The rapid urbanisation process of the last century has been possible thanks to the industrial revolution and the assembly line, which allowed for the rapid reproduction and replication of infrastructure, products and urban morphologies around the world.

Cities of today reflect the standardization and linear economy in how urban dynamics operate: they consume most of the world’s resources and generate most of the world’s waste (according to the United Nations).

On the other hand, the exponential growth of digital technologies (computation, communication, fabrication) of the last decades offers the opportunity to enable a transition towards a model based on a global and distributed flow of data (and knowledge) and local flow of materials.

Fab City connects globally networks of hyper-local infrastructures for fabrication, production and distribution of goods and resources. By adopting these strategies, cities can radically transform the way production and consumption happen within their metropolitan regions, by replacing standardisation with smart customisation, focusing on interconnected processes instead of isolated products, and more importantly: empowering citizens and communities.

The Fab City Global Initiative is an action plan for cities to operate this shift and then become more resilient through the relocalization of the production of energy, food and products, and by enabling a global community of designers, makers and thinkers that amplify and multiply the scale of this important transformation.