Time of transition
This is an invitation to become part of formulating the next ten years of Fab City.
Fascinating moments in history can only be evaluated in the future. We are deep inside the transition towards a new economy and new social and ecological contracts. Myths keep falling apart revealing painful truths and wounds that have been hidden for centuries demand to be seen and taken care of.
The way we are going to build our future starts today. The opportunity we have now is one we must put all our energy into; with new codes, rules, laws, and agreements. The need for productive cities, citizens, and bio-regions has already been proposed at critical times in history and this is another chance we have to do it. By taking the lessons learned in the past, from the people that could see this coming, voices which we haven’t listened to enough.
We do not want to be back to normal. Because normal did not make sense. It made sense for a small percentage of the world’s population, but not for any natural system or for the planet itself. Normal has been looking for growth of GDP, extractive dynamics and the exploitation of people and resources. Normal is useless in the long term as it only satisfies the useless ones. Why is it so difficult to see this? It is hard to detach ourselves from norms, from the dogmas about how the world operates. We, as the privileged ones, have the responsibility to enable inclusive and desirable futures for all; under collaboration, open source knowledge and ecological principles. We do not have time to fight the past, we must put our energy into building the present as a platform for the futures we want.
Fab City and our time of transition
Fab City is regrouping and recharging for this new period of action. During the last six years we have built the foundational principles of this global initiative to make productive cities, regions and citizens a reality: the collective, the network and the foundation. The next ten years are critical, we cannot wait for governments to act, neither for companies trapped in the fundamental problems of this corrupt version of normal. We must analyse what worked from every system we have tried and put these to use following the principles and purpose towards building the society and communities we want to live in.
This is an invitation to become part of formulating the next ten years of Fab City, as a critical period to make the next 34 years until 2054 possible. Our end goal is not just local-productivity and global-connectivity, but a larger and more urgent vision: a society that manages to live in harmony with the living systems that supports it and that takes good care of its members to be the best version of themselves they can be. Join us from wherever you are in the world for the Fab City Summit special edition, distributed and ubiquitous, open and inclusive, full of questions and spaces to learn from each other.
Distributed Fab City Summit 2020 is a digital, disseminated and free conference, that gives you an opportunity to reflect on the current state of the world and join us in creating a common vision for the future.
The 2020 Summit Program
Join the Distributed Fab City Summit 2020, from Emergency to Resilience, broadcasting from Barcelona! Hosted by the Fab City Foundation, with guests including Indy Johar, Neil Gershenfeld, Liz Corbin, Cities of Making and Circular Cities Asia, join us to explore how cities can transition from the state of emergency to long-term resilience through applying the principles of local productivity and global connectivity.
The full program can be seen online now, featuring keynote talks, panels, pitches and the new Fab City pledge.
by Tomas Diez
