MDEF Director Tomás Díez on UrbanNext Talk

by Marco Sanalitro     Posted on January 15, 2018

Master in Design for Emergent Futures (MDEF) Director, Tomás Diez, is interviewed by UrbanNext during the Smart City Expo World Congress 2017 on digital fabrication, circular systems and the future of production in cities.

As the director of Fab Lab Barcelona,Tomás Díez sets these fabrication laboratories as key changemakers for cities and local communities, acting as seeds that will unleash a change of productive system and society’s consumption mindset: “Digital fabrication is allowing everyone making anything anywhere at different scales: from personal fabricators at a domestic scale, to fab labs in neighbourhoods, to smart factories in cities and large supply chains”.

Tomás Diez stresses in this talk the concept of FAB City, which is a global project born in Barcelona aiming to develop locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities. This worldwide initiative comprises an international think tank of civic leaders, makers, urbanists and innovators working on changing the paradigm of the current industrial economy where the city operates on a linear model of importing products and producing waste.

“Cities are big octopusses that have very long tentacles and they are absorbing resources from thousands of kilometers away where they are located. We want to shorten these tentacles in order to make systems that can be more resilient locally while they are more connected globally: we will move from cities that import products and produce trash to cities that only share information at a global scale”.


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The video is filmed and edited by UrbanNext

Audiovisual Editor: Sara Traba