How Shanghai's makerspaces are fostering a new generation of start-ups

You wouldn’t think there was farmland in Shanghai, but here it is: fields of okra and eggplant, wandering chickens, cherry tomatoes dangling from thin, tenacious vines. Behind the fields are tunnel-shaped greenhouses wrapped in sheets of plastic. Roger Mu enters one of them and points at something on the ground.
 

Roger Mu, a Texan-born Chinese, is an entrepreneur. The greenhouses are part of Mu’s business venture, which provide clients with fresh, chemical-free vegetables every week, curated to their individual cooking habits. 

Mu’s greenhouse concept stemmed from his own needs as an urban farming enthusiast, as well as his involvement in Xinchejian, a makerspace near Jing An Temple. Makerspaces are community centers where tools, space, and knowledge around ‘making’ are shared. The definition of ‘making’ is broad; it encompasses any creative endeavor, whether it’s writing code, experimenting with food, or building a motion-sensing chandelier. The goal of a makerspace is simple: be a place that empowers people to create.
 

When Xinchejian was founded in 2010, it was the first of its kind in China. Since then, makerspaces have caught fire all over the country, from Shenzhen to Beijing, Chengdu to Hangzhou.
 

In Shanghai, a multitude of makerspaces have sprung up since China’s induction into the maker movement, such as Mushroom Cloud in Pudong, which was opened in 2012 by the open source hardware and robotics provider DFRobot; Fablab-Shanghai, a makerspace at Tongji University; and XinFab, a makerspace next to Xinchejian that was founded in 2013 by Lucio Pentagna Guimaraes who built the space’s first 3D printer from scratch. Though the cost of membership varies across different makerspaces, they all offer their members an array of similar benefits, like shared access to different machines and tools or discount prices on workshops.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.