One of the defining features of Fab Cities is the idea of acting locally and connecting globally. For the last year+ of posting here, we’ve featured a lot of international projects. Now, even though we’ve always featured local projects too, we’re going to spend a little more time highlighting local initiatives that, whether they realise it or not, fit under the umbrella of the Fab City.
Electric bikes are booming, you can see them on the streets, see the new stores specializing in them, and you can see media outlets talking and writing about them. The Financial Times even produced this nice short video overview of the phenomenon, including a couple of factory visits, and traveling to two cities in Germany where e-bikes are making great inroads. After decades and decades of devastating car-centric city development, are e-bikes the next great technological transformation for cities?
There are a lot of grassroots and human-centred aspects to Fab Cities, but it’s also an intersection of fields where technology tends to play a large role. Even with better maintenance, re-use, repair, upcycling, and recycling, a lot of our electronics end up in the trash or supposedly recycled but actually shipped elsewhere to be disposed of in less than ideal situations.
The “fab” in Fab City originally comes from “fabrication” and Fablabs. These labs, initially constructed around technology and tools of local fabrication, are also being applied to other fields with intriguing results. The Fabricademy, founded by Anastasia Pistofidou (who’s also co-founder of Fablab Textiles and research leader at IAAC, Fab Lab Barcelona) is a shining example of applying fabrication technologies alongside the principles and ideals of transparency, open-source access and sharing knowledge, and influencing older practices of craftsmanship.
The second edition of Further afield, where we look at some ideas that are perhaps a bit further afield than our usual focus but that can inform our thinking on cities from a broader perspective.
