REGEN VILLAGES THINK SMARTER, NOT SMALLER

ECO-COMMUNITIES designed to meet the challenges of the population explosion, urbanisation, resource scarcity and climate change while reconnecting with Nature: it sounds like utopia – but an innovative concept based on the ideas of a thought leader in organic living and closed-loop systems could show the way.

Stanford University spin-off company Regen Villages, in partnership with EFFEKT architects of Denmark, hopes to create a new visionary and regenerative model for energy and food self-sustaining eco-communities. The five pillars of the concept are: l Energy positive homes. l Door-step high-yield organic food production. l Mixed renewable energy and storage. l Water and waste recycling. l Empowerment of local communities. “Regen Villages is engineering and facilitating the development of off-grid, integrated and resilient neighbourhoods that power and feed self-reliant families around the world,” explains founder James Ehrlich, a technology entrepreneur who has self-funded regenerative organic food and bio-generator platform research and development. Regen stands for regenerative, where the outputs of one system are the inputs of another. The concept has a holistic approach and combines a variety of innovative technologies; for instance, vertical farming aquaponics/aeroponics and waste-to-resource systems.

“Regen Villages is all about applied technology. We are simply applying already existing technologies into an integrated community design, providing clean energy, water and food right off your doorstep,” says Sinus Lynge, co-founder of EFFEKT. “We like to think of Regen as the Tesla of ecovillages.”

Regen acquires land in collaboration with like-minded national and local municipalities and the idea is to remain in every project beyond completion, providing a concierge level of services to residents, by aggregating data and building algorithms to improve its mechanisms.

The first Regen Village pilot community is to be developed in Almere in the Netherlands, with 100 homes breaking ground in mid-2016. PM