ABSTRACT
Utopian urban design has long tried to find a way to reorganize the relationships of design, production, commerce, and consumption to constitute an overall way of life better than the one represented by modern industrial society. In the face of a material world consisting of vast quantities of identical goods produced cheaply far from the people who will buy them, reformers have pushed for the making of finer goods more directly by the groups who will consume them, both for the sake of the objects themselves and as a way to facilitate social reform. These were some of the primary imperatives that drove the project that began with William Morris and the arts and crafts movement in England and culminated with the founding of modern industrial design with the Deutsche Werkbund. The same urges have been at the root of the new economy that has taken shape over the last decade as the college-educated middle class continues to migrate to neighborhoods in places like Portland, Berlin, Melbourne, and Brooklyn. This has recently taken the form of a craft-based, small-firm manufacturing tide reoccupying ex-industrial spaces. From the viewpoints of economics or urban cultural politics, this transformation can seem to be nothing more than a luxury corollary of gentrification, an urban ornament for those privileged enough to join the contemporary bohème. But seen through the lens of the Werkbund, greater and more serious stakes become visible, partly in terms of craft and design's claimed capacity to lead widespread socioeconomic reform, but more concretely in the character of the real urban spaces that they have started to create.
