01 /03

Toward Productive Cities — FabCity Index France

Florentin, A., Chabanel, B. & Guimas, V. · Utopies & FabCity Paris · 2018
Sectors
257
Macro-sectors
12
Coverage
~600 urban areas
Paris score
37.58 /100

First quantitative Fab City Index. A priority × self-sufficiency lattice scored 0–100, applied to roughly 600 French urban areas. LOCAL SHIFT® urban-economy simulator and LOCAL FOOTPRINT® Nature material-flow methodologies (Utopies proprietary) underneath. Vincent Guimas was FabCity Paris when he co-authored the report — this work was inside the movement, not external to it. Paris 37.58; Lyon 34.30; Strasbourg 21.61; 95 % of French urban areas under 10/100. The convergence with Hamburg six years later tells you these numbers are not about France either.

Other key findings from the 2018 report worth not losing: the average French city produces only 3.1 % of what its population consumes (€3 of every €100). Annual household goods consumption across French metros ranges €1,700–4,100 per inhabitant. Nantes Métropole's material footprint: 9.27 Mt of raw material extraction per year, 15 t / inhabitant, with 85 % extracted outside France. The manufacturing multiplier collapsed from €103 in 1970 to €59 in 2015 per €100 of manufactured goods. Forty strategic priority sectors identified across the 50 largest French cities.

Florentin, A., Chabanel, B. & Guimas, V. (2018). Toward Productive Cities: FabCity Index France. Utopies & FabCity Paris, Étude N°13, June 2018.
02 /03

The Fab City Index — A Toolkit for Measuring Progress Towards a Circular Economy

Boeing, N. · HCU / HSU Hamburg · 2024
Concordance
NACE × COICOP
Macro-sectors
16
Coverage
Hamburg
Hamburg score
37.00 /100

Extended the Generation 1 construct via NACE Rev. 2 × COICOP concordance over public open data, 16 macro-sectors, 0–100 scoring. Published Open Access in Springer's Global Collaboration, Local Production — the volume Neil Gershenfeld wrote the foreword for, in which the diagnosis is exactly the gap FCI 3.0 addresses: cities participating in the 2054 countdown lack the data infrastructure to evaluate their own progress.

Hamburg landed at 37/100. Six years apart, two statistical systems, two different cities — Paris and Hamburg within 0.58 points of each other. That convergence is the public-data ceiling for major Western metropolises at the Economic × City / Region cell, and is the load-bearing observation FCI 3.0 was built around.

Boeing, N. (2024). The Fab City Index: A Toolkit for Measuring Progress Towards a Circular Economy. In Moritz, Redlich, Buxbaum-Conradi & Wulfsberg (eds), Global Collaboration, Local Production, SDG-Forschung, Springer Gabler, pp 115–133.
DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-44114-2_9 · Open Access.
03 /03

Fab City Index 3.0 — full-matrix and coupled action layer

Diez, T. & Vivanco, T. with the Fab City Foundation · 2026 –
Cells
20 (4 × 5)
Aggregation
PITO · DIDO
Coupling
ρ
Pilots
4 bioregions

Three specific extensions over Generations 1 and 2. First, scale: from a single Economic × City / Region cell into the full 4-pillar × 5-scale matrix scaffolded by Vivanco (2024–25). Second, vocabulary and aggregation: the founding Fab City pair PITO and DIDO — coined by Vicente Guallart and Neil Gershenfeld in the early Barcelona Fab City period, documented in the Fab City Whitepapers (Diez, 2014, 2016) — repurposed as a two-axis narrative compression of the matrix, each cell carrying a documented weight summing to 1. Third, response coefficient ρ: a coupled action layer that measures observation-to-action latency at the appropriate governance tier, turning the index from a snapshot into a metabolism.

The four pilots: Barcelona (IAAC anchor, Mediterranean bioregion), Boston (MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, North Atlantic bioregion), Santiago (UC Chile, Southern Cone), Bali (CAST / MDG / IT Del, Indonesian Archipelago bioregion). Two pre-registered falsifiable hypotheses: H₀-T (material throughput threshold via PITO) and H₀-A (action latency via ρ). Boeing's 37/100 and Utopies' 37.58/100 are recovered exactly as the single-cell, snapshot, ρ-implicit projection of the full index.

Diez, T., Vivanco, T. & Fab City Foundation (2026). Fab City Index 3.0 — Executive Summary. v0, 22 May 2026. In methodological review toward v1.
The lineage statement we propose to use verbatim

For Methods sections, partner briefs, and reviewer-facing summaries.

For citation Fab City Index 3.0 is the third generation of the Fab City Index — extending Florentin, Chabanel & Guimas (Utopies & FabCity Paris 2018) and Boeing (2024) from a single Economic × City / Region cell into the four-pillar × five-scale matrix scaffolded by Vivanco (2024–25), with a coupled action layer.

The statement is open to revision by the authors it cites while the methodology is in review. Boeing has the right priors on the Economic × Region cell because that is the cell he measured; Guimas on the priority × self-sufficiency aggregation because that is the lattice he co-built. Their direct annotation on the cells where their work is the foundation is what FCI 3.0 invites.

Canonical citations

References.

  • Florentin, A., Chabanel, B. & Guimas, V. (2018). Toward Productive Cities: FabCity Index France. Utopies & FabCity Paris, Étude N°13, June 2018. LOCAL SHIFT® and LOCAL FOOTPRINT® Nature methodologies; 257 sectors / 12 macro-sectors; ~600 French urban areas.
  • Boeing, N. (2024). The Fab City Index: A Toolkit for Measuring Progress Towards a Circular Economy. In Moritz, Redlich, Buxbaum-Conradi & Wulfsberg (eds), Global Collaboration, Local Production, SDG-Forschung, Springer Gabler, pp 115–133. DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-44114-2_9. Open Access.
  • Diez, T., Niaros, V. & Ferro, C. (2024). The Fab City Full Stack. In Moritz, Redlich, Buxbaum-Conradi & Wulfsberg (eds), Global Collaboration, Local Production, Springer Gabler. DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-44114-2_2.
  • Diez, T. (2014, 2016). Fab City Whitepapers. Document the PITO and DIDO framings, coined by Vicente Guallart and Neil Gershenfeld in the early Barcelona Fab City period.
  • Vivanco, T. (2024). Fab City Full Stack Metrics Framework: An Architectural Framework for Measuring the Impact of Design Interventions across Five Scales (Community, City, Region, Bioregion, Planet) through Four Pillars (Environmental, Social, Economic, Governance). Fab City Foundation working paper.
  • Vivanco, T. (2025). Research through Design for bioregional material mapping across four Chilean macrozones. Doctoral thesis, Universidad del Desarrollo. hdl.handle.net/11447/10038.
  • Richardson, K. et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances 9, eadh2458. Source for Environmental × Planet cell.
methodology v0 · beta — comments: index@fab.city