HubCity
Human societies and cities took the turn of a global metropolization. While humans’ futures seem more urban than ever, Africa will become the most crowded continent in the world by 2050, hosting some of the biggest cities in the world.
Digital technologists too, consider cities as an end goal. As a matter of fact, they are experimenting with solutions to embrace the next generation of urban infrastructures on the African continent.
The architect and anthropologist Sename Koffi Agbodjnou proposes to consider "tech-hubs" and other digital third places as virtuous factories of the territory of tomorrow.
Tech hubs Whether they are hackerspaces, FabLabs from the maker movement, incubators for innovative companies and coworking spaces, tech-hubs are indeed asserting themselves as places where you can work and live an experience of peer-to-peer learning, sometimes digital nomadic fashion. These are all tested models that could accompany economic developments in the field, at the same time that breeding its stakeholders in an innovative democratic context.
Located at the crossroads of all these types of innovation spaces, the "WoeLab" model proposed by Sename thus presents itself as a "Space for Technological Democracy" entirely dedicated to positively impacting its neighborhood.
Sename has been promoting this original approach to African third places since 2012 through an experiment called "HubCity". This entirely self-financed concrete utopia aims to deploy in Lomé, the capital of Togo, a network of grassroots incubators dedicated to launching a series of cohorts of urban innovation startups whose synergy could bring out Smart-districts around WoeLabs. It has become a very well-known initiative worldwide pioneering the reinvention of the concept of Smart-City.
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