Paris
Fab City Grand Paris
Last updated
Fab City Grand Paris
Last updated
City, Country
Paris, France
Initiative/ policy
Fab City Grand Paris (FCGP) is a local network of creators, designers, architects, urban farmers and innovators engaged in the rise of the circular and collaborative economy in the Parisian urban area. Formally established as a not for profit association, FCGP aims to show the possible scenarios of local, circular and distributed production, and the challenges and issues of a viable model at the scale of the city.
Initiative's relationship to REFLOW
Co-creation design & framework
Technical infrastructure & software
Collaborative governance & urban strategies
Pilots framework
Capacity building
Period of implementation
2018 - ongoing
Core vision
FCGP aims to contribute to the transition towards the Fab City, supporting the creation of dedicated knowledge, capacity, infrastructure and community at the city level, while seeking continuous dialogue and cooperation across the global network of Fab Cities. In line with the concept of Fab City, the association is committed to bringing production back to cities, developing a local network of production points where shared making facilities, peer to peer collaboration and open source hardware and software help turn manufacturing into a more sustainable and democratic process.
Implementation and governance
The Fab City Summit 2018 set a tone for the FCGP activities in that it exemplified the need to engage people in the maker movement of Fab City. In a general sense, the core co-creation processes of FCGP happens at the association level, with inputs from public sessions. The agenda of the association is created by its members with inputs from the Advisory Board and decisions are taken by majority vote. The Advisory Board is a key source of knowledge and represents stakeholders from the Parisian Maker and SME ecosystem. This event played a crucial role in propelling key ideas and visions connected to the Fab City, as well as to support the further development of the global Fab Cities network. Each project implemented by FCGP aims to test and further develop the Fab City ‘Full Stack’ model, which roots in a multi-scale approach to reaching the goals of the Fab City: distributed infrastructure, peer to peer and collaborative learning, distributed design, place-based prototyping, platform-based models, polycentric governance.
FCGP implements the Fab City concepts via three main stream of actions:
Management of shared making and urban farming facilities and community-building engaging Parisian makers, artists, architects, innovators and passionate people - with the goal of supporting an open and vibrant movement of people across the city committed to support the spread of the values and key principles of the Fab City;
Training activities dedicated to create awareness and capacity-building on open source and peer to peer production models;
Small and medium scale experiments and prototyping activities which serve as action research for the Fab City challenge (Fab City Research Hub).
FCGP also manages the Fab City Store, an online marketplace dedicated to supporting a network of responsible designers, manufacturers and resellers. Furthermore, the Association has also been active in the organization of large scale events, such as the Fab City Summit.
Summarizing, the work is based on the key incentives of fundamental clarification of scopes and objectives, and support local initiatives. The new model of Management Board and the ongoing Advisory Board defines the focus to distribute performance and accomplishments.
In a general sense, the core co-creation processes of FCGP happens at the association level, with inputs from public sessions. The agenda of the association is created by its members with inputs from the Advisory Board and decisions are taken by majority vote. The Advisory Board is a key source of knowledge and represents stakeholders from the Parisian Maker and SME ecosystem. Importantly to the context of FCGP, the FCGI approach to capacity building and innovation takes a multiscale approach, from citizens to policy makers. FCGP processes membership to the association using the online tool Helloasso.com. There are two kinds of annual membership offered: Supportive and active member for an organization, and Supporter member and active individual. At the association level, membership by payment is used as a method of inclusion and voting is used as a decision making method.
Results, impacts and learnings
FCGP is a good practice of how local and global actions can support and reinforce each other. The co-construction of the summit between FCGP and FCGI, the diverse partnerships in EU projects and regular contacts has enhanced the proximity between the stakeholders. The Fab City case-study shows the need to diversify the funding strategies, to be agile to both EU funds and private-public partnerships. Behind the difficulty of the ongoing system to effectively fund long term initiatives, the members of Fab City look for diverse ways to pursue their project, with the objective to be as self-sufficient as possible. FCGP highlights the fact that co-creation goes beyond workshops and relies on a coherent innovative infrastructure organised in networks, with decision-making processes and governance structures that need to be adapted to the values of the project. The fuzzy front-end of innovation is highly depending on the people involved in each node and the funding opportunities.
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