This following text has been written collectivelly with Kate Armstrong, Francesco Cingolani, Tomas Diez,Vincent Guimas and Minh Man Nguyen. More information here : www.summit.fabcity.paris
Heading to the Fab City Summit 2018 in Paris
Public Institutions, Industry and Society meet in Paris to define the path towards the future of Productive Cities
The rapid urbanisation process of the last century has been possible thanks to the industrial revolution and the assembly line, which allowed to rapidly reproduce and replicate infrastructure, products and urban morphologies around the world. Cities of today reflect the standardization and linear economy in how the urban dynamics operate: they consume most of the world’s resources and generate most of world’s waste (according to the United Nations). In the other hand, the exponential growth of digital technologies (computation, communication, fabrication) of the last decades offers the opportunity to enable a transition towards a model based on a global and distributed flow of data (and knowledge) and local flow of materials.
Fab City connects globally networks of hyper-local infrastructures for fabrication, production and distribution of goods and resources. By adopting these strategies, cities can radically transform the way production and consumption happens within their metropolitan regions, by replacing standardisation with smart customisation, focusing on interconnected processes instead of isolated products, and more importantly: empowering citizens and communities. The Fab City Global Initiative is an action plan for cities to operate this shift and then become more resilient through the relocalization of the production of energy, food and products, and by enabling a global community of designers, makers and thinkers that amplify and multiply the scale of this important transformation.
Reversible : Is our current productive model reversible? Can we change its logics?
Reversing current production processes is difficult because most of the products we consume today were never designed with their end of life in mind. Society is beginning to question this approach; high-tech firms are asking for forgiveness for their strategies on planned obsolescence. Governments are making laws about ecology and circular economy and the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ slogan has been embedded into the global consciousness. The Fab City initiative is progressing this cultural shift, questioning how circularity can be practiced in the the city at all levels; from the architectural and planned elements, to the way we live as part of it.
Scalable: Can we scale up a new urban paradigm or a massive change? — Growable?
To change the legacy of industrial production and consumption, we must conceptualise the urgency of our current situation as a Planetary concern. Cities are rich with local initiatives, projects, associations and activists working for this conscious state: Fab City enables synergies between them, to globalise impact. Each local territory has it’s specificities, but by practically testing approaches in local ecosystems, theoretical models can be developed; serving as procedural models which could inspire, or be deployed in similar geographies and cities globally. Citizens, small to large enterprise, public institution and private organisations can be engaged in both the implementation and sustainability of these models. Fab City creates ecosystemic global connections between these actors to link ideas, knowledge and prototype models which can be shared, scaled by a global network.
Possible : Which are the emergent scenarios that we have as society?
How do we dream the futures?
There is hope. Globally, we must support every initiative that is working to change the present paradigm. Numerous new development models consolidate or propose ways to shift the global mindset. The possibilities presented by technologies such as blockchain or biomaterial are shaping our future. But getting back to basics with a low-tech approach is also key for resilient cities. A future which merges these two seemingly disparate approaches is possible and the Fab City Collective is developing a research environment to explore these visions. By sharing, iterating, exploring, producing, creating, debating existing and actualized initiatives in this field, Fab City is defining what is possible for the future of not just our cities, but of our society.
Call for actions
The Fab City Summit 2018 is an invitation to take part of the transformation towards a more sustainable and accessible future for cities and society. We are inviting participants of the summit to experience and learn about how to grow the future of cities. The potential of collaboration and disruptive technologies to create locally productive and globally connected cities.
The great Paris is a fertile territory with a lot of initiatives around circular economy. The rise of Fab City Grand Paris reveals the numerous projects already being impulsed.
Fab City is a movement that aims to transform the way we consume and produce almost anything in cities, making them more sustainable and resilient, by enabling local production and global collaboration using traditional knowledge and advanced technologies. It is a mixed local and global convergence of governments, institutions, communities and individuals in a set of strategies and actions to build this vision in the next 36 years (until 2054).
