Manufacturing is a huge part of Birmingham's past and I think Guattari's idea about re-skilling the workforce could provide another dimension to the project.
In recent history, the car industry has suffered massive decline in Birmingham and there are a lot of people with valuable skills with no jobs. In the future scenario this problem would only get worse. I think this reskilling of the car manufacturing workforce could be another valid way of tying this into the wider Birmingham context.
Perhaps I'm getting too hung up on this reskilling thing, but I think it works well alongside the more politically driven stuff and gives us a bit more meat for designing the 'master plan'. I've also read a bit more of the cradle-to-cradle text and I think this could feed into whatever industry we decide to create. DO you have any thoughts?
Dave
Sounds good to me. When I was looking at all the different types of voids on the site a lot of them were linked to manufacturing of cars (sales of parts etc) Ill put a post up of that bike i was talking about as well. Could add another dimension if we adopt a manufacturing of more ecological mobility as a form of production.
ReplyDeleteBy coincidence when I was looking into 'up cycling' from the cradle-to-cradle text I found this about recycled bike parts.
ReplyDeletehttp://inhabitat.com/recycled-monochrome-bikes-are-classy-two-wheelers-made-from-old-parts/