye Precision has grown to be the one of the largest providers of high-tech body armor to the Department of Defense.
David Ehrenberg calls out Crye Precision as impossible to categorize:
“They are a design firm. They are a technology firm. They’ve got all kinds of IP that they can’t tell us about because of national security concerns. But they’re also hiring as many seamstresses and metal workers as they can to make the body armor and sew the camouflage.”
The Brooklyn Navy Yard, in its role as a commercial landlord, sees a huge number of companies that have the potential to be the next Crye Precision. “These range from furniture manufacturers who are integrating technology into their furniture or just have a high tech means of production, to a company who’s designing the next-generation of [electric] motorcycles.”
For Cyre Precision, vertical integration makes sense. This is a company with expertise and know how in advanced material science as well as manufacturing. Advanced materials for textiles is of particular interest, as we’ll see below in the case study on Manufacture NY.
The Impact of the Brooklyn Navy Yard
- Economic Output in 2011: $1.93B
- Direct and Indirect Jobs: 10,350 direct and indirect jobs
- Direct Earnings: $392M in earnings
This economic activity in turn generated another $1.96B in earnings and an additional 15,500 jobs. (Source: Pratt Center, 2013)
Manufacture NY
Revitalizing the Garment Industry
Adam Friedman is the Executive Director, Pratt Center for Community Development. He talks about the garment district in New York City as “the original innovation district.”
Today, much of what made the garment district a source of innovation has moved to Brooklyn in the form of a 160 thousand square-foot facility called Manufacture NY that serves as a national hub for the fashion and textile industries, focusing on design, production, training, and research.
“The idea is to bridge the gap between technology and the commercialization of products made of functional fabrics,” said Fashion Institute of Technology President Dr. Joyce Brown.
Manufacture NY is part Revolutionary Fibers & Textile Manufacturing Innovation Institute, which in 2016 was funded through a $75M federal grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. The institute is creating facilities across the country that will help American industry develop commercial and military products with novel properties such as flame resistance, extremely lightweight and embedded electronic sensors.
In addition to federal funding, the city awarded Manufacture NY $3.5M to build the 160 thousand square-foot training center. The facility is expected to increase the number of highly skilled workers and create more manufacturing jobs in New York City. Also, it will boost the competitiveness of local businesses in the fashion and military-technology markets by helping people produce items like sweaters made of functional fabrics that regulate body temperature or parachutes with built-in radio transmitters.
“This is the next generation of gadgets,” said Bob Bland, Chief Executive Officer of Manufacture New York. “Functionality will be embedded in the textiles themselves.”
Real estate is a key part of the strategy to revitalize the fashion and textile industries, as Bob Bland explains:
“Fashion designers, students, Makers, manufacturers, showrooms — all of these groups need to be located together to have any hope of staying competitive. Cycle time matters a lot in fashion. Consumer taste is fickle. And fashion items cannot be copyrighted.
“By the time you take your sample to Asia–say to put it into production most cheaply–it is likely that the competition will have taken a similar design to a manufacturer closer to home.
“The businesses we work with need support over the long term, and it starts with general operations. Overhead is where people are getting killed right now, especially in New York City. Their overhead expenses include their rent, utilities, payroll, all of that. And so any change in their circumstances can be incredibly volatile, especially for contract manufacturers. They’re typically working with 10–15 percent margins because that’s the price that the customer expects. And there’s no way to get out of that model without ballooning your margins and losing all of your customers.
You can’t afford for your rent to double. You can’t afford to lose your space.
“You can’t afford for someone to only offer you a one-year lease. It’s all about affordable, long-term space and a community platform that provides support in all the areas in which business owners don’t know what they’re doing or need help.”
Chicago’s 1871 Project
Think Small. Think Local.
It is easy to dismiss the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Manufacture NY as outliers. After all, what is possible in New York City is often not possible elsewhere in the country. But our research for this book uncovered a marked shift in the conventional wisdom on how best to use real estate as a development tool in the Maker City.
The normal plan when developing real estate designed to drive economic development is to lure a branch of a global manufacturer. But then you have an industry without roots, without a multiplier effect on the community.
