Venezuelan-born urban planner specialising in digital fabrication and its implications for the future of cities and society. He is co-director and patron of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (http://www.iaac.net) where he is also a researcher and tutor. He collaborates in projects, events and programmes with the Fab Foundation (http://www.fabfoundation.org), such as Fab City (http://www.fab.city), Fab Conferences and Fab Academy (http: / / /www.fabacademy.org) around the world. He is currently Strategic Director of Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC, co-director of the Master in Design for Emerging Futures, as well as founding partner and Executive Director of the Fab City Foundation and the Meaningful Design Group Bali.
Tomas has participated in technological and social projects such as rehabilitation plans for marginal areas of Caracas, the Hyper-habitat installation for the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, the first solar house in Barcelona: the “Fab Lab House” for the Solar Decathlon Europe 2010 in Madrid, and the launch of Fab Labs in cities such as Lima (Peru), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Ahmedabad (India), Barcelona, among others. Tomas co-founded in 2010 the programmes “Fab Labs and Informalism” and “Smart Cities by Smart Citizens”, both research agendas towards the use of ICT for the development of citizen platforms for the production of the city, which led him to found the Smart Citizen project (http://www.smartcitizen.me). Smart Citizen was crowdfunded in two campaigns and has been part of different research projects within the European Union in the framework of H2020.
Their research focuses on understanding the relationship between technology and humans for the creation of a new economy based on distributed manufacturing infrastructure and data architecture, through open platforms on a global scale, which could enable the local production of (almost) anything in cities and human settlements around the world. Fab City Global Initiative is the main project integrating these research interests, which it leads together with individual and institutional partners such as the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, IAAC, the Fab Foundation, the Royal College of Arts, the Danish Design. Centre, Barcelona City Council, Paris City Council, among others.
