The Maker-Manufacturing Nexus as a Place-Connecting Strategy: Implications for Regions Left Behind

The maker movement has been heralded as a place-based strategy to invigorate urban manufacturing—offering the millennial generation access to affordable, high-quality technologies and inclusive marketing platforms through which to design new products and get them into the hands of design-savvy consumers. Yet it also offers significant place-crossing opportunities that have been overlooked, namely, the potential for the production needs of urban-based makers to be a resource for shoring up manufacturing communities beyond the metropolis at growing risk of being left behind. We demonstrate this possibility through an in-depth case study of the Carolina Textile District (CTD), a novel value chain experiment that helps incumbent textile manufacturers in more remote legacy industrial regions connect with and lend support to a new generation of urban-based textile designers and entrepreneurs. We argue the CTD is an innovative distributive platform that transforms the shared vulnerability of urban makers and rural manufacturers into productive and opportunity-rich relationships, fortified by the millennial-maker ethos of forging high-road supply chains in support of social equity and environmental sustainability. As the maker movement gains traction within planning and policy circles, the CTD offers lessons for how to intensify and de-risk interdependencies between nonmetro and urban regions; between old and new manufacturing clusters; and, ultimately, between blue-collar communities and urban-oriented millennial youth. Conceptually, the case speaks to the need for economic geographers to be more attentive to place-connecting industrial strategies in their growing call for spatial equity.