As the Titanic was sinking, Engelhardt Ostby made sure his only daughter, Helene, got a place on a lifeboat, and heroically went down with the ship. Helene survived clutching tightly to a briefcase that contained precious stones and original molds for Tiffany & Co.’s diamond solitaire ring.

Upon her return, Helene became a co-owner of her father’s firm, Ostby & Barton, a Providence jewelry company. Today, Tiffany still uses the molds—a continuity that spans a shipwreck and 100 years of craftsmanship.

This week, we explore manufacturing identities beyond Detroit and Rochester, diving into Grand Rapids and Providence. These cities were shaped by networks of concentrated production, iconic brands, and distinctive architecture.

Providence

Whether it was the burgeoning Hollywood film industry, the expanding middle class, the ability to inexpensively mass produce replicas of famous heirloom pieces, or just Coco Chanel’s influence, 20th century America had a tremendous appetite for costume jewelry—and Providence satiated it.

Providence was the undisputed capital of American jewelry production for most of the twentieth century. At its peak in 1978, over 32,500 workers produced 80% of America’s costume jewelry, shipping 1 million pounds of costume jewelry a week.

The Coro Building was the largest costume jewelry factory in the world, and Coro just was one company among dozens. Unlike cities with a small number of dominant companies (like Detroit and Rochester), the majority of Providence jewelry businesses were small independent operations with 25 to 100 employees. They were served by a number of specialized suppliers, from jewelry-box makers to precious and semi-precious material suppliers. Firms collaborated and competed ferociously within the small jewelry district. Workers moved between firms, carrying techniques and trade secrets. Artisans and companies made innovations such as the first rolled plated gold process, “seamless-filled wire” for chain making, and electroplating—and within months, an innovation could spread from one company to the entire district.

The Providence jewelry industry was concentrated in a 19-acre industrial district of small brick warehouses—buildings that were designed for flexibility. The A.T. Wall Building, completed in 1910, pioneered mushroom-column flat-slab construction, with open floor plates that could accommodate whatever manufacturing process a tenant required.

Foreign competition undercut American companies, but decline came unevenly. Some firms failed while others adapted. Independent designers still work in the district today—using the same plating shops and specialized manufacturers that served the major brands decades ago.

Providence’s buildings were built for adaptation, and they continue to adapt. Today, the old jewelry factories house design studios, technology firms, and medical offices. The network logic that made the district function—many small actors, tightly interconnected, sharing infrastructure and knowledge—is re-emerging as a crucial factor.

Grand Rapids

Since the late nineteenth century, Grand Rapids, Michigan has called itself “Furniture City.” When Grand Rapids earned its name, furniture was primarily made of wood, hand-carved in a decorative style. The city was home to a deep talent pool of Scandinavian immigrant woodworkers who had settled along the Grand River and spent decades refining the craft of cabinetry. By the end of the 1800s, the city led U.S. furniture production; 47 furniture factories employed one-third of all Grand Rapids workers.

It was such a powerhouse, and its name was so synonymous with quality, that in 1902 the local furniture guild began using “Grand Rapids” as a kind of trademark—any local tradesperson could imprint the moniker and logo on their furniture. Its credibility was even enforced through multiple lawsuits, and industry-specific trade publications like the Grand Rapids Furniture Record exposed violators as frauds.

At its 1925 zenith, the Grand Rapids Furniture Market operated 10 exhibition halls with 560 dealers. This is where America came to find its furniture—particularly ornate Victorian residential pieces that were popular at the time.

But style is fickle. When changes in consumer demand compounded with the Great Depression, Grand Rapids’ furniture industry was decimated.

The shock was an economic crisis for the region, but it was also an opportunity for reinvention, in terms of aesthetic, materials, and manufacturing processes. By the 1950s, Grand Rapids had once again earned its title as “Furniture City” with a sharp pivot to office furniture.

