What Is a Curator?

Foundries of the Future defines the Curator as “an actor who can broker the relationships between businesses and local authorities”. But more than this, they play a vital part in “identifying necessary community infrastructure requirements” and connecting manufacturers with communities, research and financial institutions, supply lines, and client networks. Public and private stakeholders are set to benefit.

The continued ‘erosion’ of urban manufacturing, which began in the second half of the 21st century, stems from a lack of real narrative. The public and authorities have lost touch with and appreciation for production’s role in today’s city. It has become ‘invisible’, and it is the Curator’s job to restore understanding and a sense of connection.

“The curator can be the bridge between public authorities and policy makers, local stakeholders and other businesses.”

Responsibilities of a Curator

The Curator’s purpose is to represent the city’s diverse stakeholders. As a neutral body, they advocate for local manufacturing, objectively negotiating for and defending the sector in city planning meetings, discussions around infrastructure change, and gentrification pressures.

As the public face of industry, the Curator’s responsibilities include:

• Increase awareness of manufacturing among public, private, and community groups.
• Organise open door events, where citizens can get up close with manufacturing in their neighbourhood.
• Generate open, honest dialogue that identifies needs, concerns, challenges, perceptions, and benefits from all sides.
• Facilitate collaboration among makers and with administrations and other sectors.
• Identify financial and physical resources, possibilities for circularity, and opportunities for innovation.
• Support the development of infrastructure and trade-specific training opportunities that enables city-based manufacturing to thrive.
• Establish rental conditions that ensure manufacturing has a secure place in the city.
• Help authorities refine their support to align with manufacturers’ needs.
• Assist businesses to identify, generate, and refine financing.
• Create a culture that retains, rejuvenates, and celebrates traditional skills and industrial commons. This preserves unique local manufacturing capabilities and heritage.

To achieve this, Curators must have an overview of the complete local manufacturing scene at a neighbourhood and/or city scale. Relationships with myriad stakeholders are key. So, as a minimum, the role is only viable if authorities and business communities recognise their legitimacy.

Benefits for Your City

A single entity – whether an independent individual, city official, or purposefully constituted group – representing the multitude of local makers presents an undisputed asset.

The Curator can:

• Provide clarity on the position, barriers, and needs of local urban manufacturing.
• Lead on community liaison, relieving conflict via improved transparency and changing misconceptions of round-the-clock noise, dust, smells, and traffic movement.
• Educate about cleaner, greener, modern making practices, including working from home, and the capacity to regenerate derelict high streets; especially effective if the Curator has links with the local chamber of commerce.
• Establish channels for complementary makers to connect, share, and invest together, to prevent costly duplication of skill and knowledge acquisition, training, research and development, storage, distribution, equipment, and technology.
• Form collaborative partnerships to eliminate common problems, source the best staff, and innovate products.
• Identify efficient use of work and storage space.
• Rally collectives among manufacturers to leverage harder-hitting political power for change and representation.
• Provide guidance for public actors (landowners, policymakers) and producers on creating, protecting, and accessing the most suitable spaces for diverse manufacturing types and sizes.
• Work with actors to diversify appropriate use of spaces, including temporary and meanwhile spaces and microzoning – assigning blocks for manufacturing among alternative land use where it’s usually not permitted.
• Generate enthusiasm among younger generations for acquiring the technical skills being lost as they gravitate to careers in cleaner sectors, e.g., services and IT.

This should be a long-term investment. A sustained presence builds trust among businesses, encouraging them to share valuable, if sensitive, intelligence that underpins resilient industries. This includes intellectual property, research, and primary data.

Manufacturers are notoriously slow to adapt to “new norms, regulations or planning”. A consistent representative who commands trust and offers informed, experiential knowledge can accelerate the adoption of processes and changes that offer firms individual or city-wide advantages.

Requirements of a Curator

Stakeholders in the city need the Curator to bridge their differences, to guide them in understanding varied viewpoints and in establishing shared aims and outcomes. Manufacturers need a representative to undertaking advocacy work on their behalf as many small businesses simply don’t have the time or workforce to spare.

The incumbent needs a prescribed set of core competencies: a mix of “generalist knowledge of technical, social and financial issues affecting businesses” and soft skills that allow them to skilfully facilitate calm discussion, negotiations, and collaboration among multiple agents across disciplines and interest groups.

They should be appointed on account of demonstrable:

• interpersonal skills,
• empathy for all parties affected by manufacturing,
• experience of negotiation,
• training provision,
• understanding of private, governmental, and local financial mechanisms,
• enthusiasm for the sector.

Curators and the Climate Crisis

Modern manufacturing is cleaner than commonly believed. Producers are increasingly working from home and contemporary technology, such as additive manufacturing, is a far cry from the smoking chimney stacks of the Industrial Revolution.

It takes consistent messaging to instil this new vision in the collective psyche. A Curator is pivotal to sharing the good news stories of the maker movement; the realistic picture of people who are solving climate concerns with their skills and environmentally sound innovations.

They should also take a lead on moving the sector away from a ‘take, make, waste’ model and instead embrace a circular economy. This will reduce waste, pollution, and emissions.

Genuine nuisances of urban manufacturing impact the natural and living environment. Producers are often not the ones suffering the consequences and so partially unaware of their impact. Economic drivers have led to the offshoring of making and along with it waste, noise, emissions, and contaminants.

The Curator brings transparency to the situation. They raise awareness and help cities take ownership and control of their environmental impact by reshoring. Import replacement reduces emissions while boosting the local economy via job creation, community cohesion, and the multiplier effect.

It’s unlikely all environmental challenges will be eliminated. But by creating a platform for debate, a Curator guarantees the full suite of stakeholders are listened to and the positions, challenges, and capabilities are heard. This forms a basis to negotiate the extent of issues that they collectively find tolerable and to broker workable solutions.

The Curator in a Nutshell

When it comes to facilitating manufacturing in urban centres, a city Curator arguably has a challenging job. They need patience, incredible interpersonal skills, and knowledge of the manufacturing scene that spans across scales. Then they need to draw together myriad stakeholders with disparate interests to create outcomes that not only benefit manufacturers but inspire support from the gamut of citizens and sectors.

Investing in a Curator seems the most reliable way to interweave making into the urban fabric of your city. Get the ball rolling with our detailed how-to-guide.

A Final Note

Cities of Making has established a range of 50 patterns and exercises that Curators can use to create a robust manufacturing culture in their city. These are freely available and can be found in chapter 4 of Foundries of the Future.