The Fab City Global Initiative is closing 2018 with the best Christmas present: the launch of the Fab City Foundation in Tallinn Estonia on December 12.

The launch event of the Fab City Foundation, hosted by partners at Tallinn University of Technology, brought together the members of the newly established Founding Members, Supervisory Board, and Management Board as well as key stakeholders in the Fab City Global Initiative. The foundation has been established as a legal and organizational structure in Estonia to enable the location-independent work of the globally distributed Fab City community.

The inauguration event was hosted by Dr. Erkki Karo, Director of the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance at TalTech University. It was attended by the Chairman of the IAAC Board of Directors Oriol Soler, co-founder of P2P Lab Vasilis Kostakis, President and CEO of Fab Foundation Sherry Lassiter, Director of Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC Tomas Diez.

2018?—?a milestone year for Fab City.

This year the largest Fab City Summit to date was hosted by Paris which brought together over 1000 people from 80 different countries to explore Fab City thinking with the attendance of Anne Hidalgo Mayor of Paris, Ada Colau Mayor of Barcelona and Fab Foundation CEO Sherry Lassiter. Also, the first-ever Fab City book was launched, collecting contributions from the Fab City Collective and Network, and thinkers and doers such as Luc Steels, Primavera de Filippi, Ron Eglash, amongst others. Yesterday’s establishment of the Fab City Foundation is another milestone for the Fab City Global Initiative because it will help to articulate the goals of the Fab City roadmap through lobbying and financial efficacy.

Fab City Foundation
Fab City Foundation
Fab City Foundation
Fab City Foundation
Support from the Fab Lab network

Professor Neil Gershenfeld, the ‘father of fablabs’ gave his support the establishment of the Fab City Foundation saying that Fab City is one of the most impressive initiatives to arise from the successful Fablab Network; a network which has grown to an impressive 1600 digital fabrication laboratories over ten years, and continues to grow.

The Fab City roadmap has also been growing since it was initiated in 2014 under the guidance of IAAC, Fab Foundation, MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and the Barcelona City Council, under the leadership of the by then Chief Architect Vicente Guallart and former Mayor Xavier Trias.

The Foundation will officially meet early next year to establish working goals. Priorities thus far include establishing metrics to measure progress; building the technological backbone for local production of food, energy, materials; and developing the toolkits needed to support the local development of strategies. These priorities facilitate the global aspirations of the Fab City network, which comprises 28 cities that have signed on to produce everything they consume by 2054, an extraordinary challenge which has been that can now be facilitated with agility by the Fab City Foundation.

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