Ref: http://brandinsider.straitstimes.com/hitachi/urban-manufacturing-making-a-difference/
Urban Manufacturing: Making a Difference
An example of advanced manufacturing in Singapore: the Dyson advanced motor manufacturing facility with an annual production capacity of 11 million motors. The S$200 million investment in West Park Tuas, which opened in 2012, has more than 800 employees. Fifty robots and 22 components produce motors on the highly automated production line. Only 13 operators are needed to operate an entire line. In July this year, Dyson manufactured its 10 millionth digital motor. Photo: Dyson
Governments, developers see the economic and social values of urban manufacturing hubs that bring together design, creative technology and business talent.
By Martin L Dunn and Jeffrey Huang
The Business Times
Sponsored Content
October 13, 2015
IN April 2014, in the small prefecture of Aichi, Toyota City, a ‘model intelligent city’ called Toyota Ecoful Town opened to much fanfare. It was designed to be a place where the flow of traffic, human, goods, waste and resources would be monitored, managed and regulated, promising an urban life that would be more energy-efficient, less congested and better served.
Toshihiko Ota, the Mayor of Toyota City, noted that one aim was “to provide a single contact point, take responsibility to provide a site, and offer other support to proving experiments that promise to solve Toyota City’s problems and make our citizens’ lives happier.”
Toyota City’s Ecoful Town, also nicknamed “Mirai no Futsu” (Normal in the Future) can be seen as a harbinger of a first generation of smart cities that also include larger, international examples such as SongDo in South Korea, Rio in Brazil and Masdar City in the UAE. It was a generation of smart cities often sponsored by big tech companies and based on the idea of centralising big data captured for the “better good,” with regulated public welfare.
However, Smart City writer Adam Greenfield cautions about the much publicised Rio control room “that fuses data from weather stations, traffic cameras, police patrols, sewer-mounded sensors and social media postings into a synoptic, war-room style overview”.
While it epitomises this first smart city generation’s ambition, it also reveals its Achilles heels – that of being overly invasive.
In reaction to the fear of the city becoming an Orwellian big brother who incessantly monitors its the inhabitants and turning them into involuntary subjects for the big tech sponsors’ experiments, a few courageous citizens protested. They stood up and started a “bottom-up” movement as an alternative to the prevalent smart city focus.
Anthony Townshend, an early advocate, calls it the Smart Citizens movement. “Our goal is to shift the debate toward the central place of citizens, and of decentralised, open urban infrastructures”. Examples of the Smart Citizens movement, where city data are given to citizens and ethical hackers to develop their own applications, can be found in the USA, Europe and Asia.
In September, at the URA Centre in Singapore, Mr Ridwan Kamil, the young Mayor of Bandung, gave a rousing keynote speech on the design and management of Bandung. He advocated, as a counterpoint to the top-down smart city infrastructure, a series of “open government” initiatives to empower citizens. He explained that “empowerment and citizen activism was built into the system.” Free Wi-Fi access points and open data access encourage citizens to use the data; they have already built more than 300 apps.
Evolution
Urban manufacturing in New York City: US company Normal designs, manufactures, and sells personalised headphones from their trendy Manhattan store/factory, where customers can view their own headphones being manufactured by 3D printing. Photo: James Ewing/OTTO
Fast forward, and we see a third wave in the Smart City Saga, characterised by the shift from the digital to the physical, from the ‘cerebral informing’ to the ‘tangible making’.
This coincides with the evolution of manufacturing over the last 50 years. Manufacturing went through a process of transformation: from manual to skilled labour, to technology based, and now is on the precipice of an innovation-based manufacturing paradigm.
This includes big ideas in next-generation manufacturing based on highly-instrumented processes acquiring data in real time from machines, people and materials across the manufacturing enterprise. Examples include Industrie 4.0 in Germany and the Industrial Internet in the USA.
Basically, this move is enabling the manufacturing process to be more flexible and agile. The ultimate result is the ability to offer design differentiated higher-value products to market demands that are increasingly fragmented and customised.
While the industrial city of 1900s is likely gone forever, urban manufacturing is a logical convergence of the evolution of manufacturing and the smart city. It not only drives advancement, job creation and innovation but also the renewal and transformation of the city.
For example, post-industrial factories, warehouses and logistics facilities are being rejuvenated through contemporary urban manufacturing.
Maker movement
A particularly visible intersection of the urban and manufacturing trajectories is the maker movement that started in Silicon Valley. It has evolved worldwide with maker-spaces and fab labs popping up weekly that open previously inaccessible and often expensive tools of production to citizens.
Here, digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing, laser machining and robotics are integrated with design software that is often available in an open-source form. There is also an abundance of digital libraries of freely-available design files to provide a low entry barrier for makers to express their creative visions and turn them into new business opportunities.
