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Sharon Ede, urbanist and activist based in Australia has recently launched AUDAcities, a catalyst for relocalising production in cities. She shared her insights on the opportunities of making cities regenerative and more sustainable as well as the limits of cosmo-localization. Interview by Fernanda Marin.
Technology, as we all know, is not neutral. Making the transition to self-sufficient cities needs a cultural shift, not just a technological one. So, how do we design open-source tools that foster a change in behaviours and are inclusive?
Technology will go where cultural, social and economic values direct it. A cultural shift will include open source tools, and the kinds of processes we need to create those – but a cultural shift will require much more.
Governments can and do play a significant role in shaping culture through policy and regulation, and contrary to popular belief about where innovation originates, the state is not only a key entrepreneurial actor but also has a huge opportunity to reinvent itself as the ‘partner state’ – where government responds to the contributory democracy we are seeing emerge as a force that does with, not for or to, the communities it serves. The technology, and who owns it, is just a manifestation of what we value.
There has been a lot of debate about the real benefits of local production, especially that last-mile delivery is more harmful to the environment than the benefits it brings. In your experience, what is the ecological footprint of a product that has been globally designed and locally manufactured?
Any production that is not hyperlocal ie. from materials sourced within a very short supply chain, has to find its way to the consumer somehow. With respect to environmental concern, the ‘last mile’ is a question of the existing production paradigm finding the most efficient and low carbon way to achieve its objective. I’m not sure that the last mile debate concerning the most carbon-efficient delivery by a globalised supply system can be compared to local production. Local production will have ‘last miles’ (and more energy used in transportation, depending on where the materials were sourced for the production), but in general, I’d be less worried about lots of last miles from local production, than many more tens of thousands of miles of transportation required with ‘remote’ production.
It’s also worth noting that shipping is responsible for 17% of global emissions, but neither shipping and aviation are accounted for in international climate change negotiations due to the difficulty in allocating emissions ie. do they belong to the producing or consuming country? In general, local has many benefits, but it’s simplistic to assume local always equals ‘good’. It depends on so many things, for example, is the activity occurring in a water-scarce environment? How intensive is the production? Is the power source for the products generated from renewable energy?
Life-cycle analysis (LCA) is one way of assessing the ecological cost-benefit of different methods of production, but it can get quite complicated. Descriptions can offer a sense of the impacts, however, measuring these and making the trade-offs is less clear and requires not only a lot of data but a lot of consideration and interpretation.
This map of shipping routes illustrates the relative density of commercial shipping in the world’s oceans
Before even considering ecological footprints of production, one of the first things cities could do is look into ‘boomerang trade’ – the new economics foundation produced a report on this activity in the UK, where similar goods are being traded and transported across continents, or across the globe. There are also ridiculous examples, such as what I have dubbed ‘frequent flyer prawns’ – shrimp being flown to Thailand from Scotland, and then back because the labour needed to shell them is cheaper in Thailand.
Trade used to be about genuine comparative advantage. If economics is supposed to be about the efficient allocation of resources, and this is what our systems of economics are incentivising, then we need new economics.
What are the limits to urban manufacturing? Surely not everything can be made/produced locally, so as a percentage of a city’s total consumption of resources, how much can we expect to shift?
In theory, a city could make anything. It depends on factors such as whether we shift to safe, non-polluting products and production processes – one of the reasons for zoning in cities was to separate sensitive uses such as residential areas from the nuisance and potential danger of industrial areas (and there are environmental justice issues with who lives near dirty industry). What a city can produce also depends on what it wishes to prioritise, for example, does it want to invest a lot of land in car-dominated transport, or can it reclaim land for all kinds of productive purposes? Does it have the energy available to relocalise more of its production, or is it willing to invest in building such capacity?And governments and business love to talk about the circular economy, and recycling, but if you’re not making locally, if you’re not providing a way for things to be produced and materials to be remade locally, you don’t have a circular economy.
Most cities could readily produce more of their own furniture, utensils, fixtures and fittings, appliances, equipment/tools, textiles and clothing – as cities once did anyway before cheap fossil fuels allowed production to sprawl across the globe. But not all cities can or would want to make more complex artefacts like aircraft, which require specialised skills and facilities. It is likely that some kinds of manufacturing will still require an economy of scale – regional, or national, but not necessarily international. It depends on the size of the city; the skills of the workforce; whether the city values local production and associated economic and social benefits over windfalls derived from property speculation; and what its policy and incentive frameworks prioritise, though these are often influenced by national policy.
In general, it is wiser not to have your population running an ‘ecological deficit’, or being dependent on supply lines that may suddenly change or be disrupted, for example by a fuel shock or a change in policy elsewhere.
Try a thought experiment – if you cut off all external inputs to your city for a month, could it feed, water, power and otherwise sustain itself to keep functioning? What if you had to design the city anew, under such conditions? Could it be designed to still function in an interconnected global economy, but be resilient enough to meet the majority of its own needs?
