And today we share their story, straight from the source:
The Zero Carbon Roadshow – a Fab City Hamburg project to experiment carbon-free networking across Europe.
The Zero Carbon Roadshow is one of the outreach activities of Interfacer, an European Project to build a digital infrastructure to enable collaborative design and local production.
Facing the climate and energy crises, it’s time to think and act differently: Instead of traveling fast within trains and planes, we decided to take the time and use our muscles to network. We visited European fab cities, creators and creatives, and gathered new impressions and inspiration from other labs and hubs on local fabrication, sustainable design and its global collaboration through open source hardware.
And so, two colleagues, Wolf and Henry, left Hamburg to bike to Barcelona.
Their first stop was Amsterdam and the trip to this point filled with a lot of rainy camping, too many sheep and dykes to count and the fight against flat tires already. They became expert bikers fast and developed the new concept of bike-office instead of home-office. Yes, in Holland with its fantastic internet connection, you can make online meetings while biking.
Amsterdam, the ‚Venice of the North‘, is home to the very first independent Fablab in Europe, the Waag Society. It opened in 2007 and is not only a place for hackers and nerds who want to play with machines, but a place in which a new vision of design and production technology has changed the role of the consumer rigorously.
They also visited the Fiction Factory and the Wikkelhouse. The Fiction Factory was founded in 1989 as a theatre scenery company and is by now a highly professional construction studio. One of their projects is the Wikkelhouse, a sustainable cardboard house.
After Amsterdam they went south to France, passing the seaside and the impressive artificial landscape of the dutch Zealand.
On their way to Paris Wolf and Henry stopped at the L’Hermitage in Autrêches, a rural creative and productive hub, with it several labs, a micro-farm, a huge forest and many engaging projects.
Then Paris, the European megapole with roughly 12 million residents and its vibrant maker and creative community. They visited Villette Makerz, a lab dedicated to the shift from designing products to designing the process of a product and engaging in circular design. Also, the brand new Fab City Hub Paris with its new high professional foodlab, the first Fab City Hub, from eight other ones planned all over Europe, have been visited.
The next ride leaves the two bikers from Hamburg aside the Seine and then by the Loire, one of the most beautiful rivers in Europe with smooth sandbanks and various birds. After that and passing by wonderful wine regions with its yards and castles, Lyon with its world cultural heritage town center. It’s part of the historic Rhone-Alpes and the so-called Fab Region. Wolf and Henry got to see the charming local Textile lab that are collaborating with others from the ECHN network (hi Tessa!) and the very astonishing hub La Myne, a space that invented the “adaptocratcy”, a space as a topic for open source innovation in the academic field.
On the bike again, along the Rhone and with a view onto the Alps, they went to the mediterranean sea during August and its temperature records of this year. They invented the zero carbon air-condition: Jumping into the river with clothes on and going on biking – cooling is nothing more than evaporation.
Right before arriving at their last stop for the tour, they went to Montpellier and visited the LabSud, a very much community based Fab Lab with a strong focus on open source innovation and education. Going ahead following the mediterranean sea side with its amazing landscape and its rose flamingos, they have to climb the Pyrenees through its cork forests to join Spain.
After roughly 50 days and about 2860 kilometers, finally Barcelona, the birth place of the Fab City network and many incredible innovative places:
The Ateneus de fabricacio – Ciutat Meridiana Fab Lab, a public service for dissemination of technology and digital manufacturing in order to improve employability in the distcrict.
The Valldaura Labs, an incredible place in the mountains, a research centre of the IAAC (Institut for Advanced Architecture, Catalonia) for self-sufficient habitats,that promotes habitability on the basis of ecological principles, making the fullest use of all available technologies and resources, focused on the idea of self-sufficiency.
And finally, the Fab Lab Barcelona, the birthplace of the Fab City Network: During the walk-through of this incredible place by Guillem Camprodon and Pablo Muñoz, where highly innovative projects going hand in hand with the needs of local communities, like the Smart citizen project, the Fab lab house, the [Romi Robotics for Microfarms] to name just few of them, but also the “open source” restaurant Leka, with open source furniture and recipes where we finished our tour together with the lovely summer team of the Fab Lab/City Barcelona!
Who is in for the next European creative hub tour?
You can find more details about the tour and the videos here.
