Open workshops as sites of innovative socio-economic practices: approaching urban post-growth by assemblage theory

ABSTRACT

Current debates on knowledge-based and creative locational development have come to deal with small urban places of novelty that formerly remained unnoticed. A plethora of new forms of producing and working recently emerged in unplanned and uncoordinated ways, bearing odd names such as FabLabs, Open Worklabs, RealLabs, Open Design Cities, Techshops, Repair Cafés, and more (Smith, A., M. Fressoli, D. Abrol, E. Arond, and A. Ely. 2017. Grassroots Innovation Movements. London: Routledge). Political initiatives have been taken by surprise; at the same time, standard epistemic tools of the social sciences and economics have been rendered unfit. More concise analytical reconstructions are needed to adequately capture the variety and complexity of these “labs”, their heterogeneous causation, their contingent proceedings, their surplus of latency, their peculiar power relations and their local embeddings. Urban social contexts have a strong triggering function as they help to re-configure older, and create new, combinations of heterogeneous social and economic agency. Meanwhile strong elements of grassroots innovation (Smith et al. 2017) have informed the formation of various models of alternative work and production. Taking the phenotype of open workshops as a revealing example, we take assemblage theory to describe the constitutive features of these new types of self-organised work, and the associated places of innovation. A fresh gaze on the complexity and open-endedness of socio-material formations may help to better understand the nature of emerging post-growth economies.