Making translations, translating Making

Abstract

Shared spaces dedicated to digital fabrication such as Fablabs and Makerspaces, together with co-working spaces and start-ups incubators, are said to contribute to the sociospatial reconfiguration of work in digital urban economies characterised by sharing practices and self-organization. However, part of the academic literature on the topic partially reproduces the representations of Makers provided by the mainstream discourse developed by tech-gurus and consultants, which understand them as entrepreneurial innovators. Moreover, when Making is analysed as a new form of work, its spatial dimensions are identified either in the city or in the organisation in which Makers gather, considering both as bounded containers. To offer a more nuanced conceptualisation of Makers’ work and arguing that Making as a new, heterogeneous form of value production entails different spatialities, the paper claims for analyses that start from a practical, relational, and more-than-human understanding of what Makers do. Drawing on a recent post-structuralist strand in economic geography and mobilising an Actor-Network sensibility, the article claims for an approach to the study of Makers and Fablabs as economic phenomena that goes beyond understanding them as part of a new urban infrastructure of workplaces targeting self-organised, entrepreneurial, yet collaborative individuals in the age of digital capitalism. Through the ethnographic study of a community of Makers that gather around the main Fablab of the post-industrial Italian city Turin, the paper shows how heterogeneous actor-networks translate Making as a form of value production in multiple and contingent ways, in which the distinction between production and reproduction is variously challenged.