A Woodshop in your Garage: Kurt the Carpenter

Kurt is a carpenter from Somerville, MA who I actually met over six months ago when all desks were magically sold out online at the start of the semester (thanks COVID!). Sidenote: has anyone else developed a Facebook Marketplace obsession at some point? Well that was definitely me during my hunt to resolve the mysterious sold-out desk phenomenon. It was at this point, on Facebook Marketplace, that I found Kurt. His story goes much deeper than what a Facebook page might suggest, and it has been an honor to interview him for this article. This is a story of an immigrant coming from Jamaica to the US and trying to make what he knows work in a context he knew little about. 

*Screenshot taken and shared with consent*

Bringing skills into a new country is not always easy. If you are a doctor, there are several hoops you have to jump through to transfer your license (if allowed at all). It’s the same with a lawyer, and many other professional practices. In Arrival Cities, Dogramaci explains how “migration in the current era is markedly urban and falls increasingly under the responsibility of city authorities, encouraging cities to adopt new and hybrid approaches to urban governance.”[1] Essentially, it’s up to city governance to make sure immigrants can successfully transfer skills to new countries. Kurt comes from a family of carpenters in Jamaica, where his brother remains an active carpenter to this day. And while for doctors or lawyers one of the main initial challenges is converting your license, for a carpenter like Kurt coming to the US, it was physical space.

As many of us in design professions know already, carpentry requires large spaces. You need open space to operate machines, a vacuum to clean the dust, and a secure outlet for electricity. When Kurt first emigrated to the US, he opened a shop on Cape Cod, selling furniture to local residents. He found a relatively cheap large open space in the suburbs. Yet the success of his business depended on both relational and spatial conditions, motivating him to move to Boston in hopes of a larger client base. It was a trade-off between space and customers.  

Unlike our expansive (and privileged) set-up at N-51 and the workshop at MIT, Kurt operates his entire production process in the space of his home. To produce from home is challenging, but one aspect that makes this easier is that he can easily buy treated and planed lumber from nearby shops such as Fabrizio’s or Home Depot right outside of Boston. After this, he comes back to his garage-turned-workshop to work on his products. (During our interview, he made sure at this moment to express how grateful he was to have concrete walls so that the noise does not disturb his neighbors close-by.) In terms of physical space, Kurt mentioned that “the hardest part of my job is handling all the jobs I get with the limited space I currently have.” The space is extremely small and does not compare to the 1,000sf he would occupy in an ideal world. Ultimately, however, Somerville, MA is a highly residential area in Cambridge, right in between Harvard and MIT. The location is convenient because it offers a central pick-up location for many of Kurts' clients. 

Taken on as an individual endeavor, Kurt’s story raises a discussion about the direct trade-off between production space and customer success. Although virtual marketplaces can create an illusion of de-centralizing businesses, the fact that many customers filter by location (eg. 1-km radius around Boston) creates a specific location pull for micro-producers such as Kurt to relocate to larger inner-city areas.

At the same time, higher rents in these areas diminish the ability to occupy appropriate production spaces for these producers. Hence, urban governance for home-based businesses must help solve this cost-location problem for producers if this model is to provide safe working conditions across production chains. Ideas such as co-working for manufacturing spaces or small pop-up locations for pick-up on the weekends are two possible solutions.    

“To those who do not wish to see it, the wall does not appear.” [2]  For me, this quote by Sara Ahmed could not be more true as a customer: I had been one of those cases, happily collecting my desk from an online seller on Facebook and moving on. I even thought I was a “conscious consumer” because I had resisted buying from IKEA. I had never even considered the tricky position that producers such as Kurt are put in by consumer choices we make online. Now I can’t stop thinking about the safety risks, trade-offs, and spatial production chains of conducting a full workshop out of your garage in a busy inner-city.

This research was supported by the Future Urban Legacy Lab (FULL) at the Politecnico di Torino in January 2021, and a special thanks to Matteo Robiglio and Laura Martini for their continued guidance.

Sources:

Interview conducted with Kurt in early January, 2021

[1] Roth, Helene, et al. Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century. Leuven University Press, 2020. p. 9.

[2] Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2014.

Images (in order of article):

[1] Zoom Screenshot of Interview in early January, 2021 (personal production)

[2] Image of Kurt’s workshop in Somerville, MA

[3] Network-visual analysis of Kurt’s Production Chain (personal production)

[4] Facebook Marketplace Screenshot of Kurt’s Product (personal production, link for actual product can be accessed at https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/839605776765117/?ref=search&referral_code=marketplace_search&referral_story_type=post&tracking=browse_serp%3Aba2043e6-3f37-4d65-83aa-f95d94c634a3)