This summer, July 11-13, the annual Fab City Summit will take place in Paris at the Paris City Hall and Parc de La Villette. The yearly event will gather the core team behind the Fab City Global Initiative together with city officials, innovation ecosystems from civic society and industry. Get your tickets with 30% discount using code FABDAILY30.
The rapid urbanization of the 20th century was possible thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line, which allowed the rapid reproduction and replication of infrastructure, products and repetitive urban patterns in cities around the world. Urban morphology and dynamics produce standard patterns and forms of living. At the same time, and following the linear economy, cities consume most of the world’s resources and generate most of world’s waste (according to the United Nations). However, the exponential growth of digital technologies (computation, communication, fabrication) of the last decades offer the opportunity to enable a transition towards a spiral economy (an open circular economy approach), in which data (and knowledge) flow globally, and materials flow locally: from networks of logistics that move atoms, to networks of information that move bits.
Fab City brings the impact of digital technology to cities, it connects globally distributed networks of hyper-local and productive ecosystems, which enable the mass distribution of goods and resources. By adopting these principles, cities can radically transform the way production and consumption happens within their metropolitan regions, by replacing standardization with smart customization, focusing on interconnected processes instead of isolated products, and more importantly: empowering citizens and communities while reducing the environmental impact of urbanization. The Fab City Global Initiative is an action plan for cities to make this shift possible and then become more resilient through the re-localization of the production of energy, food and products. It enables a global community of designers, makers and thinkers that amplify and multiply the scale of this important transformation together with government and industry.
