Chapter 9: The Future of the Maker City
Thoughts about the Future of Our Cities
The realization of Maker Cities portends the possibilities of a brighter future for our cities and their residents. In previous chapters, we looked at:
- Characteristics of a Maker City
- An introduction to the Maker mindset, Maker ethos, Maker tools
- Ecosystems of Maker Cities
- The Maker City as a learning community; what that means for K-12 education as well as lifelong learning
- The challenges and promises of workforce and economic development in a Maker City
- The renewal in urban manufacturing, especial advanced forms, inside the Maker City
- Real Estate as a strategy to drive innovation in the Maker City
- How a Maker City encourages Civic Engagement
There are implications for cities in each chapter that we hope are of use to individuals and organizations as they build out and strengthen the Maker City. The Maker City movement is still young, with much room for experimentation and growth.
What makes the Maker movement a movement is that much change is happening through the grassroot efforts of individuals and organizations that are committed to changing our cities for the better. This makes it more difficult (of course) to expose policy levers. You cannot legislate or zone a Maker City into existence. To move forward to strengthen the Maker City, city leaders and activists have the following building blocks they can work with:
- Cross-sector collaboration. There is much evidence that when the public, private, and nonprofit sectors truly engage to solve a city’s problems, the results can be transformative. Examples include: The Brooklyn Navy Yard, experiments in municipal broadband in Chattanooga, TN; the collaboration of 250 organizations to remake learning throughout Pittsburgh, PA.
- Co-creation, crowdsourcing, and rapid prototyping are creating entirely new types of products that can be manufactured inside the Maker City. Examples include: consumer appliances (FirstBuild, Nomiku Wifi Sous Vide), fashion and textiles (Crye Precision, Manufacture NY), and precision components (energy production, aerospace).
- Engage major research universities to work with Makers. Examples include: Carbon 3D, an advanced form of 3D printer that came out of Carnegie Mellon University and research into advanced material that–with funding from the Obama administration–is happening in collaboration with FIT and MIT.
- Engage with the Make Schools Alliance. Seventy-eight colleges and universities in 32 states representing more than 1.1 million students have made commitments to support the maker movement on their campuses and in their communities. These include the creation of maker spaces open to students and the community, maker training and certification, and mentorship to support local schools.
- Embrace and support urban manufacturing in all shapes and forms but particularly advanced manufacturing as discussed in Chapter 6. The Urban Manufacturing Alliance is available to help you get experiments off the ground and achieve scale.
- Think small. Think local. At least at first, to get experiments off the ground. Only later, when you know something works, does it makes sense to scale it up, by expanding your reach regionally and/or nationally. Examples include: Pittsburgh Children’s Museum and Manufacture NY.
- Enable Makers to co-create public space. Large civic art and renewal projects are giving way to smaller, more guerrilla efforts. Examples include: urban prototyping, parklets in San Francisco; Makers working to rebuild Detroit in a phoenix-like fashion, taking back one blighted home at a time.
- Tap into young people as champions of change. Examples include: Ethan Toth of Wenatchee Washington who introduced his entire city to the power of Making; young people working with Fictiv and FirstBuild to manufacture precision parts. This isn’t child labor, it’s child capital, enabling young people to do productive work at an earlier point in their lives so as to build a lasting sense of agency and competency.
We know that the paths to Maker City status will vary, both in practice and timing, but given the speed at which these changes are taking place, we thought it prudent to use this chapter to look at the future of the Maker City.
The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is a think tank based in Palo Alto that has been researching and providing insight into the Maker Movement and Maker Cities since 2008. We asked Rod Falcon, Research Director at Institute for the Future, to help imagine what the city of the future might look like thanks to the Maker City movement.
From Maker Cities to Open Cities
How the Maker Mindset & Technology are Reinventing Urban Life
By Rod Falcon, Research Director, Institute for the Future
What is the future of the city? And how can you participate in making it? We can all start by cultivating a Maker mindset.
The Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California research nonprofit looked at the Maker mindset back in 2008. Back then, we forecasted how an emerging do-it-yourself culture of “Makers” would transform how goods, services, and experiences would be designed, manufactured, and distributed. Today, Makers represent a new kind of citizen, bringing creativity and inventiveness to urban life, opening up participation, resources, imagination, spaces, and economic opportunity. These Makers are quite literally fabricating a new kind of city: the Open City.
At the Institute for the Future, we explore the future of cities by looking at creators — the Makers and the communities that drive advances in technology, health, food, and civic engagement. We look at context, the environments that shape and are shaped by technology and that amplify or disrupt people’s lives. We look at home, work, and the streets where life unfolds. We also look at technologies, the tools that drive new ways of interacting with things and with each other.
By exploring these we see early signals of how the city is being remade. Cities are becoming places where people and new tools are coming together in transformative ways. Cities are our laboratories for the future. They’re where we face the future first. They’re where people and ideas from around the world come together in a massive, unpredictable, crucible of innovation.
