This is a CTP of initiative: FabLab 4 (East England)
This CTP refers to the point at which the correct person in the complex higher education institute that the makespace was aiming to rent premises from, was accessed. One of the major challenges for the makespace was finding premises in a suitable location. Early research indicated that supporters wanted somewhere easy to access:
“We did a survey of meet-up people: anyone north of Cambridge wouldn’t go to a site in the south, anyone in the south wouldn’t go north, and the same all over. People won’t travel. It’s a bike city, people don’t have cars. Public transport isn’t great. Everything’s predicated on the city – if you’ve got to come into the city centre and change bus, the friction gets too high. Travel times for cars are quite ridiculous because you have to go around and traffic’s bad”.
Realising they would need a central site, the team investigated possible private-sector options but these were limited. Instead, they realized they would likely have to rent somewhere through the university who owned a lot of central space through college buildings. Finding the correct person to talk to was, however, extremely difficult and time-consuming, as one co-founder described:
“There was a long process of [determining] who that person was in the university who approves things like [leases], because it wasn’t clear – the university doesn’t have an operating manual”.
After a series of meetings across different departments and committees, the co-founders met the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Finance (PVCfF) – a former engineer - and received his informal approval; but didn’t realize until a series of other meetings had taken place that he was the person who also was head of the committee needed to sign off on the process of obtaining university premises. This early meeting in which the co-founders met the PVCfF was essential for receiving the go-ahead:
“The critical point was getting the Pro Vice Chancellor on side, because he was the most powerful of all the Vice Chancellors because he was in charge of finance”.
This CTP was shaped in the first instance by the lack of viable affordable privately owned space for a makerspace in central Cambridge. Initial searches proved fruitless:
“Cambridge hasn’t got any space that isn’t an office. We looked at shops which were mostly expensive and sub-optimal, and very nearly went into a small shop premise on a short-term lease. We looked at a shed out of town. It was a balance between availability and contract terms – we were in a difficult place because we had no trading history, and we didn’t want a long lease because we didn’t know how long it [the organization] would fly. We knew we might cause problems with neighbours because of the noise”.
The co-founders considered factors including how much it would cost to “kit out” a space, and whether the possible premises felt “workshoppy or creative”. After realizing that they would need to expand their search, the co-founders met with university representatives.
The second factor which shaped this CTP was the availability of rental space from the university. Cambridge University is richer than any other British university, with this wealth attributed to land and building ownership in the city and beyond. This included premises for the university’s Institute of Manufacturing, which had recently become available for a short-term lease as the block was - at that stage - due to be demolished the following year:
“We spoke to people at Cambridge, including the Institute for Manufacturing which seemed most revelant. IFM had just moved from the centre of town to the outskirts, and they said ‘You should talk to Estates about our old offices’. It had workshops, a production line test room, a concrete floor – everything that we wanted”.
The path between learning that these premises were available, and being able to rent them was, however, convoluted. The third factor which shaped this CTP was the complex nature of the university networks: “It’s arcane – it took us a long time to figure it all out. Networking in the university was really important”.
This CTP resulted in the makespace being able to take up the former IFM premises at cheap, “peppercorn” rates, for an initial lease of 9 months (later extended to 2019, as described in later CTPs).
Events which shaped this CTP included the lack of viable affordable space for a tech shop in central Cambridge; the availability of space from the university; and the “arcane” nature of the university networks.
The co-founders reported very little tension or friction in this CTP. It was, however, characterized by a lot of confusion, in which no-one seemed to have any overall sense of the structure or power relations across the university networks. The co-founders described how, upon learning of the availability of the IFM space, they asked the university buildings team what to do next, “[and] Estates Management said, ‘Well, you’ll have to get someone in the university on side – we don’t know who it is, but it has to be someone very senior”. The process did not result in any of the co-founders leaving the process, but it was slow and time-consuming – “All of this takes forever”.
The need for, and consequences of, finding premises was a core part of the makespace’s ambitions as without premises there would be no makespace. However, the complexities of university bureaucracy were unforeseen; as was the critical role of the Pro Vice Chancellor, who had approved of the makespace before the co-founders fully realized his role in the university structures.
The specific consequences of gaining the space were also unseen: the IFM premises were cheap (the co-founders were not required to pay commercial rent), came fully equipped in the manner suiting a tech shop – “when we moved in there was already power running around the walls”; and, whilst the organization signed a lease for 9 months in the first instance, that has since been extended until 2019. In the absence of these specific premises becoming available, it is difficult to see how more suitable space could have been sourced by the makespace, either from the university or from private landlords.
This CTP allowed the makespace to fulfill its transformational aims by permitting it to rent suitable premises cheaply; and to build networked links within the university. It enabled learning about the convolutions of Cambridge University’s infrastructure which – as above – were apparently not even fully known to members of the university themselves. This process was made more challenging because vital pieces of information were only acknowledged or released as the co-founders moved through the networks, as they described:
“We met [the Pro Vice Chancellor] for 5 minutes and he said ‘Great’. It wasn’t a formal endorsement, but at least it was this person at the top. We went back to Estates and said ‘Well, the Pro Vice Chancellor likes it’, who said ‘We can do this, but now the Space Management Allocation Group has to approve this. So – finally we knew what committee we needed to talk to! We talked to them, and they said ‘We need to know someone from the Planning and Resources Committee thinks you’re appropriate’. So we looked that one up and, thank goodness, it was chaired by the Pro Vice Chancellor. We lobbied some other people and finally managed to get a paper to the Planning and Resources Committee who approved it, and then came back to the Space Management Allocation Group who said ‘This is a good project and we hereby bless it’, and they blessed it. And then Estates said ‘Ah! Actually we do have these rooms and we now we can talk to you about what it actually means for you to use them”.
This CTP also allowed the co-founders to build up critical support from the engineering community within the university, both from the Pro Vice Chancellor and also from the Institute for Manufacturing – “IFM liked us, the engineers liked us”.
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