Decentralizing Main Street

Oct 3

A community-driven micro-hub providing basic utilities and opportunities to support local economies

By: ASK* for a better world

Decentralizing main street means supporting our immediate neighbours. The micro-hub is the building that is intended to be a node of local resources for community members.

There are 3 components that every micro-hub intends to support; community love, local economy, and basic utilities. The “community love” component is a collection of amenities that community members can give to each other. The Local Economy component is about discovering what the goods, services, and talent is right there in your neighbourhood. This is accomplished through a touchscreen which is a continually updated local directory for local business, music festivals and markets, and parks. The Basic Utilities component provides some of the basic needs such as water, shelter and outlets/wifi. This could be a central hub for communicating and planning.

This idea is intended to be repeatable but highly personal to the piece of neighbourhood where it sits, supporting what that area needs. The boundaries of the area each Micro-hub services should be walkable, this allows it to be a central place for multiple resources and social interactions.

The small structure should be relatively simple, the equivalent of an elaborate bus stop. The structure is intended to be very interactive, inviting anyone to touch, use, or look at every part of it. These small structures should be constructed with natural, eco-friendly and durable materials, running off of it’s own generated power and reflecting the neighbourhood character.

Details

Budget: Roughly we would expect something like this to cost 150k if the community does a large portion of the work/contracting, and 300k if the city took the lead. Although that budget is for a more traditional approach to construction. We are hoping each community takes local talent and products very seriously, and finds creative ways to barter, lend and pay for the building. The materials and implementation sections elaborate on this.

Materials and fabrications: Ideally the buildings materials should reflect what locally owned businesses can provide or produce. It is all about creative ways to boost hyper local business while creating the future "micro-hub" of local business. For example, our case study of Oliver shows that the neighbourhood values becoming a more sustainably conscious community in the future. The community could approach a locally owned solar panel supplier, to see if they would be willing to give a great price to be "featured" on a micro-hub. The benefit to the local company could be that the community league pays back the suppliers over time with the revenue from businesses renting the "local shop" space within the micro-hub.

Installation and other services: Like we mentioned in the fabrication section, the building could be implemented using locally owned trades ( if possible, even local to the neighbourhood) and for low cost services, they could receive recognition on the micro-hub. For example, in our case study, the electrical for site lighting, charging stations and solar panels could be carried out for cheap through a local electrician, with the understanding that the end building would have a visual recognition such as a plaque stating that "Locally owned __company X_ was proudly the electrician on micro-hub #3" and provide their contact info, to further encourage locals to use local businesses.