The seeds of success had been planted decades earlier. Herman Miller was founded in 1905 just outside Grand Rapids, and Steelcase (then called the Metal Office Furniture Company) followed soon after. Both rose to prominence in the years following World War II. In 1954, the Metal Office Furniture Company renamed itself Steelcase. Herman Miller hired George Nelson, who invented the modern workstation, a systematic approach to office furniture that treated the workspace as a design problem. Charles and Ray Eames followed, creating the lounge chair that entered MoMA’s permanent collection in 1956. These were not woodworkers continuing a craft tradition; they were industrial designers inventing a new category of product.

By the early 1960s, Grand Rapids once again produced a significant share of American office furniture. The current industry is focused on ergonomics, high-profile designers, and office systems, all manufactured from steel and aluminum, engineered polymers and textiles, wood and leather. Today, the region is home to over 225 furniture-related companies, including suppliers of wood, specialty hardware, textiles, specialized machinery, and furniture-dedicated transportation companies. The cluster effect is self-reinforcing, and most of its members proudly advertise their Michigan roots.

Industrial identity can survive complete material transformation. The name Furniture City became a self-fulfilling prophecy—a regional brand that outlasted the products that earned it.

In Providence, flexible architecture and a dense district allowed for continuous adaptation. The historic product—in this case, jewelry—matters less than the urban form it created.

Grand Rapids showed quite the opposite. The myth of the product has persisted for almost two centuries, from Scandinavian woodworkers to workshops producing Victorian replicas to post-war office furniture giants.

There is no single recipe for a resilient urban economy, but the cities we have examined in these Production Potential posts offer good ingredients: a culture of ingenuity, an ecosystem of vendors and suppliers, flexible architecture in dense districts, and the persistence of a shared narrative. These are still the right ingredients, even today.

In recent years, cities have been buffeted by an economy that changes rapidly and unpredictably. Demographic changes, the rise of hybrid work, the whiplash of tariffs and isolationist trade policies, and the ever-accelerating changes in consumer demand patterns—these destabilize what was, for a long time, a stable environment. In the next posts we will look at global economic patterns in greater detail, and uncover what they mean for cities.

Does a city’s resilience have anything to do with its narrative? Last week we made the case that it does. Cities with a stronger sense of self—a clear story about who they are, grounded in what they make—have better tools for reinvention when they are hit by economic and social shocks. Those cities know what they’re building on and they have inherited resources. Rochester was a strong example, and this week we go deeper, bringing Detroit into the mix.

Cars and cameras don’t have much in common. But the cities that built them do. Both Detroit and Rochester were shaped by dominant, campus-bound companies with charismatic products that the whole world knew. Both cities concentrated their industrial identity on strong brands—Ford, GM, and Chrysler on one side; Kodak on the other. Both built sprawling, self-sufficient campuses that operated like cities within cities, with their own power plants, roads, and workforces in the tens of thousands. And both cities watched as their business titans contracted, leaving behind vast footprints and uncertain futures for the urban economies they once bolstered.

What follows is an overview of two centralized production models—and what happened when each confronted a set of disruptions: digital technology, offshoring, and the slow unwinding of twentieth-century manufacturing. Neither city escaped unscathed. But both found, in different ways, something worth building on. The outcomes, as we’ll see, were not the same. And the reasons expose something structural about how industrial identity is built, lost, and, in some cases, recovered. Identity is not the only determinant of resilience—the structure of the regional production economy is also a defining factor.

Detroit

Henry Ford is known for the automobile, but his true innovation was the assembly line—an efficient method of making a complex product quickly and consistently. Ford’s River Rouge Complex, ninety-three buildings spread across 2,000 acres, was itself an assembly line. Iron ore and raw materials arrived at one end; finished automobiles departed from the other days later. Between those two points blast furnaces, coke ovens, a steel mill, a glass plant, a tire factory, a power station and assembly facilities worked in tandem. By 1940, over 100,000 workers clocked in each day. By 1950, Detroit was the fifth-largest city in the United States, and River Rouge set new benchmarks for the size and efficiency of an integrated industrial complex.

