Designing Emergent Realities
On the event of Bali Fab Fest, we launch our newest book, Fab City:Designing Emergent Realities. Fab City: Designing Emergent Realities is a revisited version of the first book by Fab City, Fab City: The Mass Distribution of (almost) everything. It is focused on the advancements that the Fab City global initiative has made since 2018. It is a major contribution to the Bali Fab Fest 2022; the first ever Fab Fest which brings together the Fab City global initiative and Fab Lab Network on the island of Bali to accelerate the transition to a regenerative economy on the island of Bali. Along with key articles from expert contributors, it presents an updated version of the Fab City Full Stack and recent case studies from the Fab City Network members. Below is an excerpt.
Foreword
by Tomas Diez, Kate Armstrong, Lucas Lemos.
Fab City Foundation Executive Board
In 2018, we first published Fab City: The Mass Distribution of (almost) everything. It was a book about the power of human-centered technology to transform urban environments and our socioeconomic systems. It collected contributions from key representatives and enablers of the Fab City Network, coming from many disciplines such as science, design, architecture, urbanism, technology and sociology, who expressed their insights on enabling new processes to produce systems change both at local and global scales.
At the time of it’s compilation, just before the Fab City Summit Paris 2018, Fab City was establishing itself as a global initiative: a Collective of stewards, a cities Network with 28 members and it was in the early stages of establishing a Foundation. Four years on, a global pandemic, catastrophic weather events, new and on-going wars and a looming global energy crisis are reshaping the urgency for Fab City thinking. The potential that the ‘mass distribution of almost everything’ has to reshape our planet for a more livable future is more profound than before and only becomes more so. Over the past four years we have worked on concretising a Fab City global agenda. During this period we have recognised that beyond the need to distribute ‘everything’ there is also a need to provide the conditions to steward the futures that are emerging outside Europe and the USA where the initiative was founded. This year, for our first in-person annual event since 2019, we have chosen the theme Designing Emergent Realities. It aims to highlight a local and global approach that can boost the transformation economy in countries disadvantaged in the world system.
On the occasion of this historic event we’re revisiting Fab City: The Mass Distribution of (almost) everything in this second book, Fab City: Designing emergent realities. Some articles reappear from the 2018 publication, but with a renewed focus on the advancements that the Fab City Global Initiative has made since 2018. Along with key articles from expert contributors, it presents an updated version of the Fab City Full Stack and recent case studies from the Fab City Network members.
Four years on.
Since we first published the book, the Fab City Foundation has been established in e-Estonia. This has provided the global initiative with the administrative framework and decentralized governance capacities to support and coordinate global efforts. It is one of the three key pillars of the global initiative.
The Fab City Network, the Network of cities that have pledged to work towards producing (almost) everything they consume, has grown to almost 50 cities, regions and countries. This year Bali will pledge to be the first ‘Fab Island’ in the Network. A key part of revisiting the book for republication as part of Bali Fab Fest was seeking new case studies from the Network members. In this edition, we curate a state-of-the-network that sheds light on the diversity of approaches being taken by the network members to implement the Fab City agenda in each location.
The Fab City Global Initiative now spans all continents thanks to the evolution of the Fab City Collective, a group of experts and enthusiasts that steward the Fab City Roadmap in their respective locations and areas of interest. Over the past four years, the growth of the Network and Collective has been focused on diversifying the international reach of the Foundation, beyond the borders of Europe and the Americas, a key reason for our presence in Bali, Indonesia and the ASEAN region this year for our annual event.
This edition of the book is a major contribution to the Bali Fab Fest 2022; the first ever Fab Fest which brings together the Fab City Global Initiative and Fab Lab Network on the island of Bali to accelerate the transition to a regenerative economy. The convergence of the annual Fab17 event, global Fab Academy graduation and the 8th Fab City Summit including the Fab City Pledge for new cities, is a historic moment to review the state of this powerful international network.
The Fab Foundation, the coordinating entity of the global Fab Lab Network has extracted the following numbers from the fablabs.io platform (the social network of the Fab Lab Network) which speak to the economic and social importance of this event and global community.
