FAB CITY GRAND PARIS

Their core work

Fab City Grand Paris is a Paris-based NGO operating at the intersection of urban circular economy, distributed local production, and city governance. Rooted in the global Fab City movement — which aims to make cities self-sufficient in food, energy, and material resources — they work with municipalities, makerspaces, and community fabrication labs to redesign how materials flow through urban and peri-urban areas. In practice, this means designing governance frameworks, decision-support systems, and new business models that enable cities to recycle, repurpose, and locally produce materials across key streams such as plastics, packaging, textiles, wood, and food waste. They act as a bridge between urban policy, community fab infrastructure, and the practical economics of circular material loops.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

With only two projects, both launched within a single 18-month window (2019-2020), there is no meaningful long-term evolution to trace — Fab City Grand Paris entered H2020 with a fully formed focus on urban circular economy and stayed within that space. The earlier project (REFLOW) was rich in specific material-stream keywords, while the more recent (CENTRINNO) shifted attention toward urban industrial regeneration without detailing the same technical vocabulary. This may signal a broadening from material flows into urban spatial and economic transformation, but the data is too thin to confirm a trend with confidence.

Their trajectory suggests movement from operational circular economy (material streams, waste, governance tools) toward higher-level urban regeneration strategy — a natural evolution for a Fab City actor aiming to influence city planning, not just fab lab operations.

How they like to work

Fab City Grand Paris has participated exclusively as a consortium partner, never as project coordinator across their two H2020 projects — a pattern consistent with an NGO that brings community and urban ecosystem expertise into larger research consortia rather than leading them. Their network of 52 unique partners across 14 countries for just two projects suggests they are embedded in large, diverse Innovation Action consortia typical of urban sustainability calls. This makes them a reliable specialist partner to bring into consortia where city-level circular economy experimentation, fab lab networks, or community engagement is needed.

Despite only two projects, Fab City Grand Paris has connected with 52 unique consortium partners across 14 countries — an unusually broad network relative to their project count, typical of large urban Innovation Actions that include cities, research institutes, SMEs, and civil society across Europe. Their reach is European with a Paris metropolitan anchor.

What sets them apart

Fab City Grand Paris is one of very few H2020 participants that brings the Fab City movement's global community infrastructure — makerspaces, fab labs, distributed production networks — directly into EU-funded circular economy research. Unlike academic partners who study circular systems theoretically, or industrial partners focused on single material streams, they offer lived urban experimentation capacity across multiple material categories simultaneously. For consortium builders, they provide a credible civil society and city-level implementation layer that is rare among French NGO participants in environment calls.

Highlights from their portfolio

• REFLOW
  The larger of the two projects (€530,500), REFLOW brought together the broadest cross-section of material streams — plastic, textile, wood, water, agrifood — within a single urban metabolism framework, making it the clearest demonstration of Fab City Grand Paris's full circular economy scope.
• CENTRINNO
  A longer-horizon project running to 2024, CENTRINNO extended their work from material flows into industrial area regeneration, showing a capacity to operate at the urban planning and economic transformation layer beyond purely environmental themes.