MakerCon: Peter Hirshberg

There is a great deal of activity that’s happening in urban environments across the country, often driven by forces such as a new urbanism: millennials prefer to live in cites over suburbs. Correspondingly, there’s a burgeoning movement towards vocational education that emphasizes coding or maker skills over traditional liberal arts education. Fostering creativity and idea collisions amplify this activity. Examples of initiatives driven by real-estate developers, start-ups, cities, economic development bureaus, and the federal government abound.  Oakland and Brooklyn have remarkable maker and arts cultures, many smaller cities seem to have a real hunger and aptitude for a maker economy to emerge. It’s clear there is a great desire to accelerate all this and create jobs, even as we can’t define what all this is, or exactly what skills will lead to what jobs. What kind of coordinate action can be made to accelerate and sustain the new Maker City?