Fab City Conference
Meet the speakers
We gathered inspiring and forward thinking experts and enthusiasts.



Aerocene imagines new infrastructures of mobility, which challenge and redefine international rights to free movement. In turn, Aerocene attempts reversal of the extractive approaches humans have developed toward planetary landscapes, ecosystems and nonhuman species. These aims can be achieved and complemented by encouraging a bottom-up, participatory approach to environmental policy making, and through international community-building carried out by the Aerocene Foundation.
Between thinking and making together with community members: Julieta Arancio, Sasha Engelmann, Joaquin Ezcurra, Tomás Saraceno and Erik Vogler.

Project Leader for several award-winning projects, Jakob has been instrumental
to many of BIG’s largest commissions. He led the design and development of The
Mountain mixed-use residences in Copenhagen, completed in 2008, and served as the Project Leader for the new Tallinn Town Hall in Estonia, which received a MIPIM Future Award 2011. He is currently Partner in Charge of 79 & PARK, a 20.000 M2 sustainable luxury residential building in Stockholm, Sweden. Jakob also heads BIG IDEAS, BIG’s technology-driven special projects division. Through analysis and simulation, BIG IDEAS informs BIG’s design decisions with research-based information—Information Driven Design. Special projects, including a green window farm, customized furniture, and innovative building systems support the studio’s work from small details to the BIG picture.

His books include African Fractals: modern computing and indigenous design and Appropriating Technology: vernacular science and social power.
Collaborating with indigenous communities, urban artisans and others, his research program on “generative justice” develops computational, thermal and mechanical systems that nurture the bottom-up circulation of value in unalienated form, from heritage algorithms to decolonized digital fabrication.







Philippe Madec (France,1954) livesAlain Bornarel (engineer), he has taken the initiative of the Manifesto for a Happy Frugality. This in Paris and Brussels. Thanks to his family background and to an encounter with Kenneth Frampton in 1983/84, Philippe Madec has had an eco-responsible conception of urban and architectural works from the beginning of his practice (’89). He received, in particular, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture 2012, or the Taliesin Special Price 2009.
He participates in the general architecture policy of France: an expert for the Grenelle of Environment, member of the National Council for Cities and Territories of Art and History, scientific consultant for the PUCA, etc. ; he is Professor in architecture, Member of the Académie d’Architecture, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for ecology. And also abroad: Full Member of the European Chapter of the Club of Rome (Brussels) or expert in the process towards the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in Quito, October 2016.
Having been a nomad professor for a long time, in 2000 he founded the first French department of education on sustainable architecture at the National School of Architecture in Lyon: Strategy for a Sustainable and Fair Development, in partnership with engineering schools. In 2010, he opened a department dedicated to ‘The invention of sustainable territory’ in the National School of Architecture in Brittany. He has taught at the Technische Universität (Vienna, Austria), Harvard University (Cambridge, U.S.A), Université de Montréal (Canada), and Columbia University (visiting scholar, New-York, U.S.A).
His latest books are on ‘The undefinition of Architecture’, ‘Architecture and Peace’, and ‘Rural Modernity’.

Francesca Bria is an adviser for the European Commission on Future Internet and Innovation Policy. She is currently the new Commissioner of Digital Technology and Innovation for the city of Barcelona in Spain and she is leading the DECODE project (http://decodeproject.eu) on data sovereignty in Europe.

Since 2014, Jean-Louis MISSIKA is a Paris councilor and Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of urban planning, architecture, Greater Paris projects, economic development and attractiveness. From 2008 to 2014 he served as Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of innovation, research and higher education.
Jean-Louis MISSIKA is a media sociologist. He holds a PhD in management, a degree in philosophy and is graduated of Sciences Po Paris. He was head of the Information and Dissemination Service of the Prime Minister Michel Rocard and director of BVA, before setting up a consulting firm. He also served as Vice President of Iliad.
He has taught media sociology at Sciences Po Paris.
Jean-Louis MISSIKA has written several books, notably on media and politics: La Folle du logis. Television in Democratic Societies, with Dominique Wolton (Gallimard, 1983), La Fin de la télévision (Le Seuil/La République des idées, 2006) and Parler pour gagner, sémiotique des discours de la campagne présidentielle de 2007, with Denis Bertrand and Alexandre Dézé (Presses de Sciences Po, 2007).

He has worked in industry R&D for 15 years, in government (French Prime Minister’s strategy unit), and academia.
He authored many publications; the recently published “Installation theory” (Cambridge University Press, 2017), his 5th book, examines the influence of context on behaviour, and how to produce behavioural change.


Over the past two decades Kate has worked as Senior Researcher at Oxfam, as a co-author of the UN’s Human Development Report, and as a Fellow of the Overseas Development Institute based in the villages of Zanzibar. She holds a BA and MSc from Oxford University and an honorary doctorate from Business School Lausanne. She has been named by the Guardian as one of the top ten tweeters on economic transformation.

She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA).
Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, their potential to design new governance models and participatory decision-making, and the concept of governance-by-design. Her book, “Blockchain and the Law,” will be published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).