Today, the world’s cities remain places of creativity and experimentation. More people worldwide live in cities than those who do not. But they’re also places that face challenges.
We see that our transportation, food, health, education, and governance systems are unprepared for the scale of change that’s going to take place over the next decades.This means that the ways we’ve built infrastructure, provisioned services, and coordinated whole economies and markets need reinvention. So, how will we meet these challenges?
Science-fiction author William Gibson has some answers for us.
The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
This quote of his is really fundamental in that it teaches us to look for the future in the present.
But there is another William Gibson quote that gives us a hint of where in the present we should look, if we want to find the future.
The street finds its own uses for things.
His insight is that whatever a technology is designed for, people will find their own way to use it. That’s what the Maker mindset is about. And we’ve found that people all over the world have adopted this mindset that questions how we’re intended to use technologies. And in doing so, they generate new innovations, new uses, and sometimes complete transformations, true breakthroughs from the way we used to do things.
If we look at the Maker movement and the number of Maker Faires happening across the globe, you can see how big and global this is. But this is just the most visible example of a mindset that is more widespread. Even before anyone called it that, the Maker mindset thrived in the streets. For example, take the turntable. The turntable was designed as a technology to play music. But not everyone on the street saw it that way. In the Bronx in the 1970s, young people generally didn’t have bands at dance parties. Bands were expensive. But what people did have was the turntable.
And just the way a band feels out the room and adjusts how they play, so does a DJ. They read the room and choose what record to play next. But one DJ, a Jamaican immigrant who went by the name DJ Kool Herc, took it one step further.
He listened to the music carefully and watched the crowd. And he noticed that there was one part of every song that drove people on the dance floor crazy. And he had this idea, what if you could use the turntable to isolate the breaks and put them all together:
“Hmm… They’re waiting for this one particular break and I have a couple more records that have the same break up in it. I wonder how would it be if I put them all together. I started out with James Brown, ‘clap ya’ hands, stomp ya’ feet.’ And that part right there, the break, I’d come in with Apache, ‘Bongo Rock.’”
And that was the birth of hip-hop. His story is about the Maker mindset in action. Herc took something that was designed to be a technology of consumption and turned it into a technology for creation. And he helped create the future of popular music worldwide.
Today we’re beginning to see that the Maker mindset is not just about making or repurposing stuff but remaking systems, those urban systems that need reinvention. The city itself is the new turntable.
In Shenzhen, China we met Makers who are resetting technology manufacturing to super high speeds in Hua Qiang Bei. And we experienced a Maker City that is getting reinvented in the Chinese imagination as a frontier for experimentation and innovation.
In Detroit, we saw citizen resourcefulness in action as communities build their own services despite the collapse of institutions around them.
We immersed ourselves in Mexico City, where the Maker movement is just emerging in this megacity, but we saw first-hand how it’s being embraced rapidly as a way to get things done without a lot of resources.
We learned that Maker Cities are becoming Open Cities. Open cities reflect the value of accessibility through the strategies of participation, sharing, imagination, adaptability, and equity. And in city after city, Makers shared similar values, embracing openness and experimentation, hacking not only technology and innovation challenges but urgent urban challenges as well. Out of their experiments will emerge a core set of open-city strategies that will define the urban experience for decades to come.
We identified five open city strategies that shape the way individuals and communities use technology to reinvent urban life.
Think of these strategies as a manifesto for open cities.
They expand what is possible by provoking us to ask questions such as:
1. What if cities could expand participation?
The idea behind this strategy is how to let more people participate in commercial and civic life. Think about how Yelp works. Yelp depends on participation. It needs users to provide feedback, and by harnessing participation it created one of the most popular sources of reviews for restaurants and other businesses. This is an example where participation creates new commercial value, but we can also see citizens start to use the same strategies — the same kind of platforms — to create new forms of civic participation. Take for instance teenagers in Georgia who created their own Yelp for police. They call it “Five-o”. Frustrated by a lack of accountability, these kids invented an app that allows users to document interactions with police officers and rate their behavior. Here we can see the Maker mindset is not just about repurposing devices, but entire platforms, businesses, and engagement models for community needs.
2.What if cities were designed for sharing?
This Open City strategy looks for underutilized assets and unlocks capacity in people, places, and things. Cities have enormous latent capacity enabling citizens to share tangible goods, raw data, expertise, time, or assistance. Coordination tools for sharing excess capacity allow us to extract more value from the people, places, and things and create new kinds of commerce as well as charitable giving. At the same time, apps like Waze, which aggregate user data to create traffic maps, point to new ways that sharing citizen-generated data will create entirely new experiences in the urban landscape by generating new value and illuminating how the city can work better for everyone.
