Meet the Makers & Maintainers: Knowle West Media Centre
Meet Knowle West Media Centre
“We're literally building our community from the bottom up. That's the most important thing to come out of this - it's given me ownership of my community. It's giving people different choices, better choices about how things can be. And it feels like only the beginning."
Knowle West resident
Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) is an arts and technology collective based in the council-built estate of Knowle West in South Bristol. KWMC started 25 years ago with an artist-in-residence, exploring practice around voice, identity, empowerment through camera technology.
Over the years, KWMC has grown to be many things – a community hub, a digital manufacturing space, and a neighbourhood “living lab”. At the heart of all its work is supporting people to make positive changes in their lives and community by working with the arts, technology, and care to co-design new ways of doing things and explore new futures. This means working across diverse areas including health, energy, skills, housing, and smart cities.
KWMC works in an urban context of significant disparities in wealth and opportunities. In the south of prosperous but unequal city of Bristol, Knowle West is a 100-year-old council-built estate and in the top 5% of England’s most deprived areas. It is located just three miles from Bristol city centre but is poorly served by transport and often feels disconnected. It bears the scars of the previous extractive industrial model; until 1990 the largest employer was Imperial Tobacco, with workers’ benefits often partly paid in cigarettes.
Using the arts, technology, and making, KWMC delivers creative projects that focus on building; community wealth, social and digital infrastructure and creating a fairer, more sustainable future. KWMC works with people at all stages of their lives and focuses on creating inclusive and welcoming environments for people to experiment and explore ideas. They are grounded in making things real and tangible, from building air quality sensors to street furniture.
How KWMC is creating and using community tech
KWMC seeks to explore how Knowle West can more successfully navigate new waves of economic and technological change, such as automation and AI, in ways that don’t just reinforce structural inequalities and add to their economic precarity and sense of being “left-behind”.
Over the years KWMC has developed into a mature “test-space” for exploring with communities less extractive and more people- and place-led approaches to tech development and deployment. This has enabled them to support and nurture interests of their community, such as energy, retrofitting and food production.
In the process of experimentation, KWMC has a growing assemblage of community tech infrastructure. For example, this includes:
KWMC The Factory, a community makerspace, where local people can get hands on with tech to design and make things.
KWMC Cloud, a secure local private network, including an Open Stack. Using this, KWMC can establish privacy and sharing protocols determined through community agreement, rather than being controlled by third parties. This localised Cloud network has enabled KWMC to set up high-quality internet connections between different local and city buildings.
A LoRaWAN gateway to support low-energy localised “Internet of Things” networks, which gives KWMC the potential to deploy a community-owned network of sensors, reducing their dependency on proprietary hardware and software.
An AI hub, where people can gain hands-on experience with machine-learning algorithms and processes, to help demystify theoretical concepts and prototype their own chat bots and code.
KWMC’s To/Fro platform, developed as an emergency response during covid to digitally coordinate volunteering and mutual aid, which has now matured into an on-going service.
BristolAirQuality.co.uk, a collaboration between the University of Bristol and KWMC. It provides Bristolians with the most feature and information-rich portal available, for viewing and exploring live and historical air quality data, generated within the city and surrounding area.
How community tech is strengthening communities
“Robots, augmented reality, modern methods of construction. All this stuff is a completely new world for me… but now I’m not scared. I can do this stuff. And now I feel a massive amount of ownership.”
John, local resident and participant in Making Together, a project exploring community uses of new construction technologies
KWMC’s approach to using tech to create value for their place-based community is to make it as “sticky” as possible. This means holding on to its value in the form of jobs, skills, new community-led business models, and community-owned infrastructure. This has empowered the community to begin to tell a different story about itself. Rather than just being a consumer of technology, Knowle West can show that it can be a source of ideas and innovation.
KWMC believes that the ‘neighbourhood’ is a key site within which to seed and grow social change. They work to share practical glimmers of those better futures; making, prototyping, and testing ideas out for real in the neighbourhood. This means people can tangibly see and feel how new possibilities work on the ground.
In this process, KWMC creates community impact in a number of ways:
Developing the skills, confidence, and agency of local people
Seeding and supporting new community business models, enterprises and ideas
Generating evidence for wider change that can help influence policy and practice
Changing the narratives about and perceptions of “left behind” places in positive ways
For example, KWMC’s use of new digital design and fabrication tools to create homes has: trained 30 local people with these new tools; co-designed and delivered two low-carbon homes; seeded a new community enterprise WeCanMake; invented new precedents that are influencing policy around planning and housing delivery; and demonstrated how a community can be a producer and source of system-changing innovation.
The Makers & Maintainers programme will help KWMC to tell the story of how community tech can open up new ways of imagining better futures, building community wealth, and creating social and digital infrastructure. For example, through its energy projects they are exploring the potential for collective energy generation, storage and consumption and developing. And through their use of Modern Methods of Construction to make homes, they are exploring how putting digital design and fabrication tools in community hands can create new skills and the kind of communities we all want to live in.
Find out more about the programme
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We’d love to hear from you as we shape this exciting, growing field in 2023.