Ecovillage and Neighborhood Design

Why live in Eco-Villages? Is it the “Eco” or is it the “Village”?

This section by Natalie Topa

Whether you live in an apartment or in a suburb, you live within a system. At any scale, you can organize with fellow citizens and local leadership to improve and retrofit existing neighborhoods or plan ecovillages, co-housing and intentional communities. You don’t need to daydream about the time in the future when you can have your own home. Home is where the intention is.

As you know by now, ecological design is multi-dimensional, and there are physical (ecological and built spaces), social, and economic layers. As we look towards post-growth and bioregional economies, to physical community resilience, to increasing weather extremes, wherever you live you can connect with those around you to be more proactive in designing your resilient community space. There is a growing focus on bioregional planning, and being more connected to one another on smaller scales within our ecological contexts.

Self-reliance is a goal for some, for others, a sense of togetherness for safety, connection and sense of agency is what compels us towards designing our human habitats in an intentional and regenerative way. There are many ways to go about this and there are lots of things to think about. In this module, we explore some major themes in designing or evolving your community, village, neighborhood or cul-de-sac.

Introduction to the Eco-village and Neighborhood Design Module

​Neighborhood design

This section covers ways to have greater engagement in the physical realm and built environment in which you are currently situated. It explores ways in which to increase your civic voice in shaping how resources come in and out of your urban or suburban environment, and how mobility ties together the various elements of place.

Did you know that there are urban design indices that measure the success of cities and urban areas by the number of footsteps people take in a day? The idea is that they are livable, walkable, and economically and socially vital. But, aren’t there other things that come to mind when thinking of a successful city?

I came into urban planning from a small liberal arts college because I thought we were going to be discussing environmental injustice and working with the marginalized communities who get the garbage dumps, nuclear plants or casinos in their communities, because no one else wants them. When I started to realize how the built or physical environment can shape the human experience, I realized that all urban and built spaces should be built for someone like my mom, a low-income, immigrant single mother. She needs connection and social spaces to nurture her social capital as well as access to dignified economic opportunities with a livable wage (without having to spend hours per day commuting). She needed safety and security in her environment, enjoyable outdoor spaces where she can play with her child, access to safe, reliable and affordable public transit, and of course, reasonable access to affordable and healthy real foods.

This section is going to describe components of livable villages. I will describe ecovillages in two forms, one being where the majority of us are starting from: Their own urban, suburban or peri-urban neighbourhoods, and the establishing of an intentional community from scratch. I will keep in mind that, as in Bio-Construction, a “refit”, or starting with what you have, is often the more sustainable route to take. I will start with a few aspects to reflect on in the community where you live, and various elements of neighborhoods that can evolve to support a regenerative culture. I’ll be going through the Visible and Invisible Structures for both options.

Physical interconnectedness.

Why do we want to live in ecovillages? What is it about the idea of an ecovillage that is appealing? Is it the eco, or the village? I would argue that both of these are actually possible within the community you live in now. If we unpack the elements, we dig down into the infrastructure of where we live. In ecological food production systems, we stress planting water before we plant food.

In an urban area, what is the equivalent of that bare bones infrastructure that has to be in place? The skeleton on which to build a regenerative and holistic community design? When we peel back the homes, the grass, the retail, etc. it’s all about connectedness, the pattern is recurring in all communities. It may not seem like it, but the human built environment is a system. That doesn’t mean it has been well designed, but it is definitely a system.

A key element of place making in the urban or suburban realms is how we (users of the system) move throughout this system. Much of the world has comprehensive public transit systems, whether you go to London, Mexico City, Sydney, Bangkok or Delhi. In the US, we rely almost solely on fossil fuels and cars.

This is not an accident. As US cities were growing in the 1940s, so was commercial interest in the individual car industry. General Motors actively bought out the trolley lines in the western US and purposely deteriorated service and reliability, while ramping up aggressive marketing campaigns for the individual car. It worked. To this day, the fossil fuel and car manufacturing industries, along with highway authorities and governments for sale, have totally shaped the urban and even rural landscapes of the US.

What is the remedy? Seamless, convenient, reliable and integrated systems for mobility. When we refer to integrated or inter-modal systems, this refers to various modes of transportation systems that are integrated so that a person can easily move from one system to another. For example, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure that links with buses and fixed rail transit. In the most successful cities, a person can walk or rollerblade, push a stroller or wheelchair in a seamless, safe, convenient and reliable way from a sidewalk or bike path, onto a bus, light rail or metro, and can move conveniently between these systems.

Why am I focusing on transport in this module? Because wherever you live, you probably have roads, sidewalks, bike trails, etc. You probably have intersections and traffic signage and bus bays. These are usually planned by engineers without input from the user: You.