They’re not using local accountants and local printers,” says Susan Witt, Executive Director of the Schumaker Center for New Economics in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which, since its inception in 1980, has been known for its close working relationship with the late Jane Jacobs. “It’s through those roots that you get the economic multiplier effect of small businesses. And a branch or factory based elsewhere can leave as easily as it arrived.”
Michael Shuman, Research and Public Policy Director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, says research suggests that subsidies to attract and retain development are not effective at jumpstarting economies. One unpublished study he led recently looked at the three largest economic development programs in 15 states and found that fewer than ten percent of companies involved devoted even a small majority of expenditures to local businesses; in most cases 90 percent of the money spent went out of state.
“The economic developers I speak to no longer even try to defend these subsidy strategies,” Shuman says. “They’ve run out of excuses except for the fact that the politicians like them. Politicians get more mileage from one big deal that brings in 1,000 jobs than an entrepreneurship program that generates ten jobs in 100 local businesses. Even when the rhetoric has shifted to the importance of local in terms of where the money goes, it’s still following an old and entirely discredited mode of economic development.”
The “new normal” is a model of economic development that uses real estate to attract and support small and local product companies.
An example can be found in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. Built in the 1930s, the Merchandise Mart has gone through many boom and bust cycles. Today, it is home to 1871, an incubator and innovation hub which opened in 2012. Founder and CEO Howard Tullman says 1871 is the largest incubator in the country with over 500 startups in residence. Over 2,000 people each day work at 1871, which added 41 thousand square feet in 2016 to its original 50 thousand square feet for space.
Tullman’s 1871 is more than just an incubator. It’s a hub for innovation that not only attracts startups but also larger companies who want to be near it and lease space in the Merchandise Mart. Tullman says that the goal of 1871 is to create jobs in Chicago and keep the money raised by startups and the earning from their successes in Chicago. It has become a place that attracts people with innovative ideas as well as professionals with industry experience who seek to join a startup. It provides mentoring and education for startups, but Tullman believes that their most important function is “matchmaking,” which helps startups build great teams and also helps startups find funding and corporate partners.
1871 could be seen as a new kind of lightweight business structure, consisting of many autonomous units that share a set of core services but also leverage each other in unexpected ways. 1871 thrives in the middle between startups who find it difficult to function in isolation and larger hierarchical companies who find it difficult to foster innovation. 1871 enables innovators to start small and collaborate with others while creating a larger ecosystem that drives innovation in the local economy.
Are Innovation Districts the Answer?
By Adam Friedman, Executive Director, Pratt Center
Cities across the United States are exploring how to capitalize on the entrepreneurial energy and talent being unleashed by the Maker movement. Planners and economic development practitioners are looking for ways to use this energy to generate new businesses and job growth, and to help revitalize legacy manufacturers. What are the land use challenges and strategies that cities should consider as they develop initiatives to build Maker cities?
One of the primary strategies toward this goal has been to create “innovation districts” that cluster universities, software and engineering companies, arts organizations, and other “creative” resources in proximity to manufacturers.
In this model, Makers play critical roles both in the origin of new products and in helping to translate the ideas from the “creatives” into the products for the manufacturers: they help generate the concept, they design and build the prototypes, they may market test the first small batches, and they refine the product before commercial scale production.
Towards Mixed Use Land Policies
A fundamental challenge arises out of the need to have a diversity of spaces at differing prices in relative proximity to each other. The manufacturers, the Makers, and the artists need cheap space. Designers, architects, and software and engineering companies can generally afford to pay significantly more for space. In a totally free market, over time real estate developers will decide to provide space for the higher-rent tenants. The lower-rent users who made the neighborhood both attractive for private investment and who advanced the public policy objectives of business and job growth will be priced out. The picture is even more complicated by the aesthetics of the industrial space and the emergence of “industrial chic.” The attractiveness of mixed-use districts makes them unstable if property owners can easily convert from low-rent to high-rent uses. While property owners may oppose the restrictions that balance usage, such restrictions are essential to both the overall public and private value of the district. These low-rent uses are “the innovation commons” from which every property owner benefits but which no property owner wants to be responsible for providing.
