Fab City is a movement redesigning the relationship between production and place. We believe that—from the neighbourhood to the bioregion—localities can be more than consumers of products and producers of waste: they can be centres of creativity and resilience.
Fab City nurtures the skills and practices for people to prototype open source, localised and regenerative economies. We lead learning initiatives, curate programmes and conduct research to build knowledge and production capacity at the neighbourhood, city and regional scale to enable people and planet to thrive.
Create resilient, regenerative cities that foster innovation is led by a network of cities, regions and other territories who pledge to produce almost everything they consume locally by 2054. Together, we are building locally productive, globally connected places that share knowledge, skills and tools to tackle today’s biggest challenges.
We shift away from a wasteful, extractive model of production. Instead of exporting materials, we share knowledge and data globally to enable local, regenerative manufacturing.
We connect local innovation with global transformation through open source knowledge sharing, linking makerspaces, cities and bioregions to scale regenerative impact across systems.
We “learn by doing”, co-creating spaces that nurture distributed and regenerative practices through hands-on collaboration.
The first Fab Lab is created at MIT, introducing digital fabrication as a way to turn data into things. This sparks a global network of labs focused on peer-to-peer learning, innovation and distributed production.
The mayor of Barcelona and Fab Lab Barcelona connect the potential of digital fabrication with urban strategy to champion self-sufficient cities. In 2014, the Fab City pledge is launched as a global challenge for cities to produce everything they consume by 2054. The pledge is the catalyst for the Fab City Network (56 members), the cohort of cities, regions or other territories officially joining the Fab City movement.
Fab City expands worldwide supported by key institutions like IAAC, MIT Centre for Bits and Atoms, and the Fab Foundation and the Network grows. Strategic frameworks such as the Fab City Full Stack are put in place to support the Network to build new, resilient production models.
Fab City Foundation is created to enable the movement to achieve its ambitions through organised initiatives, events, research and innovation.
The movement advances through a collective process of learning how to build Fab Cities in practice. All the elements built over the last decade converge in the effort to build alternative pathways to place making at multiple scales.
We operate within planetary boundaries and restore ecosystems.
We ensure fair access to tools, knowledge and opportunities for all citizens.
We foster local self-sufficiency while nurturing global collaboration.
We support sustainable urban economic growth by investing in building the skills, infrastructure and policy frameworks needed for the 21st century
We engage with all stakeholders in decision-making processes and empower citizens to take ownership of innovation and change-making.
We support the efficient and shared use of all local available resources in a circular economy approach
we actively engage citizens in the design and production of their cities.
we give priority to people and culture over technology, so that the city can become a living and resilient ecosystem.
we prioritize the sharing of knowledge, technology and data.
we actively support the research, experimentation and deployment of innovation
Redesigning the relationship between production and place
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