‘Stand back and watch us’: Post-capitalist practices in the maker movement

Abstract

This paper examines the economic practices of maker spaces – open workshops that have increased in number over recent years and that aim to provide access to tools, materials and skills for small-scale manufacturing and repair. Scholarly interest in such spaces has been increasing across the social sciences more broadly, parallel to a growing interest in craft and making in economic geography. However, to rectify the ‘capitalocentrism’ of much existing work, the paper examines the case of a workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, through the dual theoretical lens of diverse economies and social practice theory. This conceptual approach sees the space as a novel form of economic ‘being-in-common’, providing diverse and contradictory opportunities for post-capitalist practice. The paper draws conclusions regarding the limits and potential of such spaces for sowing the prefigurative seeds for a more inclusive, sustainable and democratic urbanism.

Social transformation and postcapitalist possibility: Emerging dialogues between practice theory and diverse economies

“…The prominence of the diffuse, situated and everyday within both approaches chimes with geographers’ increasing focus on sustainability-related bottom-up organising (Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010; Fischer et al, 2017; Seyfang and Smith, 2007; Middlemiss and Parrish, 2010). Our proposed convergence of perspectives can help to situate the impressive up-swell in community economic experimentation that has been observed lately (Chatterton, 2019), including transition towns (Aiken, 2012; Hopkins, 2013), collective energy projects (Kunze and Becker, 2015), open workshops and hackerspaces (Smith, 2019), community supported agriculture (Bloemmen et al, 2015), open source projects (Mason, 2016), time banking and community currencies (Amanatidou et al, 2015; North, 2014), eco-social enterprises (Johanisova et al, 2013), and community-led cohousing (Chatterton, 2016).…”

“…Building on this growth, and to bring to life the article’s theoretical assertions, we illustrate our theoretical argument using examples from community-based initiatives. In particular, we draw examples from contemporary open workshops and repair cafés – collectively run spaces and events that have been instituted around practices of hacking, repair, and grassroots production (Lange and Bürkner, 2018; Smith, 2019; Hielscher and Smith, 2014). Open workshops establish publicly accessible working spaces, while repair cafés are best described as recurring gatherings fostering community-based product maintenance and restoration.…”

“…Our empirical insights are based on two independent research projects carried out between 2015 and 2019 in the UK and in Germany, respectively. Both projects employ primarily ethnographic research methods to explore spaces of community-based and partially de-marketised organisation and their situatedness within capitalist relations (Schmid, 2018, 2019b; Smith, 2017, 2019). The material gathered in the context of both projects illustrates transformation-oriented practices in relation to the conditions variously supporting or working against them.…”

Grow, share or buy? Understanding the diverse economies of urban gardeners

“…Expanding on this idea, I conclude that when thinking about sustainable food provisioning, scholars and practitioners need to look beyond market venues and beyond people's roles as 206 Other practices which were not explored in this study but are related to the practice of FSP include caring and guarding (Pottinger, 2018); commoning (Morrow, 2019); and creating, repairing and upcycling (Smith, 2019).…”

“…The contribution of this thesis to the existing works bringing together diverse economies and social practice theory (e.g. Holmes, 2018;Schmid, 2018;Smith, 2019) lies in the investigation of the relationship between practices and economies. If practices constitute economies, how exactly does this happen?…”