Organisation: Fab City Global Initiative
Focus Area: Enabling cities to shift away from the industrial paradigm of Product-in Trash-out, by enabling the return of manufacture to cities supported by a Data-in Data-out urban model.
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). In this model, more production occurs inside the city and materials circulate to meet local production needs. The import and export of a city is reduced to the movement of data such as information, knowledge, design or code. The Fab City Global initiative comprises a network of 28 cities, a core Collective of individual researchers and is governed by a foundation. This community of practice takes the ideals of the Fab Lab - the connectivity, culture and creativity - and scales it to the City working across local and global systems to implement key strategies. One strategic vision is Building the Spiral Economy which aims to reduce the amount of imported goods, food and resources like water or energy and increase the use of recycled raw materials for the production of objects in cities and to use local specificities like craftmanship or materials to create added value in every iteration of a new product.
