Fab labs to fab cities: Exploring innovative urban spaces in İzmir

Abstract

This study focuses on fabrication laboratories (fab labs) that provide user-oriented innovative urban spaces to meet advanced technologies and city dwellers who can share their knowledge in solving local problems. The aim is to explore the potential of fab labs as a part of smart city initiatives to develop the fab city by creating a network for collective knowledge and technology-enabled production in collaboration with local communities, companies, NGOs, and institutions. The opted methodology is to examine several fab labs as innovative and creative spaces in İzmir to evaluate their potential role in the development of the fab city. Fab labs might improve the organizational gap between local governments and inhabitants in developing innovative and sustainable solutions. This paper fulfills the lack of systematic research on fab labs; how they relate to smart city initiatives, evolving into fab cities, and obtaining and implementing the know-how of fab cities’ global knowledge.