Total fab labs registered: 2,582
Verified labs: 2,081
Organizations: 208
Users: 59,534
Active users: 31,765
Across small community labs, regular labs in schools and larger labs in a research or university context, Fab Foundation estimates a workforce of around 5,000 employees (an average of two per lab); a global investment in infrastructure of ~ $243 million dollars and a conservatively estimated ~ 385,000 users accessing these labs worldwide. Beyond infrastructure, the learning programs run by the Fab Foundation (Fab Academy, Bio Academy, Fabricademy) reach over 500 new students each year at 80–100 sites and the informal educational outreach for K-12 aged students in Fab Labs connected to the network has easily reached 500,000 in the last 5 years.
For the Fab City Foundation, educational programs that help develop the creative skills in learning environments in which experimentation, prototyping and hands-on experience are just as important as books and theoretical knowledge. In just about two decades, the global network of Fab Labs has turned the planet into a distributed campus for 21st century education, their collaborative educational offering is called the Academy of Almost Anything. To complement this path, Fab City is developing the Master in Design for Distributed Innovation (MDDI) which is an online and place-based learning experience that reimagines education and innovation. In the same way that the Academy of almost Anything has been instrumental to the growth and development of the Fab Lab Network, we hope that MDDI sets the grounds for Fab Cities to achieve their goals through an iteratively designed program in which distributed nodes help embed students into their local communities and manufacturing ecosystems. MDDI will serve as an incubator for ideas that can transform the productive model of cities and regions, providing the platform to realise community-based interventions that respond to the needs of specific territories such as neighborhoods, rural towns, and other forms of human settlements. The program is designed to respect and operate within the bioregional dynamics of place, while connecting students to a global network of knowledge founded by the Fab City Global Initiative.
As you will read more about in this edition of the book, this path from distributed infrastructure to educational programs, projects, communities, neighborhoods, bioregions and the planet, shows how the Fab City Full Stack could articulate the implementation of the ambitious Fab City Global Initiative plan to revert the current global systemic crisis. For Bali Fab Fest, alongside the traditional activities of the Fab events (workshops, talks, working groups and symposium), we have developed a curated program around the Full Stack. In addition to this, the Foundation has deployed the first edition of a MicroGrants program which has been instrumental to incorporate a new program into the Fab event, the Fab Island Challenge. The Fab Island Challenge brings together local and global innovation communities from over 32 countries to propose meaningful interventions that enrich, empower and scale Bali’s emerging regenerative economy. Teams from around the world are invited to focus and learn about ten local initiatives then propose and prototype design outputs to win seed funding for implementation. Through the MicroGrants program we expect to funnel support to local initiatives not only in Bali, but in the rest of the Fab City Network, and to facilitate the creation of opportunities for innovators and creators to bring solutions to ongoing challenges related to climate change and geopolitical instability.
As a relatively newly established foundation, we are grateful for the support given by our Supervisory Board, Network members, members of the Collective, founding members and collaborators like the Fab Foundation, Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and P2P Foundation. Our efforts are collective and we believe that, together, we can produce historic moments like the Bali Fab Fest as key milestones on our roadmap towards 2054.
Read the full book below in PDF
About Fab City: Designing Emergent Realities.
Since 2014, the Fab City global initiative has been developing the community, tools, methodologies and political influence needed to globally shift the urban paradigm from PITO (Product-in, Trash-out) to DIDO (Data-in, Data-out). In 2018, the first Fab City book Fab City: The Mass Distribution of (almost) everything, was published in time for the Fab City Summit Paris. It was a book about the power that human-centered technology can have in transforming urban environments and our socioeconomic systems.
Four years on, a global pandemic, catastrophic weather events, new and on-going wars and a looming global energy crisis are reshaping the urgency for Fab City thinking. The potential that the ‘mass distribution of almost everything’ has to reshape our planet for a more livable future is more profound than before and only becomes more so. Fab City: Designing Emergent Realities is a revisited version of the first book, focused on the advancements that the Fab City global initiative has made. It is a major contribution to the Bali Fab Fest 2022; the first ever Fab Fest which brings together the Fab City global initiative and Fab Lab Network on the island of Bali to accelerate the transition to a regenerative economy on the island of Bali. Along with key articles from expert contributors, it presents an updated version of the Fab City Full Stack and recent case studies from the Fab City Network members.