For you what is the difference between Robertson’s 1994 idea of “glocalisation” and “cosmolocalism”?
Cosmo localism, or ‘design global, manufacture local’, certainly has some overlap with ‘glocalisation’, or the adaptation of globally marketed products to local culture, in that a shared global design can be replicated (or adapted then produced) locally. But by whom, and how?
Glocalisation is about the top-down marketing of consumer products designed remotely, in a centralised way and then tweaked for local culture. Cosmolocalism, or Design Global Manufacture Local (DG-ML) is based on a different production logic, as explained by Jose Ramos and Chris Giotitsas in ‘A New Model of Production for a New Economy’:
Traditionally corporate enterprises have solely owned the intellectual property (IP) they employ in the production of goods. They source the materials for the goods through national or global supply chains. They manufacture those goods using economies of scale in a set number of manufacturing centres, whereupon those finished goods are delivered nationally or globally.
DG-ML is an inversion of this production logic. First of all, the IP is open, whether open source or creative commons or copy fair, so it can be used by anyone. Secondly, manufacturing and production can be done independently of the IP, by any community or enterprise around the world that wants to.
Relocalised production is said to help people find new meaningful economic activities and be part of a community in a word where jobs are disappearing. So far there isn’t a solid business model supporting this shift. What type of policies could policy-makers implement to assist this?
There are plenty of examples of where local production has a solid business model and operates successfully. There may be some new elements to address in building enterprise and livelihoods around open source – something I am still on a learning curve with. However, it could also be that the issue isn’t just a business model per se, but a range of policy and investment incentives that prioritise non-local business(‘attract and retain’) at the expense of local business, the same way that perverse subsidies for fossil fuel energy incumbents have made it harder for renewables.
This is why ‘relocalised production’ needs further nuance. It’s not just about bringing the process of material production back, but a question of ownership, of who benefits. Is the relationship of that production to where it happens regenerative – mostly staying within the local community, making a social, economic and environmental contribution to the place in which it operates? If not, the value generated is ‘leaking’ out of where it is created, which is an extractive dynamic that weakens economic prosperity.
‘Halifax EcoCity Project – proposal for a fractal of an ecological city, Adelaide, Australia / Paul Downton
Part of audacities’ mission is to give advice to cities on how to invest towards “cosmolocalism”. What is the first step cities should take to make this transformation possible?
Each city will have its own unique way of addressing this, however here are some suggestions:
- Build the understanding and buy-in to get people invested in the idea. Determine how you can best communicate what cosmolocalism means, and articulate the benefits for different interest groups – why would they want to pursue this, what’s the story to engage them with?
- Make an inventory or map of what locally productive capacity already exists, both formal and informal.
- Know when and why local production might not be the best option for a certain activity.
- Keep the emphasis on people and culture first – and then appropriate technology. Give at least as much emphasis to the role of ownership and underlying economic DNA in local production as to the flow of physical materials.
- Appreciate that innovation occurs and is being practised by people who do not identify with the language of innovation, who might not see themselves as entrepreneurs or makers or agents of change. Recognise that remarkable, innovative activity occurs in unexpected places – outside the boundaries of ‘innovation districts’ where, all too often, business and government and the big end of town have determined ‘this is what innovation looks like, who does it, here’s where it happens’ because you will miss many voices, many ideas, and a big part of what’s going on in your city.
- Take some calculated risks – you can’t be innovative, or achieve anything audacious, without it!
Photos by Christopher Burns, AJColores & NASA on Unsplash
And the ‘Halifax EcoCity Project – proposal for a fractal of an ecological city, Adelaide, Australia / Paul Downton‘
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]]>The post The Fab City movement Creating locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>More than two hundred 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 system of the planet. 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 embodies energy consumption. The rise of offshoring and automation indirectly leads to a decrease of the practical and cultural knowledge on how and where things used to be made locally in our cities. These dynamic hubs lose their livelihood.
We need to reinvent our cities and their relationship to people and nature by re-localising production, so cities are generative rather than extractive, restorative rather than destructive, and empowering rather than alienating. In these cities, prosperity flourishes and people have purposeful, meaningful work that they enjoy and that enables them to use their passion and talent. By connecting citizens with the advanced technologies that are transforming our everyday life, we need to recover the knowledge and capacity on how things are made in our cities.
The Fab City is an international initiative started by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), MIT’s Centre for Bits and Atoms (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. In the latter, the city operates on a linear model of importing products and producing waste. This should change to a spiral innovation ecosystem, in which materials flow inside cities locally and information on how things are made circulates globally. Fab City is about building a new economy based on manufacturing infrastructure and distributed data.
