Center for New Work: Detroit Executive Summary

• For an historical overview of New Work as well as archives of early press please click here
• A pdf file of the full final Detroit Executive Summary proposal can be found here

The Detroit Center for New Work will synthesize three integrated components to form the foundation of a comprehensive, sustainable urban village that will serve as a catalyst for innovation-based entrepreneurialism, community-providing base economy, and an attractive cultural life. Organized around a community center, advanced technologies are utilized to create a platform for new businesses, knowledge and resources for economic independence through community self-reliance, and awakening of what individuals authentically want to pursue to develop and express serious desires, interests, and talents. The Center for New Work offers pathways for economic, community, and individual development by employing advanced technologies in a community organization that self-provides the lion’s share of life’s needs while creating entrepreneurial businesses for economic growth and offering opportunities to develop individual talents, interests, and desires for self-affirmation and cultural enhancement.

New Work Enterprises

The core (though not only) component of New Work’s economic engine is the “Fabricator,” a cutting edge technology that builds objects, layer by layer, from computer drawings. This remarkable machine serves as a platform for the creation of new businesses (manufacturing single units or small series for a wide variety of products, from spare parts to customized medical/dental equipment, jewelry, and accessories of all sorts). Spinning out and supporting innovative, flexible start-up businesses able to serve a variety of markets is one of the keys to economic development. Housed in the Center for New Work, the Fabricator operation receives support from one of the pioneers and leading experts in the field of fabrication, Dr. Andreas Gebhardt. The Fabricator operation is essentially a clone or a franchise of a successful business model Dr. Gebhardt has implemented in Germany serving as a fountainhead for a host of small enterprises serving specialty markets with inexpensive, rapidly-produced products not readily available otherwise. A Fabricator Shop in the Center for New Work will enhance workforce training, create new talents and applications, spur entrepreneurship and innovation, and support sustainable business development. The Fabricator is not alone among the technologies housed at the Center for New Work employed to develop people, businesses, and community, but it is the centerpiece and symbolizes the new economy initiative.

Community Providing Base Economy

In addition to manufacturing single units and small runs of specialty products for niches markets as a business activity, the Fabricator and other technologies within the Center for New Work also support an dramatic base economy for the community making it possible to increase economic independence and self-reliance by enabling the community to make for its members much of what is needed for a modern rewarding life. This community providing base economy is organized through the Center which applies technological solutions to the problems and costs associated with modern life. This extends not only to the manufacture of needed consumer products, but also to urban gardening, fish farms, greenhouse operations, animal husbandry, and other life-sustaining, cost-reducing community economic activities. Computers and A cellular phone network radio-linked to computers at the Center providing “Voice Over IP” phone service can deliver the modern necessity of unlimited cell phones without the cost. Numerous other examples illustrate how much of what is needed for community economic life can be provided through incorporating New Work organization and technologies through the Center.

New Culture

The core of New Work’s approach to economic life is discovering and developing individual talent, interests, and desires. The cardinal New Work question posed to a community and its individual members is: “What is it that you seriously and authentically want?” The answer given is the key to a successful life: a meaningful job, the desire to better one’s-self through education, and the need to be part of one’s community, to develop and pass on its traditions, and to be a leader. For an individual, this takes the form of identifying talents and genuine desires while developing the knowledge and skills needed to be effective. The Center delivers counseling, education, resources, opportunities to pursue genuine interests and desires; and helps turn these into life-enhancing contributions to the community and its economic, social, cultural and political goals. This impacts Quality of Life, community life and even community culture; and attracts and motivates talent, provides opportunity for innovation and indelibly marks a region’s culture regarding learning, work and enterprise.

New Work

For 20 years, New Work has developed small enterprises that have enhanced self-reliance and independence through community-providing economic engines, and cultural change that supports individual development and innovation. New Work has changed lives in a dozen countries, tackling both urban and rural economic development challenges. As Dr. Bergmann says, “20% of us live in an oasis, but 80% eke out a living in the desert”. The first US Center for New Work is auspiciously set in Highland Park. This first full-scale urban model lays out a 21st Century vision – that builds rather than destroys community and celebrates individuals and cooperation instead of automation – all, ironically, exactly where the “20th Century assembly line” began. This is a metaphor New Work will embellish on as it takes root in the Centers across Metro-Detroit, in other Michigan and US cities – all still in the “oasis” – and then in the world’s many “deserts”.