Fab City Hub
At the core of the experimentation in Pilot Cities
The Fab City Global Initiative coined the term Fab City Hub (FCH) to describe the main urban interface that expands the impact of the maker movement to local communities to foster resilience and more sustainable cities. Fab City Hubs are a permeable space for citizens and organisations to experiment together with makerspaces or Fab Labs on productive and circular practices connected with their local reality, involving key stakeholders from industry, the public sector, or policy makers. Fab City Hubs operate in an interconnected global network of knowledge sharing, both on physical and digital spaces. If you want to know more about the Fab City Hub concept, you may have a look at the work on the FCH Toolkit, or directly read the FAQ developed by Volumes in its gitbook version.
One of the main goals of CENTRINNO is to support the emergence of this new typology of hubs from a landscape of previously existing experiences of creative and productive hubs in Europe. Within the CENTRINNO Framework, Fab City Hubs represent the physical embodiment of the 5 key concepts developed in CENTRINNO, becoming the test-bed for cross-stakeholder collaborations on productive practices. Fab City Hubs connect and unpack the main CENTRINNO platforms to the physical world.
Pilots will have three main resources that support the development of their own Fab City Hubs:
The Online Journal, an online series of events on diverse and inspiring hub portraits that cities who want to implement their own FCH may learn from. The online journal features Fab Lab Barcelona, Lottozero, Medialab Prado, or Fab City Milan, among others. The hub portraits include both hubs from outside CENTRINNO and project's pilot cities. This live and dynamic resource complements the static content developed for the official deliverable Creative and Productive Hubs Journal. Have a look at Online Journal to see examples of hubs!
The Exchange Platform, an online platform intended to work as a sharing platform to foster collaboration between established and emerging Fab City Hubs developed within CENTRINNO and in the Fab City Network. The platform is currently being tested as part of the CENTRINNO Network strategy.
The FCH toolkit is devised as a cohesive and contextualised collection of activities, tools and methods that will support the nine CENTRINNO’s pilot cities to implement, maintain and sustain their own Fab City Hubs. It will be based on previous toolkits (e.g., the ECHN Creative Hub Kit, the Reflow Collaborative Governance Toolkit) and it will be framed under the CENTRINNO Framework. The Fab City Hub toolkit will be developed through three iterations, building interconnections with resources developed and used in the project. Its final version will be a practical support guide for bottom-up initiatives to implement their own Fab City Hub. More information will be shared during 2022.
Developed within the CENTRINNO project, Fab City Hub's ten principles are group three elements The FCH vision, the FCH community, and the FCH infrastructure:
Fab City Hubs are local ecosystem activators
Fab City Hubs are physical interfaces to access local and global distributed ecosystems
Fab City Hubs are complex organisms that foster resilience
Fab City Hubs are extensions of traditional institutions
In Fab City Hubs, community comes first, space comes after
Fab City Hubs give voice to citizens
Fab City Hubs focus on facilitating and empowering communities
Fab City Hubs adopt an incremental approach, and avoid over-design
Fab City Hubs do not replace factories
Fab City Hubs are multi-layered spaces, both physical and digital
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