The Maker Movement and Urban Economic Development

In the making: Open Creative Labs as an emerging topic in economic geography?

“…While we find evidence for the role of Open Creative Labs within entrepreneurial processes, their function in innovation processes and thus, for instance, in local or even translocal innovation systems is rather anecdotal and primarily based on self‐reflections by labs and their users. Wolf‐Powers et al (, p. 375) already warn against “exuberant expectations” in terms of the regional development potential of the urban maker economy and Brinks () also cautions against overly high expectations of the innovative potential of Open Creative Labs. Even though Open Creative Labs have been conceptualized as local platforms for knowledge creation (Bathelt & Cohendet, ), Brinks situates labs within the user‐innovation literature and demonstrates that creative processes in labs mainly draw on already existing knowledge.…”

“…Still, the narrative that Open Creative Labs provide material and social settings for creativity, creative work, entrepreneurship, and independent, creativity driven, and craft‐based work has created a somewhat natural link to urban contexts (Fiorentino, ; Gandini, ; Jamal, ; Merkel, ; Schmidt et al, ; Wolf‐Powers et al, ; Wolf‐Powers et al, ). The existing body of literature either builds on case‐study designs that apply research on single labs in urban environments (e.g., Toombs & Bardzell, ; Williams & Hall, ), on various labs within a particular metropolitan region (e.g., Capdevila, ; Lin, ), or research that compares a limited number of cities (e.g., Merkel, ; Wolf‐Powers et al, ). A systematic comparison across macroregions, such as the European Union, or across several countries, is still lacking.…”

Co-Working Spaces - A new agenda for place based economic development policies

“…Recent studies have discussed the role of these spaces in local economic development processes (Van Holm, 2017), and their relationship with entrepreneurs (Gertner & Mack, 2017). Research has also confirmed the impact of CWSs on education and employment creation (van Holm, 2015;Wang & Loo, 2017;Wolf-Powers et al, 2017), as well as the importance of entrepreneurial co-location within cities more generally (Andersson & Larsson, 2016;Witt, 2004). However, there is still a need in the current policy framework to specifically address the implications of these developments on economic and spatial planning.…”

Moveable Production Systems for Sustainable Development and Trade: Limitations, Opportunities and Barriers

“…In addition, as summarized in Figure 1, expanding geographic and demographic distributions of manufacturing has come to be associated with increasing ecological sustainability and social sustainability [4,5]. For example, increasing the diversity of locations included in manufacturing can reduce the long-distance transportation of materials and goods [6] and increasing the diversity of people included in manufacturing can contribute to the spread of manufacturing communities [7].…”