Diego Rivera spent three months sketching the interior in 1932, captivated by the molten metal, the human-machine choreography of the assembly line. Charlie Chaplin visited too, studying the Rouge for Modern Times. Both artists were enchanted by industry as a total system, self-sufficient and self-contained.

Chrysler and General Motors followed Ford’s lead, creating vertically integrated facilities of their own. Across each of the “Big Three” the goal was to vertically integrate, eliminating the need for local suppliers and creating advantages in terms of efficiency and control. Vertical integration created disadvantages, however, for the Detroit region.

A combination of pressures—foreign competition, rising labor costs, and a failure to anticipate fuel-efficiency demands—took their toll on The Big Three. When Ford, GM, and Chrysler contracted, there was no ecosystem of smaller firms to catch displaced workers and no network of specialized manufacturers that might pivot to new products. Detroit had large automobile companies, it did not have a regional industrial ecosystem for creating automobiles—a web of interdependent firms sharing knowledge, competing for talent, and spinning out new ventures.

The Detroit Three automakers went from controlling over 90% of the U.S. market share in the 1940’s, to only 17% of the U.S. total vehicle volume today, and in 2013 Detroit became famous for largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

But the story doesn’t end in bankruptcy. The River Rouge facility still operates. Ford builds F-150 Lightnings there now, on 600 acres—less than a third of the original footprint. The blast furnaces, glass plant, and tire factory are gone. What remains is an assembly operation, its components arriving from suppliers scattered across the US and far-flung continents.

The sense of opportunity that followed Detroit’s bankruptcy drew a new kind of energy to the city. Land was cheap, and a generation of inventive projects emerged. Little Village is an emerging cultural corridor that encompasses a skate park, a sculpture garden dedicated to the late artist Charles McGee, a boutique bed-and breakfast, a bar and two restaurants, as well as office space for nonprofits. West riverfront park would almost certainly have become a private mixed use development if the City had not experienced a decline and re-emergence. Shinola brought watchmaking back to the United States with its Detroit workshop—and now includes an expansive manufacturing operation and a boutique hotel. After decades in the shadow of the Big Three, a regional ecosystem is flourishing.

Michigan Central is a punctuation mark to this story. The 30-acre project is focused on mobility innovation, societal impact, and culture, and it is centered on the long-derelict Michigan Central Station, an icon of pre-automobile transportation. This is the most visible signal of Detroit’s attempt to rewrite its industrial identity—and Ford was heavily involved. Today, the campus hosts startups and research groups working on autonomous vehicles, micro mobility, and electric propulsion, through a partnership with NewLab. Field States contributed analysis and strategic design work for Michigan Central, envisioning a new workplace fit for a today’s innovation processes. Michigan Central is a billion dollar bet that Detroit’s manufacturing depth—its engineers, its supply chain knowledge, its production culture, and its self-narrative—is the right substrate for the next generation of mobility technology.

Rochester

Throughout the four decades from 1950 to 1990, a full wall of New York’s Grand Central Station displayed an advertisement for the American experience. Well, an ad for Kodak, but the camera company was an American icon. This was true in more ways than one—as much as Kodak represented travel, leisure, and family values, the company was a symbol of American manufacturing.

A short train ride away from Grand Central Station, Rochester was the global center of camera invention and production. At its peak, Kodak employed 62,000 people in Rochester, roughly half of the city’s working population. Kodak’s campus, the Eastman Business Park, had 154 buildings, including laboratory, manufacturing, and office space, as well as its own power plant, railroad, fire department, and thirty miles of internal roads.

Unlike Ford, Kodak did not vertically integrate. An ecosystem of suppliers sprang up around it, including Bausch & Lomb, Wollensak Optical Company, and Graflex Inc. Together, these companies manufactured every component in a complete photographic supply chain, including film, optical lenses, camera shutters, photo paper and chemicals.

