Europe gave birth to the industrial revolution about two centuries ago thanks to the convergence of a series of factors that allowed technology to be closer to society, while creating economic benefits to regional and national economies. With the globalisation, European cities lost a large volume of manufacturing capacity and transitioned to a knowledge economy. The result: a decrease in manufacturing jobs, the lack appreciation for these jobs, and neglected industrial areas subject to decay. Decay of industrial heritage has a major imprint on European city's identities, but also is a source of opportunity. The result, industrial areas with high historical value for Europe being abandoned or exploited by extractive economic activities, with no connection to local knowledge, and with no generation of value at the local level. CENTRINNO aims to develop and demonstrate strategies, approaches and solutions for regeneration of industrial historic sites and areas as creative production and manufacturing hubs, that 1) hold true to the ecological challenges of our time, 2) boost a diverse, inclusive and innovative urban economy, and 3) and use heritage as a catalizer for innovation and social inclusion. We give centre stage to craftsmen, vocationally trained professionals, entrepreneurs, makers, SME’s, Fab Labs, Food Labs and Makerpaces to become key players in the cities supply of local goods and support them to take on a fundamental role in our future cities, thus opposing disengagement and stagnation of local economies. Through a holistic method combining the Fab City Global Initiative approach to productive cities with Emotion Networking, life cycle assessment and spatially-specific material flow analyses, we bring to the fore both complex, layered histories of these sites as well as the cities available resources in terms of urban landscape, materials, current day skills and practice and human capital.

The vision of REFLOW is to develop circular and regenerative cities through the re-localisation of production and the re-configuration of material flows at different scales. More specifically, it will use Fab Labs and makerspaces as catalysers of a systemic change in urban and peri-urban environments, which enable, visualize and regulate “four freedoms”: free movement of materials, people, (technological) knowledge and commons, in order to reduce materials consumption, maximize multifunctional use of (public) spaces and envisage regenerative practices. Concretely, REFLOW aims at providing realistic best practices aligning market and government needs in order to create favourable conditions for the public and private sector to adopt circular principles. In order to provide critical examples of ways in which cities can adopt a CE model and reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, REFLOW will create new CE business models (Distributed Design Market model, On-Demand System, Corporate Hacking and Corporate Pyramid) within 6 pilot cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, Paris, Vejle and Cluj-Napoca) and assess their social, environmental and economic impact. The project will make use of blockchain technologies in order to incentivise the circular practices in local ecosystems and data visualisation tools to enable continuous monitoring and optimisation of “urban metabolic” processes and rapid interventions management. Networks of sensors, urban computing and geo-localisation will capture data ensuring accuracy, integrity and interoperability of relevant data infrastructures, while data visualisation and standard templates will be available for effective communication, public consultation, and exchange of experiences.