Not only is preserving lower-cost space essential to maintaining the attractiveness of the higher-cost space, it is essential to achieving the type of broad-based economic recovery and generating the new jobs needed to address today’s unemployment and underemployment. A robust recovery requires that cities create not only jobs in the innovation economy (conceiving, designing, and making the prototypes) but also that they capture the next ripple of jobs as companies move past the initial innovation phase of their products’ life cycles and into broader production for consumer markets.
There are two basic approaches that might be combined to support the diversity of spaces that is essential to innovation and growth. Zoning can be used to prescribe not only what uses are permitted in an area but a percentage of space in a building. Ownership or management of the production space can be vested in a non-profit organization whose mission is to strengthen the manufacturing sector and to ensure not only the continued affordability of the production space but also provide services that support the companies and facilitate resident employment.
The Importance of Zoning
Long before the Maker movement, the original innovation district was NYC’s Garment District
For example, long before there was a Maker movement, the fashion industry inspired a similar type of Maker ethos. The Garment Center in New York was, in some ways, the first innovation district. The Garment Center brought together a vibrant mix of fashion design, production, and marketing, from the smallest start up designers who themselves cut and sewed their first small production runs before they could contract out for production to the largest manufacturers.
To preserve this mix, New York implemented zoning that created a preservation area for manufacturing. The city and building owners envisioned it might transition to a combination of design, sales, marketing, production, and other office uses and, in an effort to achieve the desired balanced mix of uses, the SGCD provided that owners could convert space to higher-rent uses only if they dedicated an equal amount of space for production. Unfortunately, the city failed to provide strong enforcement mechanisms and over time millions of square feet of space were illegally converted.
Cities are again taking up the challenge of preserving a mix of uses. The Greenpoint Williamsburg area of Brooklyn has emerged as a center for the creative economy and artisan entrepreneurship. But the City had already rezoned long stretches of the waterfront from industrial to residential and is now coming to realize that more industrial space is needed to seize these opportunities for business and job creation. The construction of new industrial space is generally not financially feasible without subsidies given New York’s high land costs, so the city is offering developers a bonus of additional office space if they commit at least 17 percent of a building to production space for small-scale manufacturers. While the office bonus creates an internal cross subsidy to close the financial gap, the strategy repeats the Garment Center challenge of how to enforce use restrictions when there is a tremendous differential in rents between the uses.
Enforcement and Compliance
The city’s proposal does not include enforcement mechanisms for ensuring that these spaces are used for production and both the residential community and industry advocates are proposing a variety of additional tools to improve enforcement. One proposal is to require an “administrative agent” to assess compliance annually, similar to the assessments which are done in the affordable housing field to ensure that developers are following income guidelines. While this might assure minimal compliance, e.g., proving that a tenant is “industrial,” it does not necessarily maximize the public policy objectives of creating a density of high quality jobs, fostering synergy between the tenants and other community assets, or enabling resident employment.
Another proposal is to require that a nonprofit organization rent the production space and then sublease it to Makers and manufacturers. The tenanting or curatorial decisions would be guided by the policy objectives.
San Francisco is implementing another model, which encourages that the production space be owned by a nonprofit organization that will curate the tenants. As in New York, San Francisco has an extraordinarily tight real estate market and the construction of new production space is not financially feasible. They, too, are using a cross-subsidy model and recently enacted legislation which allows office development in an industrial area only if 33 percent of the building is used for production. During the special permit application for Hundred Hooper, the first mixed office/production building to be developed, the Planning Commission negotiated that 56.4 thousand square feet of the total 199.2 thousand square feet of production space be owned by PlaceMade, a nonprofit industrial real estate developer. The use of a nonprofit both maximizes the potential to achieve the policy objectives of providing affordable space for small scale production, it also creates a yardstick for assessing compliance in the 142.8 thousand square feet of space that remains in the developer’s control.
Nonprofit Developers
Strategies that use a nonprofit developer to preserve space for production may seem more appropriate for cities where real estate pressures create a tremendous incentive to violate zoning. But they offer another set of advantages in weak market cities: they often create a vehicle for the use of a city’s capital funds to subsidize a project that “primes the pump” for development in an area. They also generally have strong ties to a community and can strengthen the pipeline that provides training and job placement for neighboring residents. Finally, real estate development is a long-term strategy and as cities across the country are witnessing, what seemed like a weak market only a few years ago is now robust and actually threatening the diversity that made it attractive in the first place. Better for a city to anticipate change and put in place mechanisms that preserve diversity moving forward than having to play “catch up” and seek to provide space in a strong real estate market later.
