The role of production spaces in a post-carbon vision

Heading to a post-carbon future requires a profound redefinition of the imagi -nary of the city and its places. The contemporary city is the result of a contin-uous override of spaces that are no more useful and abandoned, but today a post-carbon vision must be able to define how to use these spaces discarded by economic and political flows of our cities. Industrial districts, warehouses, factories, work spaces disseminated on urban conglomerates, are the picture of what is being left behind by our carbon based culture. A post-carbon city has an absolute need to define a new relationship between factory (production) and the city itself.The emerging of digital fabrication technologies, DIY online communities, lo-cal cluster and new production processes are the key points to analyse the changing way of production. Different examples from GMDC of New York, The Green Garage in Detroit, the Silicon Roundabout in London or the Fab Labs scattered all over the world are some of the realities that seek to integrate the reuse of urban production spaces with renewable energy and activities that create social, economic and technological values in the districts in which they are inserted. The analysis covers the evolution of production by studying its characteristics at the urban scale, defining what is the contemporary production space and how a manufacturing processes is evolving in relation with the environment; in order to start regeneration policies that create value and became engines of real practices and experiments towards the city that we want to build.