When digital photography emerged, Kodak moved slowly and the business model collapsed. A long decline ended in Kodak’s bankruptcy filing in 2012. Fifty buildings have been demolished since; controlled explosions drew crowds of former workers to watch an icon reduced to rubble.

But the campus is alive with something Kodak never anticipated. A cross-sectoral ecosystem for optics innovation—including the American Center for Optics Manufacturing, Optimax Systems Inc, and AIM Photonics—has grown from the knowledge Kodak spent decades accumulating. Rochester has contributed to the Hubble Space Telescope, scientific advances in the coherence theory, high-precision military applications, advanced lithography for semiconductor manufacturing, and now quantum computing. The campus has also become a home for entirely new industries—companies as diverse as cannabis and advanced textile production have adapted vacant industrial space.

Six thousand people work at the Eastman Business Park today, a fraction of Kodak’s peak workforce, but a telling representation of contemporary business models and production methods; it is currently home to 114 companies and is leasing over 200 acres.

Before George Eastman died in 1932, he asked that his ashes be interred at Kodak Park. He loved this place, and his work had an extraordinary influence on what Rochester became. Eastman’s legacy is alive in the campus that is thriving once again; a multitude of innovative companies in place of the American monolith that Eastman built. Even outside of the campus, Rochester’s economy is laced with the history of Kodak.

Resilience depends on narrative and manufacturing networks

Rivera’s murals captured a moment when industrial control was strength. The decades since have demonstrated otherwise, and as behemoth firms stumbled, the cities they bolstered rapidly declined. When production concentrates in a single organization—vertically integrated, campus-bound, self-sufficient—the organization’s decline leaves little behind. Those that weathered deindustrialization best had diversified manufacturing bases—dense networks of small and medium firms that could adapt when any single company failed. When a city’s production capacity is distributed across an ecosystem of firms sharing knowledge, competing for talent, and spinning off new ventures, disruption has a softer impact on the system. Rochester proved this too, imperfectly and at real cost, but durably.

Detroit and Rochester offer the same structural lesson from different angles. Where production concentrates without an ecosystem, narrative can sustain potential but cannot substitute for network. Detroit is rebuilding, thanks to the ecosystem that emerged post-bankruptcy. Where narrative and network reinforce each other, the city is more resilient. That distinction—between a story a city tells about itself and the actual web of firms and people that carry industrial knowledge and narrative forward—is what determines the rate and character of revival.

The next Production Potential post turns to Grand Rapids, Providence, and Portland—cities that didn’t concentrate production in a single campus or brand.

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For decades, Rochester was America’s undisputed capital of cameras and film. Why is the Kodak sign important in a city that no longer makes photography equipment? Because identity matters. Cities with clear self-narratives consistently recover from adversity—they draw on their past to navigate their future. Now, with office vacancy crossing 20% nationally and climbing to 40% in some downtowns, cities face a choice of chasing the next mobile industry or building on who they are. This essay explores why the knowledge economy proved brittle and why identity matters for urban resilience in key American cities.

He had driven past the Eastman Business Park hundreds of times before, on his way to and from downtown Rochester. On an otherwise unremarkable late summer day, he pulled over sharply. Workers were dismantling an iconic red sign, and he needed answers. “Why are you messing with the big sign?!”

The construction team reassured him that they weren’t removing anything—just rewiring the sign so the new tenants didn’t have to foot the electric bill. “My heart skipped a beat,” he later wrote. “I know it’s just a sign. But it’s also part of our collective story.” Almost every American of a certain age, and certainly every Rochester resident would recognize it: Kodak.

The company made extraordinary breakthroughs in photography, and became almost synonymous with the American dream. As it grew, it brought burgeoning energy to Rochester. Almost as quickly, Kodak declined, as digital photography eclipsed film and foreign companies dominated the new market.

