Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What is a Maker City?”.
I’M with peter hirschberg silicon valley, entrepreneur and co-leader of the maker city initiative, which is a project that’s being put together by the white house maker media and the kaufman foundation. Peter. You just got off stage talking about some of the great things that are happening, but i think one of the interesting things is how quickly and prominently this maker city concept has blossomed, and i think one of the things that would be really great is to hear Well, how would you encapsulate definition? What does maker cities mean? You know it’s a term of art, that’s really only about a year old and what it captures. First of all, is this notion that our cities really are kind of the the bastions of economic development, entrepreneurship and creating and, of course, right now, everyone’s moving back to cities. So all of this activities in cities – and we see how popular they are and at this same moment uh.
All of these new tools are coming online. All of the tools of making, and, of course this stuff has a lot to say for education, for economic development. For the future of manufacturing, the united states, so that whole ecosystem is just a powerful boost in a city right when you start teaching kind of maker stuff to young people, they have a sense that they can do things and they’re getting skills uh. It’S the possibility of bringing new enterprises to it so you’re, finding that cities like pittsburgh are building out these networks, that are, how do all the maker spaces and the education people get hooked together and how do they find each other and smaller cities are finding that? There’S a great need for skilled workforce and how they make that stuff develop you know, or in san francisco.
We have sf maid, which is all about locally produced goods and then working through the permitting issues to make all that stuff happen. So this is a movement. That’S both about economics and it’s also about co-creating the city, so just as making empowers you and social media made everyone part of the media. So too, cities are becoming a platform they’re.
Actually, an invitation to create an urbanism, as opposed to like the city planning department, makes it and you play a parking ticket and you either do or don’t like what they came up with so in san francisco. Recently we had market street prototyping where 50 projects came up and they were done by a broad, diverse group of designers and architects and urbanists, and the city planning department said: let’s have a bunch of prototypes, we’ll see what works and what doesn’t work, we’ll modify we’ll Interact with the public all that stuff, we normally do in the web with like a web service, and we learn quickly. What would it be like if we applied that to part of how we do something that is normally a structure that is all around for a long time, so we add prototype to it. So you add all that together and that becomes the notion of a more participatory maker city and we call it maker city because, like we like the word, make and we all live in cities.
But it really codes for kind of how the way we build where we build is going to be much more collaborative effort, got it yeah, and i saw you know. I saw you at uh. The urban market street uh prototyping festival some incredible uh creations there uh. What’S what’s the next step? What’S what’s happening with with that uh moving forward, yeah, so market street prototyping? For those of you familiar with san francisco market street’s, the main drag, it goes from the ferry building down to city hall and it’s being redone in a couple of years: more pedestrian, oriented, uh, uh kind of less vehicular traffic.
All that stuff. And the question was: how do you activate it? How do you just make that a lovely place that people want to go with the feeling of a north beach or the west village, so there were 50 projects and now they’re a formal part of city planning. So, as the city sits down with its architects and its designers, some of those will officially be put into it and some will influence how the city is designing it. For example, the city is now thinking that its streetscape is more like a lego like its convertible spaces.
That can be updated and changed and prototypes can come in and maybe it’s an art thing you’re playing with. Maybe it’s a pop-up library, maybe there’s a grid for food food type things. Maybe it’s outdoor ping-pong games, but how would you program and constantly change it and we haven’t thought of urbanism that way we thought of it more like you build it for a bunch of years, so it’s influencing how we’re permitting how we’re physically designing the space it’ll It’Ll pop up in market street and most interestingly, the knight foundation that funded a lot of this brought 12 other cities to town. Well, there are other cities are, are like detroit, uh and and philadelphia and tallahassee, and miami they’ve got a bunch of cities and uh they’re all now thinking about how to apply that. So it’s a movement. It’S uh, that’s amazing.
So this is the thing where this is a a project in endeavor that can then spread, and you know we can start seeing. You know again something that’s just a the beginning of a really interesting idea. Yeah and these you know we’re trying to open a lot of this stuff up so you’ll see the launch of uh of an urban prototyping organization soon. That uh has taken a lot of what we’ve learned here and we’ll work with other cities and you’ll see people like the knight foundation. Take it out, and you know, like any other kind of project.
It will be shared. Just the city’s like a big arduino and uh, and if it works somewhere else, it would work in the next place and then we’ll build on each other. I think the other point here is cities are really networks. I mean what we’re seeing in all this maker city. Stuff is a year ago when we first talked about this stuff.
It was new and what i heard from a bunch of cities is this is amazing, but how would we even do it and how do you pay for maker spaces and what are the economic models for this and now you’re, seeing almost like the synapses grow, pittsburgh Is doing such a great job of weaving these things together and other cities are learning, but these don’t stop at city boundaries. They become regional and really in very wiki sense. It’S one city learning from another and building and building on top of each other, and this is really what’s exciting about the city is kind of a living laboratory. It’S not just a theoretical thing.
It actually is what people are doing together and some of the most interesting organizations in our nature, nation are on top of it. The bloomberg foundation is passionate about civic innovation. Knight is funding. This brookings done some great work on metropolitan revolution.
The kaufman foundation cares mightily about uh entrepreneurship, so you have these thought. Leaders in these cities that you know it’s a pretty exciting forefront of making. So if someone wanted to get involved be part of a maker city initiative, what do they need to do? We are actually in the middle of putting together a playbook and launching and gathering a great deal of of this stuff right, so so, right now uh, i can give you links to a couple of talks that i’ve given on maker cities.
That would be a really interesting thing for people to look at and we’re going to put up on on up on the make site a bunch of resources to take a look at this stuff. In many ways, the real request now is, if you’re doing these things share this stuff with us, because coming up is the national week of making and the white house is collecting a lot of commitments of what cities are doing and the white house was becoming a Real interesting collection point: uh: a year ago we had over a hundred cities and mayors sign up and saying here’s what we’re doing and there’s going to be even more of it this year, so uh. If we look at that whitehouse.gov and then in particular the the maker initiative sites, that’s a place where you can see what your city is doing and when you can register what you’re up to and that’s going to be the next big step in this movement. Fantastic.
Well, thank you peter. This is exciting and i can’t wait to see how it develops. .