Hacking Policy to Make Real Estate more Affordable in the Maker City
By Kim Mai Cutler, Writer, TechCrunch
Given the immense amount of market pressure to convert former industrial warehouses into offices and condominiums, cities that want to preserve some remnant manufacturing facilities as Makerspaces need to act deliberately and quickly.
After American manufacturing reached its peak share of employment in the 1970s, factories both decentralized their workforce out to the suburbs and began moving jobs overseas. This left industrial warehouses in disuse in major American cities like New York. Famously, artists began illegally converting some of these mid-size and smaller factory spaces into lofts in 1960s SoHo. As quickly as a decade later, these lofts became highly sought after as a form of upscale living. Artists, who had once sought to legalize loft living in the 1960s, made a political U-turn and tried to prevent legitimizing them to broader swaths of real estate investment capital to hold property values down.
Likewise in the commercial arena, warehouses achieved an “industrial chic” aesthetic that became coveted by younger companies and startups in the first dot-com boom in San Francisco.
Facing the loss of these spaces by the mid-2000s, San Francisco invented a new zoning category called PDR, or Production, Distribution, and Repair.
“It was a branding move,” explained Steve Wertheim, who works in the city’s planning department. “We needed to protect industrial use but we needed a term that covered a broader range of activities including the arts.”
The word “industrial” didn’t adequately describe the new non-housing and non-office uses the city wanted to protect and it evoked too many of the heavy uses from the early twentieth century.
“Back then, we had these industrial districts from the 1950s when industry was smelting lead and grinding animals — just nasty stuff — and it was a huge part of our economy,” Wertheim said. “Now industry is so much more benign.”
So PDR, what Wertheim called a “plannery-jargony” term, became the umbrella definition. Over time, as office spaces have shot up to per-square-foot costs that exceed those of the late 1990s and early 2000s, this category of space has come to trade at a 30 to 40 percent discount.
In certain neighborhoods, the city also created incentives to produce new production, distribution and repair spaces on large vacant sites and re-developable land. Around parts of San Francisco’s Mission District, real estate developers who build large enough office buildings must set aside one-third of their newly created space for PDR.
Inadvertently, this has enabled more capital-intensive hardware startups, which have experienced an unexpected resurgence in the early 2010s thanks to crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, to find space in competitive San Francisco. Nomiku, which makes a home sous vide kit, was able to find affordable space in San Francisco and then partner with 3D printing houses in Oakland to rapidly prototype new versions of their device instead of building and manufacturing in Shenzhen, China, where they had been based before.
It has also enabled larger manufacturers like Heath Ceramics to co-exist alongside upscale coffee shops and startup offices.
However, at times it can become a contentious issue. In 2014, Pinterest, the software platform that is popular among women for collecting images of fashion and home design, tried to move into production, distribution and repair space that was already occupied by furniture retailers. After an uproar, city supervisors quickly nixed the deal and Pinterest had to look for space elsewhere.
Wertheim says that the city upholds the category through complaint-based enforcement, which means they can sometimes miss or overlook uses that don’t necessarily live up to the category.
Preserving Independent Retail
San Francisco also has a long history of resisting standardized chain stores and supporting independent retail through intentional quirks in its zoning code. In 2006, voters passed a “formula retail” proposition that requires stores with more than 11 global locations to go through an extra layer of review in certain neighborhoods. While this has prevented bigger chains from eating up retail space that could otherwise go to local businesses, it hasn’t prevented the boutique-ification of neighborhoods like Hayes Valley, which now have independent, but very upscale, small shops.
The city PDR zoning also allows businesses like Heath Ceramics to sell their product in parts of their factory, which lets consumers buy directly from manufacturers in their Makerspaces.
Guarding against Inadvertent Loopholes
Sometimes, land-use policies intended to protect artists and Makers can go awry. In the late 1980s, San Francisco’s planning commission enacted new rules to prevent the loss of artists and art-related businesses by creating a zoning category that allowed housing in industrial areas, but only for people who worked and lived in the same space.