Since Kodak’s bankruptcy, Eastman Business Park has transformed from a company campus into a cross-sector innovation hub housing 114 companies—photonics firms, biopharma manufacturers, and even cannabis cultivation. The Kodak sign stays, proof that Rochester has earned its place in history. The memory of Kodak matters to the workers who made film in these buildings, for their children who work here now, and for the Rochester resident walking by.

What allowed Rochester to reinvent itself? This essay explores how a city’s legacy can animate its future.

Why Identity Matters

Research shows that individuals with clear self-narratives recover faster when adversity hits. They draw on past experiences, find purpose, pivot with confidence. A strong identity adapts without breaking.

The same is true for a city. Historically, a city’s physical form, economy, and identity develop hand in hand over time. And often, one industry becomes so foundational that the city is the industry.

As companies succeed, buildings are constructed to serve their distinct needs, with features like tall ceilings, large windows, loading bays, or basement storage. Distinctive building types emerge, forming whole neighborhoods that are laid out for production. Urban form calcifies in the image of the industry and its products. Jewelry studios line Providence’s downtown manufacturing district. Detroit’s “big three” automakers each developed a campus.

Industries shape the social fabric as well, as innovators and employees build networks. Knowledge is created and stolen and adapted through a competitive process. The city acquires a self-narrative that is intimately connected to the industry, and there is a pride in place.

Industries bust almost as much as they boom. When international trade prospects change or raw material supplies run out or technological advances make an industry irrelevant, urban decline follows. When whole regions are struck, names like the rust belt stick. The population diminishes, wealth shifts out of the city, and buildings are vacated. In addition to economic decline, the result is often a collective existential malaise, because a city is its industry.

Resilience Depends on Narrative

Kodak emerged into its heyday in the late 1970s, spinning out scientific advances and animating a cluster of optics innovation and production in Rochester, New York. Then Kodak tumbled, falling quickly at first, then slowly, excruciatingly, over decades. By the 1940s, The Detroit Three automakers controlled over 90% of the U.S. market share. Today, the Detroit Region produces only around 17% of the U.S. total vehicle volume.

But some cities prove to be resilient. The ones that reinvent themselves share something: a strong narrative.

Grand Rapids emerged as a furniture capital in the late 1800s and the city’s name became a mark of quality by 1902. Decades later, the city’s furniture show was eclipsed by a larger fair in Chicago, as its artisans were caught unaware of—or perhaps were unwilling to accept—the American public’s changing tastes. When changes in consumer demand compounded with the Great Depression, the industry was decimated.

After a period of decline, brands like Steelcase and Herman Miller rose to prominence in the years following World War II. They became internationally successful for a new kind of design: modern metal office furniture. By the early 1960s, Grand Rapids once again produced a significant share of American furniture. What allowed the pivot? It was not craft knowledge (prior expertise was in wood carving) or the existing buildings stock (artisan woodshops replaced by industrial metal fabrication). What mattered was the identity. Grand Rapids believed it made furniture, and when Victorian reproductions died, the city didn’t ask what else it could make. It asked what furniture could become.

For a century, this pattern repeated: boom, decline, reinvention. But the 1980s broke it. Globalization and offshoring struck every manufacturing sector at once. Knowledge work took its place—first in downtown office towers, then in converted warehouses as cities competed to attract tech companies and startups.

Knowledge work was a strong economic base, but firms were highly mobile. Workers moved quickly between companies, and companies moved quickly between cities. Soon cities competed to attract tech company headquarters, rather than cultivating industrial craft or a stable production base. Post-industrial buildings became staging grounds for this competition—warehouses converted to startup offices were trendy. They traded on urban character without creating lasting ties.

The tech economy proved brittle. A software developer can work from a warehouse in Portland or a glass tower in London or a beach in Bali. The rise of remote work in 2020 only intensified this placelessness. Without roots or narrative, downtowns hollowed out.

