Fab City Global Initiative

Fab City Global Initiative Fab City is an initiative which emerged from the global Fab Lab Network to develop locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities.

📍🇬🇭 Accra, Ghana is officially a member of the Fab City Network.Fab City Accra pledged to produce locally what it consum...
20/08/2026

📍🇬🇭 Accra, Ghana is officially a member of the Fab City Network.

Fab City Accra pledged to produce locally what it consumes by 2054, on 30 July 2026 at FAB26 in Boston. Their plan: transform Mamprobi, a neighbourhood in Accra, from a consumption-based community into a locally productive, community-owned economy that puts youth and women at the centre of local value creation.

Anchored by Jaynii Streetwise Organisation, a community-embedded nonprofit focused on youth empowerment and skills development, Fab City Accra brings together the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, universities and technical institutes, fab labs and maker spaces, women's associations, youth networks, artisans, traditional leaders, and neighbourhood associations.

What they're building: a community manufacturing ecosystem where textiles, fashion, recycled materials, crafts, food processing, and digital services are increasingly produced within the neighbourhood itself. Cooperatives, social enterprises, and women- and youth-led businesses as the drivers of local prosperity. Waste treated as a resource, not a disposal problem.

The systemic shift: from consumption to creation, from waste to circularity, from exclusion to inclusive opportunity, from dependency to locally owned resilience connected to the world.

Welcome to the network, Accra 🇬🇭

📍🇲🇽 Monterrey, Mexico is officially a member of the Fab City Network.Fab City Monterrey pledged to produce locally what ...
19/08/2026

📍🇲🇽 Monterrey, Mexico is officially a member of the Fab City Network.

Fab City Monterrey pledged to produce locally what it consumes by 2054, on 30 July 2026 at FAB26 in Boston.

Monterrey brings a distinct profile to the network: a strong industrial and manufacturing base, an entrepreneurial culture, and a dense ecosystem of clusters already linking government, industry and academia. Fab City Monterrey's role is to bring these actors together around a shared goal: a city that uses resources better, reduces its environmental footprint, and becomes a reference for locally driven production.

The initiative is led by Fab Lab UANL, based at the School of Architecture of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, under the coordination of Roberto Isaac Rentería García. Its ecosystem spans: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (organização líder), Innovaction Gym, Lab Nuevo León, Tec de Monterrey, Instituto Tecnológico Nacional, o Município de Monterrey, Goberno del Estado de Nuevo León, and more... Together, they're running digital fabrication workshops, circular-economy projects, open design challenges, and testing what "produce locally" means in one of Latin America's most industrial cities.

The bet: a meeting point for government, industry, and academia — where a strong industrial base becomes a system that makes better use of what it already has.

Welcome to the network, Monterrey 🇲🇽

📍🇮🇳 Goa, India is officially a member of the Fab City Network.Fab Region Goa pledged to produce locally what it consumes...
18/08/2026

📍🇮🇳 Goa, India is officially a member of the Fab City Network.

Fab Region Goa pledged to produce locally what it consumes by 2054, on 30 July 2026 at FAB26 in Boston. Their plan: decouple one of the world's most visited places from the supply chains that make everything it uses somewhere else.

Anchored by Maker's Asylum in Moira and Design Village at the Electronic Manufacturing Cluster in Tuem, Fab City Goa brings together the state's Startup and IT Promotion Cell, the Creative Community of Goa, artisans, fishing communities, and hardware entrepreneurs — from twelve years of practice into a public commitment.

The plan: laterite cut by CNC becoming the walls of Goan buildings. Ghost nets pulled from the coast processed into textiles sold back to the tourism economy. Cashew waste turned into bio-based materials. Village schools plugged into fabrication labs. Panchayats participating in the production economy — not just planning around it.

The bet: a Goa that exports its knowledge and creativity, not its raw materials.

Welcome to the network, Goa 🇮🇳

📍🇬🇭 Kumasi, Ghana is officially a member of the Fab City Network.Fab City Kumasi pledged to produce locally what it cons...
17/08/2026

📍🇬🇭 Kumasi, Ghana is officially a member of the Fab City Network.

Fab City Kumasi pledged to produce locally what it consumes by 2054, on 30 July 2026 at FAB26 in Boston. Their plan: turn one of Africa's most vibrant informal engineering hubs into a distributed manufacturing city.