It was designed for artists, but in the mid-to-late 1990s tech boom, real estate developers began using it as a way to build thousands of condos in SOMA, the Mission District and Potrero Hill in a loft style with 17-foot ceilings, large windows, and roof decks. By 1999, the Planning Commission began restricting construction of these live-work spaces, seeing that they weren’t being used by their originally intentioned target audience but rather by young professionals and office workers.
Inclusionary Zoning for Affordability
As remaining parcels of land in highly demanded cities get rapidly converted to office and residential use, there is now an extraordinary amount of pressure that is working against preserving socioeconomic diversity in neighborhoods. At the same time, both federal and state funding for subsidized, affordable housing has disappeared across the country. In California, state funding for affordable housing has declined by more than 60 percent since the re-development agencies were dissolved in the wake of the last financial crisis.
One of the last remaining tools in the bucket is inclusionary zoning, which uses market-rate development to fund a small number of subsidized units for lower-income workers. Since 2012, San Francisco has required developers to either build 12 percent affordable housing on-site, or fee out of the program by paying 20 percent of a project’s cost into a citywide fund. Voters recently raised that requirement to 25 percent. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio also recently adopted a mandatory inclusionary housing policy that relies heavily on the concept to either build or rehabilitate 200,000 units.
Inclusionary zoning is not a panacea; it is one tool out of many that need to be used. In San Francisco, this policy produced fewer than 2,000 units between 1993 and 2014, but it is one of the last remaining sources of funding for building income-protected housing given the loss of state funds.
The units these programs build, called “below market rate” or BMR, units are income-restricted to people earning a certain percentage of area median income. Typically, these are for low-income residents, although the housing affordability crisis has become so extreme in San Francisco that the city is now considering subsidizing the production of middle-income units. These units are awarded by very competitive lotteries and they cannot be resold for a higher profit.
Designing Space for Innovation, Creativity, and Engagement
By Heather King, Managing Director, Eight Inc.
In recent years, interest in innovation has proliferated beyond universities, NASA, and corporate R&D. Cities are getting into the action, looking to support this next generation renewal through citizen engagement and private/public partnerships.
Eight Inc. — as a strategic design firm — is increasingly active in innovation that happens where the city is the unit of change.
Future Cities Catapult Innovation Centre, UK as a Public/Private Hub
Most recently, we worked with Future Cities Catapult (FCC), to create a global center of city innovation. FCC wanted to develop the Innovation Centre, a space for business, universities, and government to develop urban solutions.
FCC Innovation Centre is the antithesis of the traditional office. It was conceived as a platform for experts from various backgrounds and disciplines to work together on a variety of projects. Some collaborations involve small, focused teams. Other efforts are more complex and require a larger team and more continuous space.
The Eight Inc. team used an outside in, inside out approach to develop a human-centered design plan for Future Cities Catapult.
The strategy and implementation effort spanned three distinct phases: align, create, build:
- Align around the experience needed by an existing and emerging audience.
- Create the product through a highly collaborative, agile, democratic prototyping process.
- Build and execute using best-in-class delivery.
FCC required thoughtful orchestration of physical spaces to support an array of team sizes and collaborations. It also invokes novel uses of technology to support problem solving and to showcase invention. The exhibition/demonstration area consists of analog displays and a digital interactive table with an adjacent video wall. The interactive table holds a large touch-screen. Physical objects drive the interaction: as the objects are moved to different areas of the table they trigger content both on the table and on the video display.
The successful outcome of Catapult is highly rooted in this collaborative three-phase process: align, create, build. At Catapult, FCC executives, partners, and stakeholders were engaged; Eight Inc. worked together with stakeholders to conceive its product and present it to an executive team. This was an inclusive and iterative process honoring inputs from the myriad of stakeholders. This singular focus on human needs and the radical inclusion of users and partners is central to driving a successful Catapult Centre experience. Attention and support from the top levels on through the service department and most needy customer is equally critical.
Small Town Innovation in Minden, Nevada
While many innovation districts and incubators are springing up in large- and mid-sized cities across the world, we are also seeing Making activity combined with retail springing up in small, rural locations as residents, small businesses, and landowners work to proactively direct the future of their communities. This is urban renewal and civic innovation writ small, yet it is popping up in towns and rural communities across the U.S. and beyond. In April 2016, the Berkshire area in rural Massachusetts and Connecticut announced the launch of an “innovation lab” to cultivate regional innovation renewal.
