Metropolitics

Between Two Crises: New York's Artisanal Food Startup Founders

Nga Than — 2021-09-28T05:00:00Z

The Covid‑19 pandemic forced a pause to a decade of growth for New York City's artisanal food startups. Strategies employed by their founders reveal the precarity of their circumstances and the importance of support from city government.
---- Series: New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic Food startups—small-scale artisanal food preparation enterprises—have proliferated in many global cities since the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In New York City, food manufacturing

- From the Field / food industry, food culture, food, artisans, start-ups, businesses, manufacturing, precarity, Covid-19, coronavirus, pandemic, United States, New York

Reflections on Retooling for the Covid‑19 Pandemic

Nichola Lowe & Tara Vinodrai — 2020-06-19T06:00:00Z

Factories are adapting to the new conditions and needs the coronavirus has introduced by retooling production lines and repurposing knowledge and technology to manufacture essential items for Covid‑19 management. Nichola Lowe and Tara Vinodrai assess the nature and scale of these retooling efforts and argue that institutions can support manufacturing in ways that respond to crises and support economic regeneration.
Factories in cities and communities around the world are retooling production

- Essays / manufacturing, Covid-19, coronavirus, industry, textile industry, North Carolina, South Carolina, United States, North America, start-ups, pandemic

Reskilling Urban Manufacturing: Workforce Solutions from the Inside Out

Nichola Lowe — 2015-12-15T15:59:35Z

In the United States, a four-year college education has gradually come to be assumed as a prerequisite for entry into the middle class. This is troubling, as more than half the country's working-age population lacks this credential. Rather than being driven exclusively by a “college for all” mentality, argues Nichola Lowe, policymakers should strive for an economy in which social-mobility strategies are also embedded in the workplace, activating internal structures within firms that support and

- Debates / United States, work, public policy, industry, blue-collar workers, education, manufacturing, skills, training

Bargain hunting in the “small-commodity city” of Yiwu, China

Alison Hulme — 2015-11-10T06:00:00Z

China's rise in the global economy has been largely based on the manufacturing of both cheap and expensive goods. Focusing on the growth of “function spaces” of mass production in Yiwu, Alison Hulme explores this “other” city and its challenge to the rise of the spectacular “image spaces” provided by established world cities.
Approximately three hours by train inland from Shanghai lies the “small-commodity city” of Yiwu—a promised land for the international wholesale buyer of low-end

- Essays / consumption, urban economy, China, new town, industry, economic development, global supply chain, function spaces, image spaces, manufacturing, specialization, commodity city