Welcome to the Fab City Summit Montréal

This week, the Fab City Summit takes place, cohosted and streamed live from Montreal. You can follow all events via YouTube and the live.fablabs.io platform.

Friday 13 August, 8.00 - 12.00 EDT
Join us live on YouTube, August 13, from 8:00 EDT with Chantal Rouleau, Minister for Transport and Minister responsible for the Montréal region and the Metropolis, Valérie Plante, Mayor of Montréal, Raquel Peñalosa, President of Communautique and Sherry Lassiter, President and CEO of the Fab Foundation. Keynote speakers, panels and the Fab City Network pledge will follow.

Friday 13 August, 12.00 - 17.00 EDT
Talks, workshops and meet-ups via the live.fablabs.io platform events section

Saturday 14 August, 1.00 - 17.00 EDT
Talks, workshops and meet-ups via the live.fablabs.io platform events section

The Fab City Summit 2021 in Montréal: Fabricating the Commons

Communautique is an innovation hub and home of échofab, the first Fab Lab in Canada. They have been working for 22 years to democratize access to technology and are proud to bring the Fab City Summit to Montreal under the theme Fabricating the Commons. This is a meaningful event, given the urgent need to review our production and consumption model. It will bring together more than 1000 key actors involved in the resilience of cities and will highlight the official commitment of new cities and regions.

Keynote Speaker Spotlight:  Pia Mancini

Pia Mancini is co-founder and executive director of Open Collective, as well as president of the DemocracyEarth Foundation, a democracy activist and free software advocate. She has worked in politics in Argentina and has developed technologies for democracy around the world. She is a YC alumna, a YGL (World Economic Forum), a globetrotter and Roma's mom. Meet Pia Mancini at the Fab City Summit this summer at one of the Summit's great opening panels: Fabricating the Commons.

Keynote Speaker Spotlight: Sonja Novkovic

Professor of Economics and Academic Director of the International Centre for Co-operative Management at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada. She contributes to the UNRISD Sustainability Performance Indicators project with a cooperative economics perspective. Meet Sonja Novkovic at one of the Summit's great opening panels: Making the Commons.

Online film screening

With the support of the Caisse d'Économie solidaire Desjardins, the film Autautsikut / leaving none behind, will be screened at the Fab City Montreal Campus and made available online to registered participants. An international screening, followed by a discussion around this documentary that tells the story of the Inuit and Cree communities of Northern Quebec and how, more than 50 years ago (in 1967), they created an economic network of cooperatives that allowed Nunavimmiut to regain autonomy over their territory and their way of life. We believe that this powerful story holds many lessons and new perspectives for the Fab City.

Introducing Samantha Slade, speaker at the Fab City Summit Montréal

Conversation with Samantha Slade, Percolab, on horizontal governance.
Beyond reviewing our production model, the intangible side of the Fab City movement: getting back to the collective, how we stand together, creating together. The Fab City, a creative approach to constructive change, anchored in the territory.

Fabricating the Commons - Cities, biodiversity and climate change

One of the highlights of the Summit, the panel on 13 August 11.00 EDT, with Steve Hamel, urban biodiversity biologist at WWF-Canada, Marie-Ève Roy, specialist in forest conservation and ecological functions at ISFORT, Raquel Peñalosa, landscape architect, President IFLA AMERICAS 2014-2018, and Oliver Hillel, programme officer at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, moderated by Martin Van Den Borre, head of the Fab City office for Québec at Communautique.

Urbanisation has played a central role in the loss of global biodiversity but it can also be part of the solution. How important is biodiversity for the city and its inhabitants and why should we make it, along with the fight against climate change, the top priority? From conservation and regeneration techniques to the notion of ecosystem services and the global governance challenges of protecting biodiversity, we will explore how the Fab City movement can help reverse the ecological collapse we are facing.