Departures From the Norm: Innovative Planning for Inclusive Manufacturing
11.27.23
Departures From the Norm: Innovative Planning for Inclusive Manufacturing
Report originally published November, 2023 via the School of Urban Studies, University of Washington Tacoma
For decades, urban development strategies that privilege narrowly defined “creative” sectors, and anachronistic zoning policies have been the norm in US cities, bringing persistent displacement pressures to manufacturing businesses. However, as cities have faced mounting concerns over inequality, affordability, and diversity, recent scholarship has begun to revisit the importance of urban industry, identifying key contributions that industrial enterprises make to cities. The challenge is finding the right strategies that can preserve, enhance, and potentially expand existing urban industrial space. This article takes up that challenge in three ways: (a) by calling attention to long-standing industrial planning norms that have simultaneously disadvantaged communities of color and undermined awareness of and support for urban manufacturing, (b) by exploring “innovations” that depart from those norms by prioritizing “inclusion” and “visibility” in their planning efforts, and (c) by taking an expansive approach to “planning” that seeks lessons from beyond the formal planning establishment. Drawing from emerging scholarship, research and policy reports, program documents, and interviews with key participants, this article gathers lessons from two industrial planning examples—in San Francisco, CA and Buffalo, NY—that help reveal existing barriers to industrial retention, help reimagine the role and place of manufacturing in the city, and ultimately help to foster more inclusive urban development in the US.
‘What we want to be doing is more intentional inclusion and upskilling of machinists that are coming out of Northland [NWTC] to then be up‐skilled into automation a few years down the road. So we can continue that career upward mobility of folks so that they cannot just become people that are making a living wage, but the ones that are becoming the innovators.’ – Stephen Tucker, NWTC President & CEO.
NWTC helps coordinate a manufacturing ecosystem that offers comprehensive services to employers, employees, and those looking to enter the sector. Training focuses on building new skills for advanced manufacturing to bring new workers into the field, as well as ongoing training for existing workers to ensure professional mobility within the sector. That emphasis on up‐skilling was a consistent theme across interviews, as respondents recognized the importance of pipelines that run not just to entry‐level, but through various tiers of a manufacturing career.