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.
Not quite about fabrication, not about cities, not quite about making, it’s also kind of all the above, mixed in with food. Food safety, food autonomy, new kinds of proteins, local agriculture, local food making and invention, the list of variations in which our lives and the lives of our cities intersects with food is, of course, quite extensive.
Short article and interview with Quinn Wallace, transportation planner at the Oakland Department of Transportation, on some of the results of the Universal Basic Mobility program run in 2021 by the Oakland Department of Transportation (OakDOT).
Such a beautiful project, and with unusual partners. The US Forestry Service, whose mission is conservation, worked with social enterprise Humanim and furniture retailer Room & Board to put together a process of deconstruction of empty houses, rather than demolition, addressing a grave problem in Baltimore.
Despite “fab” being part of Fab City and Fab Lab, the presence of Fab Labs and maker spaces is now just one aspect of a much broader range of ideas and solutions in the Fab City initiative, which wants to act as a global infrastructure and source of knowledge for transforming the way we work, live, interact and evolve in cities.