For more than ten years, Fab Labs have provided widespread access to modern means for invention and production. They began as an outreach project from MIT’s CBA, but Fab Labs have spread from inner city Boston to rural India, from South Africa to the most northern tip of Norway, counting approximately 1,000 Fab Labs located in more than 78 countries today. Activities in Fab Labs range from technological empowerments to peer-to-peer project-based technical training. Projects being developed and produced in Fab Labs include, for example, solar and wind powered turbines and custom housing. Fab Labs share core capabilities among each other so that people and projects can be shared across the world. These labs work with components and materials optimised for use in the field and are controlled with custom software for integrated design, manufacturing and project management. This inventory is continuously evolving, towards the goal of a Fab Lab being eventually able to make a Fab Lab.
In 2054, our cities should be at least 50% self-sufficient.
Global manufacturing
In 2011, the Fab Lab project was launched at the FAB7 conference in Lima, Peru. A few years later, at the FAB10, the Mayor of Barcelona invited his colleagues around the world to join the Barcelona Pledge: a countdown for cities to become at least 50% self-sufficient by 2054. Ever since, several cities have pledged to join the network. Amsterdam joined the movement in 2016 at the first annual Fab City Summit, held at the EU2016 Fab City Campus. The Fab City movement is open for other cities, towns or communities to join in order to collectively build a more humane and habitable new world. Fab City takes the ideal of the Fab Lab – the connectivity, culture and creativity – and scales it to the level of the city.It is a new urban model for transforming and shaping cities that shift how they source and use material from ‘Products In, Trash Out’ to ‘Data In, Data Out’. 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 and code.
Rescaling and connecting
At the core of the Fab City strategy is the development of a global network of cities that are a part of a sustainable ecosystem of production and knowledge: from a 3D printer at home to the neighbourhood’s Fab Lab, and from the city factory to global production infrastructure. In a Fab City, the number of imported goods – like food and resources as water and energy – need to be reduced. To make this possible, urban farming needs to evolve from experimental practices to a larger scale infrastructure. Local production of food at domestic, neighbourhood and city scales create a closer loop system for food production and harvesting. The use of recycled, raw materials for the production of objects in cities should be increased. this way, we create added value in every iteration of a new product, in a new spiral economy approach. A new productive ecosystem to rescale globalisation and provide the means of innovation to empower citizens. This process involves a huge cultural shift. One that promotes the empowerment of cities and their citizens.To become a Fab City requires having a more precise knowledge of the way that cities work. The evolution of the movement will make it possible to create better systems of capturing and analysing data, developing knowledge about each city and sharing it, and it will require the implementation of an evaluation system and detailed monitoring: the Fab City Dashboard. The Fab City strategy is unique in that it addresses a range of environmental, social and economic objectives (carbon reduction, waste minimisation, relocation of manufacturing and work) in a system approach to harness new technology and production approaches. All of this is brought to a practical level, by connecting with the existent Fab Lab Network and complementary productive ecosystems; a vast source for urban innovations being shared already globally by makers in more than 70 countries and 1,000 labs. The first city to become self-sufficient – simultaneously increasing employment by creating opportunities through open innovation, and radically reducing carbon emissions by relocation production – will lead the future of urban development globally.
According to Marleen Stikker, founder and director of Waag Society, also home to Fab Lab Amsterdam, Fab City shows that the combination of maker movements and circular economy are solid alternatives, ready to scale.
“The shared starting point is that we have to take responsibility for our own behaviour. We cannot wait for systems to change. We have to be the change. This Do-It-Ourselves, or rather Do-It-Together, mentally unleashes a powerful dynamic in society. It shows that civic movements are at the heart of change. We need an innovation paradigm shift. Not shareholders value, but social value, open instead of closed, cooperative instead of competitive. Smart citizens instead of smart cities.’ – Marleen Stikker, director Waag Society
The Fab City approach can contribute to achieving a range of city objectives. It helps civic leaders to develop locally productive cities in collaboration with local communities, companies and institutions by revitalising manufacturing infrastructure and offering incentives towards a new economy. Fab Lab and makerspace-based innovations could be a source for solutions to connect to real problems in cities, opening opportunities for businesses, research and education through projects in the digital realm. In this approach, citizens and cities are empowered to be the masters of their own destiny as their resilience is increased. With the circulation of materials and associated energy consumption, a more ecological system is developed in which carbon emissions – typical for the current economy – are drastically reduced; atoms stay in cities while bits travel globally. In order to make this happen, the city must be locally productive and globally connected to knowledge, economic and social networks. In this connection, the cooperation between cities, citizens and knowledge centres form the basis of scientific knowledge.
A concerted and coordinated response must be made to reimagine how, where and what we make if we are to live harmoniously within the bounds of the planet’s resources. Fab City proposes a model for cities to be resilient, productive and self-sufficient in order to respond to the challenges of our time. It also proposes the recovery of knowledge and the capacity to make things, to produce energy, to harvest food and to understand the flow of matter, in order to empower its citizens to be leading agents of their own destiny. The Fab City is about radical transformation. It is about re-thinking and changing our relationship with the material world, in order to continue flourishing on this planet.
This publication was written by Christel van de Craats together with Tomas Diez and originally appeared in New Amsterdam Magazine #10. You can access the original publication here.
Feeling inspired? Watch the video below.
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