🚩10 principles for Fab City Hubs

10 principles and organizational practices to define and support the development of Fab City Hubs

The Centrinno framework for Fab City Hubs.

Fab City Hub Vision

This group of principles aims to create a mindset from which the hub operators should look at their project and relative challenges:

What is a FCH? What should one think about FCHs? How should one visualise the future of those hubs in relation to other actors, makers, institutions and private companies?

Principle 1 - FCHs as ecosystem activators 🚀

Hubs act as “concentrators of urban interactions” among different actors (communities, institutions, businesses). To do so, hubs need appropriate physical facilities and intangible assets (activities, public events, conviviality, free exchange…).

Principle 2 - FCHs as physical devices for accessing distributed ecosystems 🏭

Actors are distributed in a city, and their impact depends on their mutual interaction. FCHs act as interfaces (physical spaces or landmarks) to connect different agents, communities and projects, and to guide newcomers who want to enter the local ecosystem.

Principle 3 - FCHs as complex organisms enabling resiliency 👍

FCHs’ structural, organisational, and functional aspects are predominantly hybrid, complex and non-hierarchical. This is also reflected in their space planning and the programs of their activities. As complex organisms, FCHs perform as resilient structures to fast-changing and hazardous environments.

Principle 4 - FCHs as extensions of traditional institutions 🏢

Hubs represent a buffer zone for the prototyping of unusual assemblages of actors and functions. Hubs can attract more traditional institutions (schools, municipalities, private companies) and facilitate openness, networking, and innovative thinking.

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Fab City Hub Community

How should FCHs relate to their communities? Is a physical space needed to start the project? How can somebody make the project inclusive? How should the hub’s operating team collaborate with those communities?

Principle 5 - Community first, space after 🫂

Hubs are community builders and emerge from a dialogue involving different actors. Events and programming help build communities and co-create the hub’s space.

Principle 6 - Give voice to citizens 🗣️

Hubs can provide their space for dialogue between citizens and local institutions, informal gatherings or networking. In this way, hubs act as platforms for bottom-up initiatives and debate.

Principle 7 - Focus on facilitating and empowering communities 💗

A hub’s team is recommended to act as a facilitator of processes and projects that happen among members. Such orchestration requires internal communication and distributed knowledge.

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Fab City Hub Infrastructure

This group of principles focuses more on the tangible assets of the Fab City Hubs:

What about physical space and fabrication facilities? How should those be managed or designed? Are productive facilities meant to replace traditional production or rather used to reskill local communities?

Principle 8 - Adopt an incremental approach, avoid overdesign 🏗️

Instead of following a linear waterfall approach, where the space is fully planned and designed in advance, an incremental approach can leave space for real and situated needs to emerge from the community. This could simply mean to temporarily leave empty some portion of the space or without attributing it to a precise function for later occupation or transformation.

Principle 9 - FCHs are not replacing factories 🧰

Hubs are more intended as cultural spaces whose facilities are means for innovation, reskilling, citizens empowerment and conviviality. They create new narratives and new business models by promoting awareness.

Principle 10 - FCHs are multi-layered spaces, both physical and digital ⚒️

Combining physical spaces and facilities with digital communication for diverse communities.

The framework behdind the principle and the Fab City Hubs Toolkit

Where these guiding principles came from

One of the first steps we took at CENTRINNO was drafting the "Creative and Productive Hubs Journal", a detailed document that explores creative and productive hubs as pioneers of innovative practices, paving the way for the upcoming FCHs in urban centers. The document outlines the history of creative and productive hubs, highlighting how they emerged from complex socioeconomic dynamics that shaped Europe in the last few decades.

Creative and productive hubs emerged in urban centers during a time of transition from manufacturing to intangible economies. The first hubs laid the foundations for the FCHs to come, solidifying values such as innovative production, participation, and hybrid spaces. CENTRINNO aims to go even further, implementing in its FCHs five main criteria: circular economy, social inclusion, vocational training, heritage, and innovation spaces.

Some already-existing creative and productive hubs represent remarkable examples of how each criterion can be translated into practical actions.

Volumes performed an analysis of those case studies, which produced a series of ten principles that represent a preliminary set of recommendations for setting up an FCH in CENTRINNO's Pilot cities.