But you can have a voice. In the US and in much of the developed countries, there are local government departments who oversee these elements who usually have a method to communicate with them. If not, then create one. City council or Mayoral committees need to be the held to their responsibilities of leading for the citizens, and reminded that things like bike paths and public transportation must be prioritized. If they are, people of different ages and capabilities have greater options of moving throughout their community to access services, food, social events, work, etc. The transit systems are the swales of our neighborhood. Through community mobilization and active public participation, this can be innovated and improved on in your area. .

There is a global movement for Transit Oriented Development (TOD) which is the idea of having villages anchored by fixed rail public transit. In an urban or suburban area, this means vertical mixed-use development of medium to high density.

What does this mean? It means that in ¼ or ½ mile around a fixed-rail transit system (light rail, trolley car or metro/subway), there is a blend of land uses including (affordable) housing, retail, grocery, office space etc., which makes for a vital, economically and socially thriving environment. Find out which departments in your municipality are making the decisions around the transportation networks that shape your community, and get involved.

Water for resilience

Water for resilience is something every person should be thinking about and acting towards, whether you are in a tropical environment or drylands area or in the urban US or Europe. People in all types of areas are getting increasingly creative with how water is being harvested and stored. 

What is the source of water in your community and how can you apply your voice to ensure that it is heard by the local government that we are demanding systems that are more regenerative?

Let’s talk about big water and little water.

Big water.

As we know, it is extremely important to understand the resources we use (water, electricity, solid waste management, etc.) and where they come from.

For example, do you know if the lights in your urban apartment or suburban home come from coal? Diesel? Wind? It’s important to think about what we are using and where it comes from. If you look at big cities around the world, like Cape Town for example, they are experiencing major water crises.​

Cape Town currently has less than 10% of its water reservoirs left to supply its population until rains replenish the water stocks, which has been delayed by prolonged drought. It is high time that we raise awareness among our neighbors, families, schools, public offices and businesses, and make collective plans and commitments. Cities are becoming very innovative with water conservation, and you have received many insights throughout this course.​

You could also set up a local campaign for using LEED Certification for reducing the building footprints in terms of water use. You can lobby local government to incentivize the private sector to be innovative with their water use and disposal. For example, LEED Platinum certified buildings use composting toilets even in urban areas. This is feasible and we need to start campaigning locally in our communities to get more examples of this innovation, in partnership with the private sector and in public-private partnerships.

For example, the local government can decrease a requirement for the number of parking spaces (wasted real estate for developers) in exchange for innovation on water. Get creative, but get organized and get vocal. Look to progressive cities like Portland and Vancouver to see how they are transforming themselves to be more livable and regenerative.

Little water.

Little water refers to the household and neighborhood level water harvesting opportunities. These are what I refer to as structural water harvesting methods, including surface harvesting from rooftops, roads and gutters, to the recycling of household grey water. Grey water includes waste water from washing dishes and clothes, as well as from bathing. Brown water refers to toilet water. That also has value and can be filtered but can require a larger, biological system, which is usually more associated with municipal infrastructure or natural filtration systems on larger land. The longer we can have water cycling through our systems, the better.

There are so many opportunities to capture water where we are. Wherever you are on earth, unless you are in the North or South Poles, water falls where you are. It is free, clean and nitrogen rich. It is the easiest and cheapest water to access, and we are only limited by our imagination. So much can be done at the household level, but when neighbors work together, you can get into things like street level systems that involve cutting the street curb and gutter to borrow some of the water that is being ushered away. Roads are excellent water harvesting structures because they carry large volumes of water very quickly. That synergy of water can be directed and flowed into street planting medians, yards, storage containers, etc.

For people living in dense urban environments, roof top water harvesting is the strongest option. We already have building gutters and stormwater management elements, but they usually lose that water by sending it out on a long, expensive and degenerative journey that requires heavy energy to build and maintain, without the benefit of having the free clean water instantly. The best place to catch and store water is always right where it falls, not shipping it to another location many miles away just to be pumped back.

Study the water behavior where you are. When I train farmers, I tell them there are “Three thieves of water: Sun, wind and slope (gravity).” At your home, think about which thieves are stealing your water, and what you can do to mitigate this theft. This is a great starting point for mobilizing neighbors and community members to stand together and use both household and inter-home strategies for capturing this precious resource.

Neighborhood energy

​I’m also going to refer to energy by differentiating big energy and little energy.

Big energy.​

Big energy refers to the source of domestic and commercial power for your municipality, town, county or state. Wherever you live in the world, there is a primary source of fuel used to power homes and businesses. We know that fossil fuels are major contributors to climate change and there are cities all over the world that are transitioning into more regenerative methods of power. Be a part of that process, show up, lobby, vote, bring friends and neighbors and activate your voice.