Manufacturing is intimately connected to place, in a way that knowledge work isn’t. When Kansas City rebranded as the Silicon Prairie, did anyone feel inspired? Did the identity run deep enough to weather a downturn?

Rebuilding on a Narrative Foundation

Cities must rebuild their economies. The next chapter of American urbanism cannot be written in the language of knowledge work alone. As in any biological system, monocultures fail under stress.

Cities adapt successfully when they build on their sense of identity; pride in place becomes the foundation for reinvention. For decades industry globalized and municipal leaders wooed the technology industry, homogenizing their cities and their urban economies. Years of post-pandemic malaise have stalled development. With the shift to remote and hybrid work, companies are shedding their real estate portfolios. In 2024, the US office vacancy rate crossed the 20% threshold for the first time, and in some cities these rates are much higher: 36-40% of office buildings. Now is the time for reinvention. A place-specific narrative may be dusty (or rusty), but it is still there.

Rochester kept its sign. It survived by building on what it was—and other cities can do the same. In the coming weeks, we’ll trace these narrative through-lines in five American cities: Detroit, Rochester, Providence, Grand Rapids, and Portland. Each tells a story of identity, loss, and reinvention.

Why these cities? They share crucial traits: each has a strong industrial identity (cars, film, jewelry, furniture, shoes). Each faces high vacancy rates. None is located in a state that has prioritized and funded manufacturing in the recent push for reshoring—these cities must define their next chapter endogenously, that is, based on their own intrinsic strengths, characteristics, and narratives.

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Welcome to the Povey Building

If you haven’t experienced it before, Thermoplastic Polyurethane 3D printing is surprising. It leaves behind a fine white powder as it turns a mostly-recycled stock material into a finished, environmentally sustainable, and aesthetically remarkable product. It’s even more surprising to see that powder dusting a historic brick masonry wall, collecting at the base of old-growth Oregon timber columns, inside a century-old building in the center of Portland’s Old Town Chinatown neighborhood.

This is the scene you’ll find when you walk into the production lab at HILOS. Engineers are designing and manufacturing shoes in the same room, something the industry abandoned more than a century ago. Using advanced manufacturing technologies, HILOS moves from a concept to a fully functional sample product in about one day. The industry standard is weeks or months, and the total production cycle from design to shelves is 18 months.

Co-working desks at WeWork—the late-2010s startup office trope—wouldn’t be suitable for the kind of work that HILOS does. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fledgling startup moved into Portland’s historic Povey Glassworks building. Like most of the buildings around it, the Povey building, originally built in 1905, had been converted to offices for knowledge workers during the “creative class” boom of the early 2000s and 2010s. And in 2020, almost overnight, it emptied out. The Povey building, alongside millions of square feet throughout the city, became stranded assets. As an office, the building had no real utility—but that didn’t mean it was useless. When HILOS found it, the space was vacant, the price was right, and it was a remarkable raw material for architectural reinvention.

HILOS leveraged that opportunity to create a new kind of work space. The former creative office, the generic kind of real estate that remains impossible to fill in the aftermath of the pandemic, became a hotspot for both designing and producing the next generation of sustainable footwear. Its architectural characteristics—tall ceilings, regular column grid, loading bay, natural light—embodied what Adaptive Urbanism calls the design imperative: structure that outlasts any single use. Because of its manufacturing history, the building required no building or zoning code updates. It was primed to adapt, and it did. Today, the Povey Building is thriving. It is productive, in all senses of the word.

Three Generational Trends

HILOS signals the convergence of three generational trends: urban cores are hollowing out, supply chains are in flux, and breakthroughs in manufacturing technology are bringing the next generation of products into sharper focus. A new urban industrial economy is bringing production to the core of American cities.

