This is a CTP of initiative: Hackspace 4 (South-Central England, UK)
This CTP describes the decisions advocated by one of the directors to intentionally close the hackspace in its current form in 2017, and find ways to migrate elements of the organisation – people, tools, etc – into different, temporary spaces.
At the time of interview in early 2016, the hackspace had been in operation for over 7 years. Having started through a series of pubmeets, the organisation had taken up its first premises in July 2009 and since moved through 3 additional spaces. Its current site is in East London in an area which is “is being gentrified at a frightening rate” and the directors were concerned that the organisation would lose its lease in the coming year.
However, the organisation had grown to such a size that it would be very difficult – “impractical” – to find another space large enough to site it in, with a landlord willing to house their machines and activities, for affordable rents. As documented in previous CTPs, successive jumps to larger premises had led to raises in proposed monthly donations which also would not be continually sustainable for members.
In the face of this crisis, with the organisation forced to shut down earlier than directors and founders would have liked, one of the directors proposed a reconceptualization of what the hackspace was, and how the model could be made sustainable in the face of rising rents across many UK cities. Rather than moving into a new space, the director proposes finding a number of smaller spaces that the hackspace can “fail gracefully” into, carrying smaller numbers of machines and people into them, for the shorter term:
“If you have maybe 200 people, and only 30% of them are there at any one time, maybe we might be able to get premises for free as we’re only intending them to last for 2 or 3 years, and then we move on again.”
The plan also depends on the motivations and support of other non-hackspace actors, including local councils and hardware companies, through relationships built up over the organisation’s lifespan.
This strategy acts as a CTP, not only because it signals the end of the hackspace in its current form, but also because it represents a new heuristic about the purpose and sustainability of the wider hackspace model.
This CTP has been heavily shaped by rising property prices in London. In the course of its tenure, the organisation has inhabited four different spaces across the city, each larger and more expensive than the last. As documented in previous CTPs, London has the most costly rental costs of all UK cities (and, in the West End, the highest office prices in the world), and meeting these costs has been particularly challenging for the organisation which has had to constantly raise the recommended membership rates and find new ways to generate a constant income stream to support its activities. The issue is ongoing, with housing costs projected to rise 40% over the coming 6 years in London. The problem for the hackspace was thus not a lack of premises (“Big cities have spaces everywhere, if you know where to look”) but that it was exceptionally difficult to get long-term spaces with protected rents.
The area of East London where the hackspace took up premises in has seen particularly steep rises in costs, with reasons including proximity to the City of London and the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ tech cluster; and a broader pattern of gentrification seen from the late 1980s onwards, as artists moved into a populated an area that was formerly economically deprived. The directors noted how the area of road where they were currently located was in the hands of one landlord, who they suspected would be keen to sell up: “It’s not good. Our landlords owns the buildings on either side of us as well as us, and he hasn’t built on either of them. If we go, then that frees him up…”
As in other CTPs, the hackspace has also been affected by its constant and unexpected growth. It is the largest in the UK, reaching its 1000th member in 2014; as one member described it “We just got bigger and bigger and more uncomfortable as time went on, in terms of size”.
Each successive rise in membership put more pressure on the physical space which the organisation needed in order to run smoothly, in turn summoning in a greater set of dependencies around revenue streams, liability insurance, and volunteer time. The scale that the organisation was at, and as a non-profit enterprise, made its continued existence unfeasible in its current form.
Rising property prices in London, and the growing size of the organisation.
In interviews, the director described how they had raised the issue of “failing gracefully” with the founders of hackspaces and other similar organisations for some time, but had found little support or reception for the idea, with people unwilling to consider what failure meant in the context of the hackspace model:
“I’ve talked to so many people. Everyone, everyone always said ‘But we’re not going to shut down, we’re going to keep going!’ Even when they know about all the problems. They can’t look at the truth of how this works”.
However, rather than choosing to create conflict, the directors saw this as an opportunity to create knowledge for future founders, many of whom they were already in contact with, through example and codification: “What I’d like is to develop some kind of ‘Getting Started’ kit for hackspaces – ‘You need to do these things, have these minimal requirements, talk to these people’ – and in that, you could build in from the start how to map out closure. No-one told us any of this”.
The stakes for this CTP represented the different between the complete shuttering of the hackspace and loss of the material resources and institutional knowledge contained within it; and a way to sustain and contain those resources, albeit in some different form.
The potential loss of workshop space has been an ongoing threat for the organisation since its inception who, as documented in previous CTPs, have been constantly concerned about the increasing cost of rents in cities in the south of the UK since the 2008 financial collapse. As the organisation has grown, the scale of potential loss has also increased as members have built their livelihoods around practices and infrastructures available to them in the hackspace. These dependencies provided additional urgency to the provision of these resources in the case of failure:
“You need to design these things so they fail gracefully. When these things shut down, they strand a whole community, potentially the people with small businesses that they started there and all of the tools that they had access to.”
As described in previous CTPs, the possibility of failure was baked into the organisation from its inception, with the company limited by guarantee model chosen as a way to protect members from financial risk in the event of collapse; and one of the co-founders also stating to the online groups that he would take responsibility should anything go wrong. As detailed below, these circumstances have been matched by rising awareness about what hackspaces are and how they operate by councils and other local authorities, making it easier to find new, smaller, premises.
This CTP represents a fundamental shift in the life of the hackspace, inasmuch as it will transform the organisation from its current form into a new, smaller, networked number of forms.
This CTP represents a critical point in the organisation’s transformational aims inasmuch as it permits the organisation to continue existing (and thus meeting those aims), whilst reconceptualising the organisational structure and very purpose of hackspaces themselves, and how they existed within a wider eco-system of similar organisations. The intent to create not only a single hackspace but a larger transferable and adaptable model had been baked into the organisation from it inception, when the the co-founders separated out the location-based name of their own hackspace from the name that the company was registered in. Rather than framing hackspaces as individual organisations in competition with each other for resources, this approach signalled a new long-term way of considering them as a sustainable network in such a way which recognised the different forms of financial and spatial pressures which different organisations experienced:
“I think this is the only way to make this work in the long run, particularly in big cities where you can’t buy a building, and you won’t get given a building either, but we might be able to move around in short-term lets. It would be different if we were up [in the North of England], we’d have less money but we could probably buy a warehouse somewhere if we wanted. For small cities it’s more about how you sustain it when you have a limited set of people to draw on”
This CTP drew on the institutional learning which the co-founders had developed in their tenure with the hackspace, and in particular the relationships which they had developed with different external organisations who they hoped could support later activities:
“Because of our contacts, I can talk now to other hardware companies who will give us things, tools, they could provide sponsorship. Places like B&Q and Maplins [UK hardware stores] know what we’re about and I think they’d want to help”.
The relationship which the organisation had built up with local councils – and the learning which councils themselves had undertaken about hackspaces - was also seen as a potentially fruitful way to combine the organisation’s needs with those of local government:
“The council, I think, understands what we’re doing. Hackspaces are everywhere now, they exist all over the place, they’ve been in the press. When we started talking to councils about space at the beginning they didn’t get it, it all sounded terrifying to them. But they’re interested now, particularly around regeneration things. That’s where I think we can offer something good to them”.
As this quote indicates, the long-term survival of the hackspace may thus be shaped through the development of co-transformational aims between different bodies.
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