Over the next decade, Fab City Kumasi will bridge these worlds. Engineering graduates flowing into artisan workshops. Metal, electronic, and rubber waste turned into feedstock for locally built recycling and agricultural machinery. Shared equipment, open-source designs, industry residencies.

The bet: local production that keeps resources, jobs, and expertise circulating in Ghana, instead of exporting scrap and importing machines.

Welcome to the network, Kumasi 🇬🇭

29/07/2026

No WiFi. No SIM. No cloud. Still online. 📡

Yesterday at FAB26 Boston, we built an open, off-grid environmental sensor mesh across Kendall Square, together with Seeed Studio, Sensical and Meshtastic.

Solar-powered, open-source sensors reading the city’s air. Talking over long-range radio. No carrier, no subscription; a network the community owns.

It’s also node zero of PLANETAI: the first sensing layer of a stack connecting planetary observation to 2,700 fab labs and 61 cities. Boston first. Barcelona, Santiago and Bali next.

Full story in the press release, link in bio.

When supply chains break, when the infrastructure designed for "normal times" can't reach the people who need it, what r...
29/06/2026

When supply chains break, when the infrastructure designed for "normal times" can't reach the people who need it, what remains is what communities can make, repair, and share among themselves.

We've been building a small repository of tools, designs, and practices in that lineage, something we hope can be useful to anyone, anywhere, navigating moments when the official systems aren't enough. It's open. It's free. It's not finished, and it doesn't pretend to be a solution to grief or loss. But if it can be a contribution to the work of community recovery, it's there.

https://ttw.fab.city/

You’ll find there a couple of useful and hands-on tools, such as 3D-printed thermoformable splint designed by Venezuelan doctors, how to keep insulin and vaccines cold without grid power provided by international aid organisations, or how to plan around minimum water quantities tested in Japan.

Our thoughts go to Venezuela’s population following the earthquakes, and to other regions facing regional and local crises.

Kamakura, a city in Japan, had its only waste incineration facility shut down in January 2025. The city had to find anot...
16/06/2026

Kamakura, a city in Japan, had its only waste incineration facility shut down in January 2025. The city had to find another way.
The answer didn't come from policy alone, but from a community-built tool that fits even on a balcony.

FAB de Chiero is an eco food waste processor that uses soil microorganisms to decompose kitchen waste, with no electricity required. Designed through a collaboration between FabLab Kamakura, Keio University SFC, CAINZ, and Kayac, it transforms an inventor's hand-crafted solution into something anyone can build themselves using a ShopBot CNC at a local DIY store.

The project addresses what centralised waste systems can't. The last mile of food waste, in apartments, on balconies, at schools, in neighbourhood associations.

📸 Explore photos of the project on Fab City Flickr, and find out more about this processor: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCVMtr

12/06/2026

"It's not so much what is human, what is not human, but what is compromising our life support systems at scale — what is actually regenerating them, and making it part of a way of living in which humans and non-humans can coexist."

Diez and Kaur in conversation during our Expert Talk earlier this week, on what regeneration actually asks of us.

Watch the full Expert Talk on YouTube, link in bio!

10/06/2026

“We don't start with land ownership, and governance, and we've gotta change the economy, and racialize capitalism, and economic and societal collapse at every supper club. (…) You've got to be able to understand the beat, the temperature, and the soul of a place.”

and in conversation yesterday during our Expert Talk, on neighbourhood change and what it takes. Moderated by

Full Expert Talk on YouTube! Link in bio!

Next Expert Talk in September. 🗓️

Most participatory processes collect data, very few collect feelings.When a site carries history, every decision about i...
03/06/2026

Most participatory processes collect data, very few collect feelings.

When a site carries history, every decision about its future carries weight. A building isn't just a building. A tool isn't just a tool. For some people, it's a livelihood. Designing can include emotional responses.

Emotion Networking, developed by the Reinwardt Academie in collaboration with the CENTRINNO EU, turns emotional connections into a methodology. Stakeholders gather around a single heritage object and map their emotional responses to visualize the range of perspectives.

The method is part of a broader ethnographic approach designed for Fab City Hubs, which work at the intersection of industrial heritage, circular economy, and social inclusion.

👉 "Emotion Networking Tool" is part of the Fab City Learning Hub → a growing repository of projects, frameworks, and tools developed by and for the network.

→ https://fab.city/learning-hub/resource-emotion-networking-tool

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