While some may dismiss the maker movement as limited to do-it-yourself (DIY) hobbyists, there are growing signs that this is instead an important signal in a transformation in the way things are made. In the US, President Barack Obama went as far as to note that “Today’s DIY is tomorrow’s ‘Made in America’”.
His Advanced Manufacturing Initiative is creating new research institutes. This includes additive manufacturing, digital design and manufacturing, composites, photonics and advanced textiles.
In March 2014, President Obama inaugurated the Digital Design and Manufacturing Innovation Institute in Chicago, an example of an early urban manufacturing initiative. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel proclaimed this “a game changer for the City of Chicago”. Governor Pat Quinn noted that “advanced manufacturing is a great way to grow jobs, retain jobs and to literally bring back jobs that have gone to foreign shores. If you want Made-in-America, this is the heart of that initiative because advanced manufacturing makes it much more feasible to do that manufacturing in your own backyard.”
Examples are emerging worldwide, driven in part by consumers who desire design-differentiated high-quality goods produced locally ranging from craft beers to apparel to creative tech. Local character is resulting in valuable branding both for the products and the city, and is attracting artisans, small and medium-sized companies. Even big companies are looking to new manufacturing technologies to build and share shorter and sustainable supply chains, and enable design-oriented mass customisation.
Hubs
Governments and developers see the economic and social values of urban manufacturing hubs that bring together design, creative technology and business talent. And they are placing bets. In cities around the world, areas that were once populated by decaying warehouses and factories are re-emerging as hip and trendy hubs anchored by local manufacturers. For example, Brooklyn NY is transforming through recent investments in excess of US$1 billion in manufacturing and technology infrastructure. Areas like the Tech Triangle, Industry City, Liberty View Industrial Plaza and the Brooklyn Navy Yard are hotbeds of local designers and manufacturers who are exploiting new design and fabrication technologies to innovate and grow the “Brooklyn brand”.
In San Francisco, space has been set aside for local manufacturers in places such as Pier 70 and the SF Giants baseball complex, and ground floors of apartment buildings, to accelerate the maker movement while increasing the value of real estate and making neighbourhoods more hip.
Particularly interesting is the emerging phenomenon of micro factories, like the innovative Local Motors in the USA.
The company boldly seeks to produce automobiles at a fraction of the cost and time required in the traditionally large capital-intensive industry. It is creating designs by crowd-sourcing and producing automobiles in small local factories based on local needs.
Recently, it has partnered General Electric to explore these innovative approaches for product design and manufacture broadly.
Interestingly, many emerging urban manufacturing hubs strive to achieve creativity, supply-chain agility and fast transition from design to production. In this regard, the manufacturing ecosystem of Prato, Italy, is an outstanding example, making it a powerhouse in high-value fashion and textile markets.
Singapore
In Singapore, urban manufacturing is especially promising and potentially impactful. The country already has the ideal ingredients: a rich knowledge base; cultural diversity with social harmony; sophisticated smart nation infrastructure; excellent logistics and supply chain, precision engineering and creative and technical design capabilities. These can help to shift manufacturing into innovation-based high value production; and help to maintain manufacturing at a healthy 20-25 percent of GDP, and build the ‘Made in Singapore’ brand.
The Singapore University of Technology and Design has launched the SUTD Digital Manufacturing and Design (DManD) Centre to contribute to such a vision. DManD is bringing together creative, technical, and business ideas in new ways to create innovation-driven advanced manufacturing paradigms and possibilities.
These will play a transformative role in the long-term evolution of manufacturing and provide the human capital that will help establish Singapore as a world leader in high-value digital manufacturing. DManD is pursuing innovations in design software, 3D and 4D printing and robotics to impact industry sectors that relate to the smart city of tomorrow. These include smart products ranging from wearable technology for fashion to healthcare, and design and fabrication approaches for building and construction.
It is an exciting time as urban manufacturing emerges in various forms as a central actor in the Smart City movement around the world. Such developments will be further enabled by smart city infrastructures and will ultimately impact the economic and social fabric of these cities.
In turn, it will influence the future of production and the citizens involved in production. Indeed this dynamic is a pathway to one aspect of self-building and renewal of cities – an imperative put forth by Jane Jacobs in her 1961 plea for what makes a city work.
Professor Martin L Dunn is the Associate Provost, Research SUTD and Professor Jeffrey Huang is the Head of Pillar, Architecture and Sustainable Design SUTD.
This is the fourth of a six-part series brought to you by Hitachi, in collaboration with the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities (LKY CIC), SUTD. The next part of this series, Smart design on an aging population, will be published on Nov 17, 2015.
