Community-S.C.A.L.E. Production 

We launched the Freedom Dreams Carriage House three years ago as a Design//Build//Restore Makerspace. Over time, it has evolved into a regenerative hub within our Detroit network, deepening connections to the land through woodcraft, hands-on education, and collaborative design and building. This space has been instrumental in creating foundational structures and furniture that support our community work—from garden beds for growing and sharing food, to the Shelf of Life, Birwood Bins for neighborhood waste collection, and larger gathering spaces like the Meeting House and Mariposa Pavilion, which foster community reflection and connection. Notably, our CanDo garden resource station, in partnership with Freedom Freedom Growers, addresses the urgent effects of climate change in the Jefferson/Chalmers Community.

Each project allows us to practice Community-S.C.A.L.E Production, a methodology that integrates local needs, materials, skills, and capacity. This approach has positioned our Design//Build pedagogy as a community-driven model for neighborhood development. As neighbors actively participate in creating small infrastructures—such as garden beds, seating, and pavilions—our collective skill set expands. This process inspires us to reclaim the means of production within our own community, strengthening both our capabilities and our agency in shaping our environment.

Embedded in our process is the practice of a Circular Economy. We challenge the traditional take-make-dispose model of the Linear Economy by upcycling materials often seen as waste, giving them new life as educational tools and neighborhood infrastructure. This practice reflects Detroit’s long history of reclaiming overlooked resources and transforming them into community assets. Across the city, numerous community organizations are stepping into leadership roles around education and land use, embodying a shared vision of sustainability, resilience, and self-determination.

We are often asked about scaling this process—how it might be made bigger, faster, or further-reaching. However, this question reflects a progress trap: it focuses on value rather than values, commodifying a process that is intentionally organic and ecologically constrained. For us, scale is defined as Sustainable Collaborations Across Living Ecologies (S.C.A.L.E)—a biomimetic response to the corporate model of traditional development. Growth, for us, happens through relationships and critical connections that are reciprocal and transformative, not unilateral. At the same time, we remain keenly aware of the urgency and competition posed by the predatory open market. Our response is collective and learned through decades of work that has come before us. As we evolve into world where a climate that is ever changing, increasingly demanding that our resources are resilient and sustainable, vapid population growth on top of growing wealth disparities, education divides and economy not fit for over half of our cities population, we must reconsider how can our neighborhood play a generative role in growing our humanity.  We consider Community-S.C.A.L.E. Production to be one of many responses our community has put forth to help imagine and shape our collective futures.