View source for Fab City


'''= "a global effort to make cities more locally productive using new sustainable manufacturing technologies available in city centres and, ultimately, to realise the Fab City Pledge of 50 per cent self-sufficiency by 2054".''' [http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/fab-city-how-can-we-build-more-sustainable-cities]

URL = http://fab.city/

"A FAB CITY IS A NEW URBAN MODEL FOR LOCALLY PRODUCTIVE AND GLOBALLY CONNECTED SELF SUFFICIENT CITIES".To


=Contextual Citation=

Tomas Diez:

"A fab city is not a city full of fab labs. We are aiming for fab labs to disappear, which means that local production is embedded in everyday life."
(http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/fab-city-how-can-we-build-more-sustainable-cities}



=Description=

'''1.'''

"In a Fab City, citizens are empowered to be the masters of their own destiny, their resilience is increased and a more ecological system is developed because movement of materials and energy consumption is drastically reduced. The Fab City has been initiated by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and the Fab Foundation; it operates within the Fab Lab network, using it as a global infrastructure and knowledge source for the radical transformation on how we work, live and play in cities."
(http://fab.city/)


'''2. Nesta:'''

"Describing the initiative as "part project, part network, and part movement", Tomas Diez, one of Fab City's main instigators, argues that the disconnect between consumption and production is at the heart of our cities’ problems. As societies become disconnected from the production of everyday items entirely, we become reliant on importing via supply chains. As Tomas puts it: "We have externalised the responsibility for sustaining our lives".

It isn’t hard to find evidence of this disconnect; the components and labour which combine to create our food, clothes, phones and buildings are sourced from all corners of the world. Fab City hopes to reverse this centuries-old trend. Citizens are being empowered to reclaim the means of production and manufacturing to create anything in their own cities, from food to prosthetic limbs, using sustainable technology and tools."
(http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/fab-city-how-can-we-build-more-sustainable-cities)



=Characteristics=

The Fab City Pledge wants to achieve the following by 2054:

"Self-sufficient cities

* Cities produce at least 50% of what they consume

* A global repository of open source designs for city solutions

* Materials are source locally through recycling and digital materials"

(http://fab.city/#fabcity)


=Discussion=

"Cities are where most of the planet’s population now live, and they offer the best opportunity to effect practical change at scale, and in a context to which people can relate. Cities are at the heart of addressing the social and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

The FAB City is a global project to develop locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities. It comprises an international think tank of civic leaders, makers, urbanists and innovators working on changing the paradigm of the current industrial economy where the city operates on a linear model of importing products and producing waste. 

FAB City is a new urban model of transforming and shaping cities that shifts how they source and use materials from  ‘Products In Trash Out’ (PITO) to ‘Data In Data Out’ (DIDO). This means that more production occurs inside the city, along with recycling materials and meeting local needs through local inventiveness. A city’s imports and exports would mostly be found in the form of data (information, knowledge, design, code). 

In this way, the citizens and the city are empowered to be the masters of their own destiny, their resilience is increased and a more ecological system is developed because the movements of materials and the associated energy consumption and carbon emissions typical of the current economy are drastically reduced. In order for this to be possible, the city must be locally productive and globally connected to knowledge, economic and social networks, making cooperation between cities, citizens and knowledge centers the basis of the scientific knowledge. 

To become a FAB City requires having a more precise knowledge of the way that cities work. The evolution of the project will make it possible to create better systems of capturing and analysing data, developing knowledge about a city, and it will also the implementation of an evaluation system and meticulous monitoring. 


This initiative is a great economic opportunity for participating cities. It will create new types of jobs and professions related to the knowledge economy and the development and implementation of new approaches and technological solutions, including: 

* Manufacturing locally, and creating global impact: A global network of cities that share knowledge and best practices on urban solutions emerging from citizens, companies, educational institutions, and governments. Local networks of Fab Labs and production centers connected to the larger global network of supply chains, sharing knowledge, best practices and projects.

* Distributed energy production: With the advent of domestic batteries and efficiency improvements in solar and other means of clean power generation, energy distribution itself will face enormous changes. Distributed grids will change the role of households and businesses in power, water and resources distribution.

* Cryptocurrency for a new economy: Cities creating their own trade markets connected to a global economy, using a multi-currency and value system based on the blockchain and similar technologies.

* Food production and urban permaculture: Urban farming will scale up from experimental practice to large scale infrastructure. Local production of foods at domestic, neighbourhood and city scales, will create a closed loop system for food production and harvesting.

* Educating for the future: incorporate a stronger emphasis on  learning-by-doing in education systems and curricula, and  engage all levels of education in finding solutions for local needs, through digital fabrication technologies, and  sharing them with global networks.

* Building the future circular [spiral] economy: Reduce the amount of imported goods, food and resources like water or energy. Increase the use of recycled raw materials for the production of objects in cities.

* Collaboration between governments and the civil society: local government and civic organizations, start-ups, universities, and other organizations must work together in order to make a cultural shift that promotes the empowerment of the cities and their citizens.

All these initiatives will be supported by technologies such as digital manufacturing, energy rehabilitation of buildings and neighbourhoods, smart energy networks, electrical mobility, urban permaculture, intelligent infrastructure, and related policy and regulatory approaches, among other solutions to be shared globally between cities. 

The Fab City project was launched in 2011 at the FAB7 conference in Lima by the Institut d’Arquitectura Avançada de Catalunya, the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, the Fab Foundation and the Barcelona City Council. This initiative is open for other cities, towns or communities to join in order to collectively build a more human and inhabitable new world, and join the Barcelona pledge: a countdown for cities to become self-sufficient by 2054."
(http://fab.city/about/)

=Examples=

==Poblenou neighborhood in Barcelona==

Nesta:

"One of these ‘aeroplanes’ is the newly designated makers’ district in Barcelona’s Poblenou neighbourhood. Working in partnership with the council, fab city enthusiasts hope to create a fab city Prototype in Poblenou as the area becomes an experimentation playground for trialing new systems of production and interaction. Similar schemes are taking place in Paris and Amsterdam.

The prototype sees residents experimenting in three main areas: material production, food production, and energy production. At the most fundamental level, this means manufacturing goods in makerspaces, growing food on rooftops, and storing energy collected via solar panels in domestic batteries. However, if enough citizens become empowered as producers rather than simply consumers, a whole new range of relations and transactions are possible.
(http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/fab-city-how-can-we-build-more-sustainable-cities)



==Cooperation with IKEA==

Nesta:

"Fab City has also attracted the attention of some of the manufacturing industry’s biggest players. Fab City recently welcomed members of IKEA’s design, production and sustainability teams to Barcelona to experiment with new models of production and distribution. Tomas is confident of the potential of localised production to enhance existing business models.

"Rather than IKEA having warehouses outside the city where they can store stock which travels thousands of kilometres, and then people buy IKEA products before becoming part of the assembly line, IKEA is going to have stores in neighbourhoods where products are going to be manufactured on demand, possibly in collaboration with citizens and their designs." 

A report on the cooperation between IKEA and Fab City will be published in December. However, if recent pop-up IKEA stores in central locations in Madrid and Barcelona are anything to go by, it would appear that the company is reflecting seriously on how its production model can be adapted to new localised manufacturing techniques in the future. This integration of the present into the future is at the heart of the Fab City vision."
(http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/fab-city-how-can-we-build-more-sustainable-cities)

[[Category:Manufacturing]]

[[Category:Urbanism]]

[[Category:Catalonia]]

[[Category:Spain]]