Fab City Hubs as physical spaces for supporting urban regeneration within your city.
Why does it matters?
Access to affordable space is a crucial issue in cities today, and securing a spatial presence for makers and creative communities in our city is an important challenge to tackle.
Space has been defined by urbanists and sociologists as a means to provide (or deny) societal justice, so it's important to be aware that space is a powerful tool for addressing spatial justice.
One of the main challenges of Fab City Hub typologies is to trigger a physical presence to start regenerative processes for inclusive and thriving urban areas.
Your FCH's typology will depend on local challenges and opportunities, and it will be shaped by those same challenges and opportunities.
Key aspects
Here is a selection of 3 key aspects to find out how to better design your spatial strategy for your Fab City Hub.
Map first
Mapping and knowing your local environment are fundamental aspects to consider whether you have a space or not. In order to establish the best spatial strategy for your FCH you could start having an in-depth look at the "MAP YOUR ECOSYSTEM" page, to better understand spatial opportunities in your local environment. Mapping could be useful to find out about vacant spaces, if you are looking for one, or to locate other innovative initiatives with whom you could partner.
Start a local presence in your neighbourhood
If you do not have direct access to a specific space for your Fab City Hub (FCH), a starting strategy is to establish a local presence in your city or neighborhood. This will allow you to gain a deeper understanding of the needs and challenges of your community, as well as to assess the spatial availability for creative communities. One effective approach may be to organize recurring distributed events, such as the Open Workshops in Amsterdam or the Urban Talk in Barcelona. These simple yet effective event formats will allow you to explore spatial possibilities for your hub and, at the same time, build and grow your community, expanding the possibility of finding key partners for your FCH.
Fab City Hubs are located, distributed and digital
There is not a single model of Fab City Hub nor a unique spatial strategy your hub will establish with its local environment. Therefore, as explained in the FAQ sections FCH are open spaces in the city and physical embodiments of a distributed initiative. Your local model of Fab City Hub could be, for example , a small and representative space that manages a digital platform connecting a wider number of actors, spaces and resources across the city. A digital platform for FCH, and Milan's story is a very good example, could help you in organising events, build and grow your community by leveraging on this network. Nevertheless, a physical and identifiable space is needed as a gate to access distribute and otherwise intangible resources and actors to visitors and stakeholders.
You can have a look at this presentation to better understand why spatial strategy for FCH matters. You can also try a game, the Fab City Hub Game to guide you to reflect on how to structure your spatial strategy for FCH.
Another case could be that you have a space but the costs of management and bills are high, in that case, you could consider partnering with other innovative spaces present in your local environment and mutualise resources and efforts. Establishing partnerships with key actors that operate in the real estate environment, and that manage vacant or temporary spaces is also a crucial step to better define your spatial strategy.
You could have a look at this presentation to better understand how Paris has built an ecosystem of innovative spaces around their FCH by partnering with a social cooperative involvedin real estate operations.
Tools/Stories
Find here a curated selection of Tools and Stories from the Fab City Hub Network that could inspire you to design your FCH typology and its spatial strategy.