San Francisco as a Lab for U.S. Urban Manufacturing

December 01, 2014Contributors

Here in San Francisco, we understand what it takes to both lead in technology and marry it with old world craft and artistry. We are home to and celebrate the Maker Movement but we also appreciate that helping a maker scale to become a manufacturer is no small feat. We recognize that to continue to produce innovative product designs, we also need to understand how products are made. We appreciate that as a city, our policies need to get creative as we seek not only to retain industrial space in perhaps the most unaffordable urban area of the country, but to build more, perhaps even co-locate with the very commercial and residential uses that seek to displace it. Above all, we know the diversity of our people is the fuel for our collective innovation and economic success.

As San Francisco's manufacturing sector continues to mature, so it now goes in cities across the US. This is evidenced by membership in the national the Urban Manufacturing Alliance - which was founded in 2011 by SFMade and the Pratt Center for Community Development in New York, in partnership with Citi Community Development, SFMade's longest standing corporate partner. From those humble beginnings, the Urban Manufacturing Alliance has now grown to represent more than 50 North American cities and 100+ organizations, all working together to grow their respective urban manufacturing ecosystems. San Francisco has become an unlikely national model, a kind of "urban manufacturing lab," demonstrating the power and creativity - and jobs - unleashed when manufacturing and the city are linked together. We may not have the largest manufacturing base, but our collective ability to innovate, to create unlikely combinations of people, ideas, and partnerships, and to use our city itself as a platform to implement new models has led our work to be replicated in cities as diverse as Chicago, Portland, Philadelphia, and Montreal.

In the coming years, San Francisco and cities across the U.S. will continue to wrestle with the challenges: the urgent need to strengthen our supply chain; the need to repurpose or even build new industrial space in expensive, constrained urban areas and still have it be affordable; the continued challenge to capitalize smaller manufacturers who may not yet be fully bankable; and the work to inspire the next generation to reimagine a manufacturing career as something profoundly different than manufacturing of the past. While this may seem like a heavy lift, we can accomplish it with the innovative and counter-intuitive work that we are good at, here in San Francisco.

SFMade's more than 550 member manufacturers continue to demonstrate creativity, growth, and valuable lessons on how to balance competing needs in a dense urban economy. Check out the infographic below based on the 2014 State of Local Manufacturing Report to learn more about how this dynamic industry is thriving in the Bay Area.

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