↔️Scaling
This phase is still under development.
Last updated
This phase is still under development.
Last updated
In Food Tech 3.0, scaling refers to Scaling Out (not up), or horizontal growth of innovator initiatives and the Food Tech 3.0 FAL itself to new regions, called FoodSHIFT2030 Enabler Labs (or FELs). FELs are supposed to be new regions, local or international, where a FoodSHIFT2030 Accelerator Lab wants to share knowledge with. In order to multiply their impact, each of the 9 FoodSHIFT2030 Accelerator Labs onboards 3 FELs, effectively reaching 27 new regions and ensuring the project's reach to 36 regions in total. (Make sure to read the Context: FoodSHIFT2030 section so you can understand what things like "Accelerator Labs," "Enabler Labs," and "FoodSHIFT2030" is).
At Food Tech 3.0, we identified Hamburg, Milan, and Paris as FELs. While the scaling stage is still underway, we've generally followed these steps: 1) onboarding 3 FELs, 2) creating a common vision, and 3) knowledge transfer.
Identifying Food Tech 3.0's FELs was the first challenge of this step. The FoodSHIFT2030 project hosted an open-call for potential FELs. For our Lab, it was essential to choose regions, and organisations, that we already work with. Out of the organisations that applied to the open-call, we made a list of those that were already actively moving food projects and had a historical relationship with Fab Lab Barcelona through previous and current work. As FELs did not receive funding through the FoodSHIFT2030 project, choosing those that had both of these prerequisites ensured that participating as a FEL would be inline with their existing work while simultaneously strengthening our existing relationships.
In the end, we identified and selected Fab city Hamburg / Mechanical Engineering of the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, Open Dot in Milan, and Fab City Grand Paris / Ars Longa as Food Tech 3.0 FELs... and all three said yes!
These institutions are part of the Fab Lab Network, an open and creative community of makers, artists, scientists, engineers, educators, students, hobbyists and professionals located in more than 100 countries and 1750 distributed and networked Fab Labs around the world. Additionally, Barcelona, Paris and Hamburg are all Fab Cities, a network which includes 49 cities and regions around the world that are striving to produce what their city consumes by 2054. Both the Fab Lab and Fab Cities networks operate on a highly connected approach and offer the opportunity to further scale out knowledge from the Food Tech 3.0 ecosystem.
Our FELs joined us in Barcelona to work on consolidating how we could collectively promote the improvement of the food system. Through co-creation and sharing sessions, we decided to focus on how we could promote the development of more spaces like the Food Hub at Fab City Grand Paris' Fab City Hub.
Fab City Hubs are spaces that combines a social and community-based dimension to Fab Labs and makerspaces in an effort to achieve the goal of a Fab City: to produce what their city consumes by 2054.
Fab City Grand Paris's Food Hub is 250m2 of space dedicated to food production, experimentation with new concepts and products, trainings, and event organisation. It is part of their 1000m2 Fab City Hub, a third-place for demonstration, training and research whose mission is to implement the city’s transition to a productive and circular model, relying on infrastructures and communities located in the territory, all by being part of an international network of cities (Fab Cities) working for the same cause. Fab City Hubs are distributed networks of knowledge where citizens and communities can bring together distributed knowledge and practices with a social component and their food labs, are by nature distributed and social components.
Fab Lab Barcelona also hosts the Barcelona Fab City Hub, which we define as a distributed space for citizens to approach the Fab City vision, translating meta ideologies into skill-sharing sessions, talks, and events. The Hub works with citizen-empowerment within the fields of food, energy, and materials and is a physical space to communicate the Fab City ideology.
Bringing food into contact through Fab Labs and makerspaces, like through the Fab City Hub model, can create a collective space for inclusion, encounters, and debate, with food being the essential ingredient that brings people together. At the same time, this ensures that food technology can be made on site to complement community initiatives.
During the onsite Barcelona meeting, we discussed key questions around governance, infrastructure, and stakeholder in these types of spaces. Here, you can find the template.
At this meeting, we also had the opportunity to scale a local initiative from the local to the international level, with the Domingo club's fermentation workshops. Attendees from the 3 visiting cities learned how to prepare tempeh with their own body temperature through The Domingo Necklace and joined the network of tempeh friends. If you are interested in this initiative and want to join the Domingo Club network, click here.
As part of the scaling program, currently the 4 cities (Barcelona, Hamburg, Milan, and Paris) started organizing a series of webinars where each of the cities selects a food system innovator to share their practices and experience to inspire other innovators to join the cause. Here you can find the first webinar “Transformation of the food system through the community.”
If you are interested in contributing to this change, don't hesitate to look for the drivers of these initiatives in your city. If you have an idea and you want to put it into practice, do not hesitate to NETWORK, there are many institutions and initiatives that can help you. You can join us to keep the conversation going and the innovations coming at the global #food discord channel, hosted by the Distributed Design Platform.
In the following sections, we invite you to explore Scaling Out (not up); each of our FELs Hamburg, Milan, and Paris; and Learnings, challenges & limitations of scaling out.
