As part of my work in Danish Design Centre I had the pleasure of attending the FabCity Summit in Amsterdam on April 20-21, where a group of around 50 selected people from all over Europe came together in an expert meeting to co-develop the FabCity concept: A new urban model for locally productive and globally connected self sufficient cities, inspired by the values of the FabLab movement and initiated by Tomas Diez, director of FabLab Barcelona. More background is available in the Fab City white paper.
The event took place in the large ‘FabCity Campus’, which covered half of Amsterdam's Java Island and which was set up as part of Europe by People, the Amsterdam EU2016 Arts & Design programme. The FabCity Campus was divided into topic-based smaller areas, inspired by the ‘Fab City’ project that started in Barcelona two years ago. During the event Amsterdam officially pledged to become a FabCity, which among other includes committing to become completely self-sustainable within the next 40 years.
Lots of brainstorming work was done in Amsterdam, including the early drafting of a manifesto for the project and some groundwork for a fundraising phase. All this will help pave the way for coming summits and further development work in our group as well lay the foundation for getting more city to pledge towards joining the network.
While I was in Amsterdam I also took the opportunity to visit Eva de Klerk, founder of the NDSM shipyard creative hub, who kindly had written an article for the 'Open Source City: Art & Technology Experiments in Platform4'-book that we published with Ctrl+Alt+Delete Books earlier this month.
