FAB.Region Bergisches Städtedreieck – Transformation of the cities Wuppertal, Remscheid and Solingen into a co-creative circular economy region / FAB.Region
Background
In the project "Fab.Region Bergisches Städtedreieck", the transformation principle of "Fab Cities" is applied to the economic region of the Bergische Städtedreieck, encompassing the cities of Wuppertal, Remscheid, and Solingen.
The Fab City movement aims for a city to increasingly produce and dispose of, or reintegrate into a local cycle, everything it needs and consumes. Ideally, fewer goods are imported, and less waste is exported. Instead, energy, water, raw materials, materials, semi-finished products, and products, but also capital and knowledge, circulate within the region, are reused and/or reassembled. A responsible city or regional policy ensures that many products consumed by the local population are produced, repaired, maintained, shared, recycled, or disposed of within their own territory (R-strategies). This leads to greater sensitivity to environmental impacts, ideally resulting in less consumption and savings in energy and resources (sufficiency). Other expected effects include: livable, multifunctional city centers, more startups, a closer network, and thereby increasing potential for circular economy cooperations. Places of innovation, such as Fablabs, hold special significance within the Fab City approach. These are laboratories where collaboration and interaction of various technology sectors, fields of knowledge, and communities come together. Users can design, develop, manufacture, and test innovative solutions for everyday problems on-site. Since local communities promote these innovations, they can lead to sustainable solutions.
Objective
The project's objective is to operationalize a major transformation task towards a co-creative circular economy using the Fab City framework and to develop a clear strategic action plan for the Fab.Region Bergisches Städtedreieck. Places of innovation act as drivers in the development and implementation of learning formats and serve as incubators for test pilots for local production in the neighborhood. This is done using digital manufacturing technologies and recyclable materials, as well as co-creation and open-source design. In the spirit of a vital Fab.Region, we aim to achieve the following goals for the Bergische Städtedreieck:
- Initiation and establishment of work structures for lasting intervention
- Development of a common regional vision and a strategic action plan
- Establishment of a vibrant, regional community with appropriate communication formats and platforms
- Utilization of global learning formats and development of region-specific learning formats
- Integration of existing innovation and production sites through co-creative test pilots and joint learning formats
- Identification of relevant metrics and models and data collection for individual sectors
- Evaluation of the project's impacts
- The region is an active part of the international Fab City Community, connected and shares its knowledge internationally.
Work packages
The project includes the analysis of the structures of the Fab.Region and a strategy (WP2). In living labs, regional learning formats and test pilots will be co-creatively developed, implemented, and evaluated (WP3). Parallel to this, scientific analyses and life cycle assessments aim to estimate the ecological footprint of Fab City activities in general and the Fab.Region activities in the Bergische Städtedreieck specifically (WP5). International, national, and regional networking (WP4), as well as communication and scaling (WP6), play a central role in the project. The Institute for Work and Technology (IAT) is significantly involved in work packages 2 and 5.
Consortium
The Fab.Region project is funded under the ERDF funding line by the EU and the state of NRW and carried out as a joint project of the Bergische Structure and Economic Development Corporation (Bergische Struktur- und Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft), the Institute for Work and Technology (IAT) at the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences in Gelsenkirchen Bocholt Recklinghausen, the Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production gGmbH (CSCP), the Wuppertal Institute gGmbH, the City Development Company Solingen GmbH & Co. KG (SEG), the Gründerschmiede Remscheid e.V., Gut Einern e.V., and the Start Up Center of the Bergische University Wuppertal.