ABSTRACT
The chapter title comes from a description of the mid-nineteenth-century English cutlery industry in Sheffield, in which metal products passed from small workshop to small workshop for different stages of manufacture. The city of Sheffield, “one great workshop,” acted as the overall physical and social framework that supported this industrial system. The myriad small workshops were part of a large, self-organizing system of production within the city as a whole.
The historic idea of “one great workshop” provides a loose analogy for an archetypal emerging city of production. This city supports new and existing forms of production and how they might evolve in synergistic ways. It includes large and small firms, traditional craft and highly specialized technologically-based manufacture, home-based workshops and larger factories, the “maker movement,” and computer-based design activities.
Although this archetype is focused on production, it provides a view of the “post-twentieth-century industrial city” itself, in which making, manufacture, and the growing and processing of food are a strong and visible part of daily life. Production is no longer hidden from view, but takes its part among the ordinary activities of the city, helping to reunite the fragmented parts of contemporary urbanism.
