🛠️ Made to Order, Made to Last: The Workshop Economy After Growth
💬 This post is a follow-up to "🚜 The Unimog That Could Have Been: A Post-Growth Parable".
In the shadow of the Unimog that could have been, we begin to glimpse what a mature, sustainable economy might look like — not one driven by quarterly earnings and planned obsolescence, but by durability, stewardship, and shared responsibility. Imagine a world where no factory churns out millions of identical widgets for anonymous customers. Instead, every community has a well-equipped workshop, every repair manual is open-source, and every product can be improved, forked, and sustained — not just consumed.
This is the workshop economy — a vision for post-growth manufacturing that replaces mass production with just-in-time creation, local fabrication, and global collaboration. It doesn't dream of infinite shelves filled with throwaway goods. It dreams of enough, made with care, repaired with pride, and passed on with knowledge.
A Living Example: The Mikrokopter Commons
This vision may sound utopian, but elements of it already exist. Take the Mikrokopter project — a grassroots open-source drone initiative born in Germany in the early 2000s. It started in workshops and garages, driven by curiosity and community, with full schematics and software released to the public. It was the inverse of the typical trajectory: not a corporate R&D lab doling out innovations under NDAs, but a network of enthusiasts building and iterating in the open.
Today, drones based on or inspired by that early work play contradictory roles: they buzz over war zones in Ukraine, shaped by the needs of asymmetric warfare; and they hover gently above birthday parties and backyard film shoots, democratizing aerial photography. Both realities emerge from the same distributed foundation — not a centralized factory, but a global commons of knowledge, refinement, and modular improvement.
This is the workshop economy in action, even if it never called itself that.
Resilience by Design: The Workshop Economy in Practice
In this workshop-driven model, resilience isn’t an afterthought — it’s a core feature. A local production and repair culture means fewer dependencies on fragile global supply chains. When parts break, they’re replaced with 3D-printed components or locally machined spares. When improvements are discovered, they're shared upstream — not locked behind firmware updates or subscription walls.
Customization becomes the new luxury, not a premium feature but a natural result of products designed to be understood, modified, and passed on. Communities maintain and adapt their tools as their needs evolve, extending usefulness rather than manufacturing desire for the new.
From Hobbyists to Policy: Scaling Workshop Economies
But for this to scale beyond hobbyist circles, policy has to catch up.
Post-growth legislation could recognize modularity and open IP release as a public good. It could reward durable design, fund public infrastructure for repair and remanufacturing, and treat locally anchored production ecosystems not as quaint anachronisms, but as strategic assets. The Sovereign Tech Fund, repairability laws, and right-to-repair initiatives in the EU already hint at this future. What’s missing is the cultural pivot: seeing these developments not as counter-industry regulation, but as infrastructure for a different kind of prosperity.
A just-in-time, just-enough workshop economy isn’t anti-technology — it’s anti-obsolescence. It prizes tools that last, knowledge that circulates, and value that accumulates in communities rather than shareholder spreadsheets. In the long arc of post-growth transition, this isn’t merely feasible. It’s inevitable.
Customization as the New Luxury
The growth economy taught us to associate progress with uniformity and scale. The post-growth economy reverses this: progress is in diversity, adaptability, and the right tool for the right place.
In workshop-driven ecosystems:
Products adapt to local climates, use cases, and cultures
Ownership fosters pride, care, and longevity
Upgrades are designed for reuse, not replacement
This vision doesn’t promise utopia. But it does offer something we’re sorely missing: a positive, practical future to work toward.
The tools are already here. The communities exist. What’s missing is the story — and the political imagination to scale it.
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