Distributed Manufacture of a Neighborhood Bench

This project comes from the team driving the Fab City movement in Montreal, based in a former manufacturing neighborhood in Montréal that now serves as a real-world testing ground for distributed production. Rooted in a local Fab Lab, the initiative shows how open-source fabrication can respond to concrete community needs while rebuilding connections between people, skills, and place. The work unfolded in stages, starting with the rapid, community-led production of face shields during the early days of the pandemic, which proved the capacity of local manufacturing to act at scale. It then evolved into “Remix Your Chair,” a creative project that transformed discarded chairs into new designs through the collaboration of artists, designers, and makers, with the goal of reinvesting value back into the neighborhood. That process ultimately led to the open-source design and distributed manufacturing of public benches, produced by local actors using reclaimed materials from industrial symbiosis and installed directly in public space.