Valldaura Labs has won a call issued by the European Institute for Innovation & Technology (EIT) Urban Mobility group for rapid responses to COVID-19.

The Valldaura Labs project, FURNISH (Fast Urban Responses for New Inclusive Spaces & Habitats), joins three Barcelona-based design teams from IAAC, Elisava School of Design and Engineering, and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) with four additional design teams from Fab Lab Budapest, Aalto Fab Lab, the University of Minho/Polytechnic University of Valencia, and the Polytechnic University of Milan to form a pan-European community of urban intervention first responders empowered by digital fabrication, inspired by the community of first responders which used digital fabrication to produce personal protective equipment and machine components for hospitals during the first wave of the novel corona-virus.

FURNISH aims to merge the challenge of gaining more public space through ‘tactical urbanism’, which can reconfigure a street to expand the area for pedestrians and leisure, with local digital manufacturing. The 7 teams listed will produce rapid solutions to the urgent spatial problems and opportunities posed by the novel coronavirus, demonstrated through pilot installations in 5 European cities.

The objective is to develop the designs and prototypes in collaborative workshops featuring all the selected FURNISH teams. Pilot installations will be installed and tested by December. Each selected team will receive 10.000€ to fund the fabrication and implementation of their prototypes. All designs developed under the FURNISH project will be documented in an open-source format, enabling replication anywhere in the world.

The FURNISH project is managed by CARNET Future Mobility Research Hub, and in addition to the three Barcelona design institutions referenced above, partners include the City of Milan and the Environment, Mobility and Territory Agency of Milan (AMAT).