For the past few years, Eight Inc. has been working with rural landowner Chris Bentley in Minden, Nevada, to create what is essentially an urban renewal project. Minden is a frontier town at the Eastern edge of the Sierras, just over the hill from the tourist mecca of Lake Tahoe basin. Bentley is leading an effort in the community to historically and sustainably “reinvent” a cluster of structures at the center of town. Rather than house unglamorous and somewhat toxic gambling outposts, they are working to develop a core commerce that has financial viability and makes best use of land, crops, and location. The mill and creamery structures will become a boutique whiskey distillery, with an adjacent visitor center that provides learning and participation for both locals and visitors. The interior and exterior spaces are integrated; the façade facing Main Street invites. It is at once an important economic engine for the region, and a place to gather and learn.
The Minden project will impact the community profoundly. Locals will have a new a space that invites them to recreate, appreciate their surroundings, and encourage mingling with visitors. This, in turn, will promote the interconnectedness of their remote location with the larger world community. They will reap the economic benefits of more jobs and more locally-based business tax revenue. With the preservation of historic structures, townspeople can celebrate their heritage. The strict adherence to sustainable agriculture and business practices will yield healthful benefits and set the bar for other redevelopment efforts. This innovation district is the embodiment of urban sustainability in which the diverse factors that will sustain the town into the future–the economic, social and environmental benefits–are considered and addressed. It is an urban biodiversity that is characteristic of the current renewal and at the heart of sustainable cities. In essence, it is similar to the well-known and successful High Line Park in New York City and the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Reviving and reinventing important public-private spaces drives a long term, sustainable benefit for the community.
Conclusion
The acid test for a successful outcome is whether people get excited, really excited, about a product or experience and make it their own. We believe that Maker Cities can effectively do this. Maker Cities can create a community hub around a Makerspace, an innovation center, or an urban renewal project and can tap into a deeper emotion. To encourage community engagement, the trick is in the design and in the execution. It is easier to envision a place that feels innovative than to make it happen. Any initiative requires the vision and support of great leaders, a laser focus on all elements of the human experience, and best in class implementation.
Implications for Cities
- Innovation Districts could be the answer for your city when looking at how to make room for Makers to work. The best such districts enable Makers to knock shoulders with other creative people (designers, architects) as well as with those in the tech community. The challenge is creating a diversity of spaces at differing rent levels and not allowing high rent uses to squeeze out lower rent uses that both stimulate innovation and broad job growth. The great irony is that a vibrant creative business sector requires stable real estate. Pratt Center argues that zoning can encourage a mix of space and vesting management, and ownership in a mission-oriented nonprofit can add stability as well as promote tenant curation that maximizes job growth, advances equity and inclusion, and facilitates resident employment.
- Innovation centers and labs are popping up everywhere. But building one isn’t as easy as it sounds. You need a champion who is laser-focused on building the user experience around the people who will work in your innovation center. Each touch point needs to be carefully designed to have a visceral impact on the senses. Space needs to be carefully programmed and planned for casual and accidental interactions.
- Be a good client when commissioning creative space to be built from scratch. Supportive. Not beholden to preconceptions. Willing to throw out “industry standards” and try something new and different. Committed to “getting it right” even if “it” is ineffable.
- Working with real estate is like everything else in the Maker movement. Commit to rapid iteration, much experimentation, and don’t bother arguing about the conceptual. Build a prototype instead. Bring in experts early to point out challenges and develop solutions. Get the team that is working on a real estate development together weekly if you can, as you’ll find that a week then gives you the same productivity other teams get in a month. Clients need to commit to reviewing materials and providing a decisive reaction quickly so as to keep the project on track and the team from getting buried under an avalanche of delayed decisions.
- Policy hacks look promising, but we have yet to crack the code on how to make space inside our gateway cities affordable for Makers to live and work. We need to spin up more policy hacks that experiment with how to make both work and living space more available to Makers at prices they can afford. Hackathon anyone? If you are unsure what a hackathon is or how to field one, see Chapter 8 on Civic Engagement for details.
