What would be your ideal city? There are likely as many answers as there are people but also likely to be a lot of common ground. The team at SPACE10, IKEA’s innovation lab have written a book on the topic, appropriately titled, The Ideal City.
Despite “fab” being part of Fab City and Fab Lab, the presence of Fab Labs and maker spaces is now just one aspect of a much broader range of ideas and solutions in the Fab City initiative, which wants to act as a global infrastructure and source of knowledge for transforming the way we work, live, interact and evolve in cities.
In this short article by Kim Stanley Robinson for Bloomberg Green, the sci-fi author and climate thinker writes about the “30 by 30” plan to protect 30% of land by 2030, which a growing number of countries are joining, and how it echoes “the preeminent conservation biologist of our time”, E.O. Wilson who advocated for the protection of 50% of land on the planet “for the sake of the thousands of species now in danger of extinction.”
The Cities of Things lab in Delft, Netherlands, is studying how we “live together with intelligent things, and relate to intelligent systems.” Their research has “a focus on the design of these new relationships and interactions.”
We already covered some of Amsterdam’s plans towards a doughnut economy but this concept, or otherwise the circular economy, are important parts of how cities can be transformed into Fab Cities, so it’s worth another visit. The DEAL (Doughnut Economics Action Lab) have launched An introductory guide to downscaling the doughnut which explains why and how the planet-wide concept can be scaled to a city.
