- Mapping and auditing the regions of Cumbria and Bristol for production spaces, capability and kit, including community businesses, SMEs, and social enterprise (building on work already undertaken https://wcm.gogocarto.fr/);
- Expert advice on distributed fabrication and logistics through interviews and design sprints with industry experts (ie. BlokBuild, Open System Lab, BE-ST);
- Draw on the commons and GitHub to explore community tech platform options;
- Use the Design Hop process to co-design the tech platform for distributed fabrication, with a focus on user experience, quality control, and part tracking;
- Develop terms and conditions to ensure platform has community tech mission at core, delivers value for money, and is viable in terms of business model;
- Test through a series of demonstration fabrications, delivered by members through the distributed platform.
Distributed manufacturing – aggregate, collective, open
A major shift is required to create homes that are delivered in a way that addresses the wider set of structural challenges facing people and places, including the housing crisis, the ecological and climate emergency, and rapid technological change. WeCanMake’s mission is to develop new community-led ways to tackle these crises head on, by putting the power and tools into community hands to deliver development on their own terms.
Knowle West and the many other neighbourhoods like it already have the knowhow and assets they need. The creative and collective challenge is how to best tease out those powerful strengths, and develop the means to make what is needed to fill the gaps. Together with other communities in the UK, we are exploring how we might use community tech to grow our capacity to make homes in a way that retains and builds community wealth, addresses the housing and climate crises, while remaining economically sustainable.
We know there’s huge potential for digital technology in construction. Construction is currently the least digitised sector in the world, just above hunting. Together with our local community, we have built two low-carbon, community-led, affordable homes using modern methods of construction (MMC) in our community micro-factory. There is a massive opportunity for communities to use these new tech tools to design and deliver new homes on their own terms, generating community wealth, and making use of local material palettes.
But the scale of the challenge is vast, and we are at a bottleneck of only being able to produce two homes per year in our current facilities. Over the next 36 months, we have secured land and have a pipeline to deliver 34 community-led, low-carbon and affordable homes in our local area. This is a significant opportunity to generate a substantial (+£5 million) income for our community business, and community wealth in the form of skills, jobs and homes.
To meet this demand, our vision is a distributed, agile production network made up of community micro-factories (including our own), which can flexibly draw on additional production capacity from an ecosystem of other local community businesses, SMEs, and social enterprises with similar digital fabrication technology.
Scaling – the next big thing could be lots of small things
As with our model for gentle densification, scaling up is not the only route to impact. While we could scale our production by acquiring a larger facility, this could be problematic. In the last few years, three commercial MMC factories in the UK have closed because they could not sustain the pipeline that a large centralised factory demands in uncertain planning and inflationary times. Equally, as a community business, we can’t access investment finance on favourable terms to support set-up of a large factory. This is a challenge shared by a growing number of community-led housing projects, who want to scale while holding onto the value of development.
Rather than one centralised factory, we are keen to harness the power of community-tech to set up and run a distributed production network that links up numerous smaller facilities in a locality, to collectively fabricate the components needed for a particular housing site.
Distributed manufacturing in action
Such a model would make a game-changing difference to our community business and to the wider community-led housing sector, by presenting the capacity to use community tech to scale in a flexible way, track production, and ensure quality control. We already know of two other community businesses who want to develop this kind of model in Dorset and Cumbria, and are keen to work collaboratively with them to develop an open-source platform to service the whole sector.
Drawing on our experience in setting up an MMC production space to deliver housing compotents to the highest industry quality control levels (BOPAS), we will be working with fellow community business DigitalWoodoo in Cumbria to create a design-test-learn process to develop the community tech platform for distributed manufacture.
Key elements
Open source
A key part of our mission is developing collective, regenerative community-led alternatives to the mainstream extractive commercial development industry. We believe that community tech in the form of MMC is a key part of how the power and resources to make good homes can be held in community hands.
WeCanMake has an ethos of working in the open, sharing what we learn and discover as we go. A distributed manufacturing platform would be no different. It would be designed to be open sourced so that other communities can benefit from the knowhow we develop, both the platform and the process. We are an active member of the national Community Land Trust Network, and a member of its Growth Lab to spread and replicate community-led housing solutions. Combined with this open-working ethos, we are well positioned to share and spread the learning from this exciting project.
Partners?
Or any other drop downs?