“More than 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, global urbanisation keeps accelerating. United Nations projections indicate that 75% of the human population will be living in cities by 2050. Newly created cities and the urbanisation process in rural areas replicates a lifestyle based on consumerism and the linear economy, causing destructive social and economic impact, while compromising the ecological systems of the planet. We are losing livelihoods through both offshoring and automation, and this in turn leads to the demise of dynamic hubs of practical and cultural knowledge, where things are made. Extreme industrialisation and globalisation have turned cities into the most voracious consumers of materials, and they are overwhelmingly the source of carbon emissions through both direct and embodied energy
consumption; we need to reimagine the cities and how they operate. The Fab City is an international initiative started by IAAC, MIT’s CBA, the Barcelona City Council and the Fab Foundation to develop locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities. The project is connected to the global Fab Lab (Fabrication Laboratory) Network and 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, to a spiral innovation ecosystem in which materials how inside cities and information on how things are made circulates globally. Fab City is about building a new economy based on distributed data and manufacturing infrastructure.”
The full White Paper on the “Locally productive, globally connected self-sufficient cities” is available here.
For more information on the Fab City Project visit their website.