Is it simply reshoring? Not in any conventional sense. To this day, most reshoring attempts have failed. They will continue to fail if they attempt to replicate outdated manufacturing models that were built in a very different context. Conventional mass production is synonymous with astonishingly low wages, inhumane work conditions, and environmental degradation. Continuing those practices—let alone replicating them in the United States—is neither ethically defensible nor economically viable.

Today’s market realities are distinctive. Consumers expect new products monthly, not yearly—and they reward companies that disclose sustainable and humane practices. Trade policies swing unpredictably between administrations, but they are trending worldwide toward protectionism. These shifts demand manufacturing that can adapt: batch-on-demand production, just-in-time delivery, supply chains that absorb volatility rather than shatter under it.

The infrastructure for this transformation already exists. Advanced manufacturing has moved from peripheral novelty to mainstream capability. And cities are burdened with millions of square feet of vacant space, especially the office buildings that once defined their downtowns.

Domestic production is viable only if the fundamentals of manufacturing radically transform. That means rethinking the product itself and how it is made.

Through the late twentieth century, companies optimized their supply chains by squeezing suppliers and chasing the lowest possible wages. They created an intricate, efficient, and shockingly fragile global production system, and the COVID-19 pandemic proved just how brittle it was. In its aftermath, resilience has replaced efficiency as the primary operational objective for companies that manufacture. That means more (and often redundant) suppliers in more countries, especially on-shore and near-shore providers. Flexibility as risk management has become the operating principle, and it is the economic imperative of Adaptive Urbanism.

For decades, 3D printing remained peripheral to manufacturing: useful for prototyping, embraced by hobbyists, but too slow and too limited for production at scale. Recent advances in materials, equipment, and automation have changed the calculus. Advanced manufacturing now operates at production scale, and it stands to reshape the relationship between companies, their customers, and their employees—and the geography of production.

Every day, HILOS shows that it is possible to make finished shoes in downtown America, and they are not the only one. Gildform designs, 3D prints, and manufactures custom jewelry on demand from its facility in Detroit, and seamlessly transitions creators into a vetted global manufacturing network for production at scale.

Honda has operated an advanced design facility in downtown Los Angeles since 2012. In 2021, the company merged “all auto development, planning, purchasing, strategy and manufacturing into one company, thus strengthening what Honda calls a one-floor approach to the product development process,” (Honda News). The production R&D facility creates full-size models and prototypes that are moved into scale production at a facility in Ohio.

The Next Downtown

For decades, downtowns have served office workers, and today they need a new purpose. The simple intuitiveness of office to residential conversion makes it popular, but architectural analyses have repeatedly proven that it is only feasible in a narrow subset of the building stock. Even feasible conversions require heavy public subsidy or yield market-rate units, often both. Office-to-housing is neither scalable nor a solution to housing, especially affordable housing.

Office to production is largely absent from the architectural, political, and public conversation. The value proposition is clear, and it should be a call to action for civic leaders, economic development professionals, real estate developers, and architects: this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to (re)define urban production. Achieving this goal will take a cross-sectoral coalition, because the economics of manufacturing and consumer demand are changing faster than zoning, development, and real estate finance can respond. This an example of the pacing problem, and overcoming it requires coordinated action.

When design and manufacturing share the same space, each accelerates the other—ideas move from concept to prototype to production in days, not years. A new method of making will reshape what products look like, how urban economies function, and what vacant buildings become. This future is neither speculative nor theoretical. A new economics of production is emerging at a time when the financial infrastructure of American cities is strained to the edge of collapse. The fundamentals have changed; there is no return to a pre-pandemic equilibrium.

The next urban economy will emerge when entrepreneurs, developers, planners, and communities recognize what they already have: an abundant supply of vacant buildings waiting for a new purpose. This is production potential.

This post is part of a series about Production Potential, a long-term project that began as an installation for the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture, a collaboration between Versostudio, an Arsenalia company, and Field States. If you like it, subscribe to Field Discovery and receive posts about Production Potential, Adaptive Urbanism, and the Methods & Tools we use as an adaptive design practice.

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