3. What if cities inspired and harnessed imagination?
Back in 2013 San Francisco and the Make-A-Wish Foundation showed us what happens when we empower people by inspiring their imaginations. When the foundation decided to grant a boy his wish to be “Batkid” for a day, they anticipated a few hundred people would pitch in to make it happen. But the whole city got involved. Businesses, politicians and more than 10,000 citizens all coordinated to transform San Francisco into Gotham City. The local newspaper even put out a Gotham City Examiner. All this wonderful energy and imagination came together for one child for one day. But what if we could harness the same energy and imagination everyday to remaking the city? The next decade’s virtual reality and augmented reality tools will enable artists and citizens to reimagine their communities and persuade others through immersion in “what-could-be” scenarios. As lightweight tools for simulation and prototyping emerge, anyone will be able to create and share visions for the future of the city.
4. What if cities made public spaces adaptable?
Today, food truck courts and parklets — those curbside parking spaces converted to public benches and walkways — are among the most mainstream examples of a broader trend toward recolonizing urban spaces to make them more open, public, and social. The shifting demographics of cities will transform needs, habits, and even values, which in turn will change the demand and priorities for the use of public spaces. At the same time, the advent of lightweight manufacturing technologies and crowd-sourced “recipes” for doing almost anything will accelerate the ability to place-make. With more adaptable spaces, cities will become more open to the needs and imaginations of populations.
5. What if cities created more equity across the population?
A city can use all of the other Open City strategies but do little to address equity. At their core, Open Cities are about creating a new culture of innovation that pursues equity by making spaces, services, and economic opportunities open and accessible to all citizens regardless of age, ability, gender, and socioeconomic status — that is, they’re about creating new standards of equity. As they leverage open data, shareable resources, and adaptable spaces to meet emerging needs across diverse populations, Open Cities create alternative pathways to attain equity.
Make the Future Today
Each urban challenge we face can’t be solved by any one stakeholder. But the promise of Open Cities is that we can enlist each other. Together we can untangle the knotty problems that ensnare communities and cities. The future is within reach. You can start making the future by cultivating your Maker mindset and participating in the reinvention of your city as an Open City. IFTF’s, Open Cities: How Technology and the Maker Mindset is Reinventing Urban Life, is a Maker kit for doing just that. The map contains tools and a process to help you choose your open city strategies. It highlights the technology catalysts Makers are using to accelerate their strategies. It shares how Makers are creating new tools and platforms to meet existing and emerging needs and in the process remaking how we all live, work, and play.
Open Cities is a big idea. It inspires and overwhelms at the same time. Our hope is that we can help you reimagine your city or any city as an Open City and think about ways to bring the future forward.
After all, we’re all invested in the future of our cities. We invite you to explore the future, to imagine the possibilities, and to start making the future today.
Implications for Cities
- Download the IFTF research map and toolkit on Open Cities to gain additional insight on how to better anticipate future trends that will affect the evolution of your city, from Maker City to Open City and beyond.
- Anticipate the future by making the 5 strategies listed above your own:
1. What if my city could expand participation?
2.What if my city was designed for sharing?
3. What if my city inspired and harnessed imagination?
4. What if my city made public spaces adaptable?
5. What if my city created more equity across the population? - Follow all or some of these people and organizations to learn more about Maker Cities
- Contribute your own story to the Maker City project, by authoring a case study on Medium and using the hashtag #makercity when you post.
- Work with a local college or university to field an economic impact study and share the results on Medium using that same hashtag.
- If there are policy hacks, funding sources, or recent legislation that Maker Cities could benefit from, let us know and we’ll get the word out. Send an email to omeed [a] makercitybook [dot] com and we’ll be sure to publicize the results.
- Sponsor a Meetup, Maker Faire, Makerspace (hint: crowdsource to get your initial financing) if one does not already exist in your city.
- Build the ecosystem you need, one that ideally cuts across sectors, including the learning network for K-12 education that already exists in your city, colleges and research universities, as well as the startup/entrepreneurial community and innovation centers within major corporations.
- Invest in urban manufacturing by partnering the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, an organization uniquely qualified to help you put in place programs to encourage urban manufacturing in your city.
- Support young people who want to go into Making. After 40 years of vilifying people who work with their hands, it’s important that we tell young people with a background in STEM that they can support themselves and their families by working with their hands. The next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs is almost certainly working away today as a master carpenter, a robotics maker, a drone designer, and/or fabricator of prosthetics or another kind of custom medical device.
- Support older workers as they retire and guide them into roles where they can transfer the knowledge they have as well as their mastery of specific Maker skills.
- Identify and nurture new forms of business. Today, it is possible to put the means of production can be put in more people’s hands at a lower cost than at any other time in history.
- Remember that the career paths inside corporation are–for all extents and purposes–gone. Encourage young people to build a portfolio of relevant projects they have completed and also to get training in the “Understandings” of starting their own businesses based on their Maker skills.
