Fab City Summit

The rapid urbanisation process of the last century has been possible thanks to an economy built on top of the industrial revolution and the assembly line. This allowed to rapidly reproduce and replicate infrastructure, products and urban morphologies around the world, standardizing urban life. Cities of today reflect the standardization of industry and linearity of the economy in how the urban dynamics operate: they consume most of the world’s resources and generate most of the 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 opens new opportunities 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 happen 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.