There is so much innovation around clean energy in various parts of the world. Did you know that Portland is now being powered by the energy of flushing toilets that is being harvested through the pipes? Check it out. Plant energy is another example. Plant roots generate energy and there are now buildings with a pond on the roof with electrical grids that capture the electrical charge from the shallow pond plants.

There are solar and wind solutions. There are even regenerative options for hydropower that are implemented without damming water and impacting entire ecosystems. With careful design and the use of appropriate technologies (remember Kareen?) before implementing these, we might find that our energy demands have gone down, and we need less input from these and other energy sources, which all have their embodied footprint. Citizens can demand and vote for these shifts It is happening all over the world.

Little energy.

There is also little energy, that which can be generated or harvested at the household level. If you’re in a stand-alone home or in a neighborhood where resources can be collectively planned and shared, solar and wind energy are both viable options as is biogas. Also here we see lots of innovation, and costs are regularly becoming more affordable. It is important to think about ways to invest in your home that may appear higher as capital investment in upfront costs, but save huge amounts of money in the long term.

We are only limited by our imagination with this. Even at the community level, mobilizing neighbors to get LED or solar lights into the urban design starts to build a culture of a regenerative community, where the ethics and values of inhabitants are expressed in the community design and infrastructure.

A little caveat there that I want to say is that, about photovoltaics and solar power in general, it does require minerals that are often done in really poor conditions. In East Africa where I live, on this continent, minerals for cell phones and all this technology are mined in very exploitative conditions. That means children, women, and wars, if you look at Congo, if you look at South Sudan. You look all over the world in poor regions, you have this profit extraction from developed countries who can bring out the raw materials, manufacture them and provide jobs where they are, leaving the local community to just literally scrape through mud and artisanal mines and very poor operations. If we want to do solar sustainably, the practices of extraction need to be done in a more regenerative way.

Pocket parks and outdoor living rooms.​

When I was doing my Master’s Degree in Urban and Regional Planning, I had an Urban Design professor who was amazing. Earlier, I said that some people measure the success of cities by how many people are walking, by the number of footsteps taken per day on average in a given city. This Urban Design Professor taught us that you can’t measure the success of a city by how many people are walking, but by how many are sitting. She went on to explain that humans are like trout; we like to collect in the eddies and watch the river go by.​

Humans are social beings. This is why we like places in Paris or Florence with their street cafés and buzzing, vital street level activity. In the absence of real village centers, town squares, pedestrian malls or urban promenades, humans in suburban settings like to go to malls.

That’s right, shopping stations, often replete with waterfalls and spacious open corridors, where people can cruise all day and window shop. They may not actually interact, but are in one another’s accidental, casual human presence. This is very common in Kenya where I live. Other than malls and destination restaurants or locations, there is no place that acts as the village square. This has serious political implications as, increasingly, public gathering places are on privately owned land.

When that is the only place for humans to fraternize en masse, where is the place in the landscape for us to engage in democracy? Look at Washington, DC and the malls and monuments where protests and marches happen. With the privatization of civic space, where does democracy play out?

• The focus on public spaces is critical for a variety of reasons:
• It’s often the only place (in very dense urban environments), where we have expressions of nature and ecology.It can be an escape from the hustle and bustle, a place of respite.
• It often is a safe space for interacting with passersby, striking up a conversation and connecting with humans with whom you share physical space.
• It is a place for children to play, music buskers to perform, actors to have a public theater, protestors to have a voice and sign petitions.
• It is our community living room where we meet and have togetherness.

​This can happen in many ways, even a micro space can be an urban pocket park or an outdoor living room. It can be a formal park with outdoor furniture and manicured gardens. It can be a playground, or even a nook between buildings in a city block, where neighbors have made benches and a special gathering place, like the setting of a mystical secret garden.

Depending on where you live, there are many opportunities to combine forces with neighbors and friends to visualize and implement special places for outdoor living right outside your front door, even in public spaces. If working with municipal governments, citizens can persuade city planners, city councils or the mayor’s office to incentivize the private sector to include these visions as new construction plans are drawn up.​

The main idea is that you visualize the community you want to live in and work with community members, local authorities and business owners on the various ways to implement this. Get creative! A park doesn’t have to just be a room or a destination, it can also be a hallway, along a path or through an alley.​​

There is obviously a natural connection here with community gardens, though that is covered in another module. The message is, food can and should be grown everywhere, in public medians and planting strips along sidewalks, in parks and along trails, on rooftops, and even inside buildings, abandoned lots and warehouses. All of these areas can be part of the design that is envisioned by you and other community members.

Reclaiming your streets

Street reclaiming can be a long term or short term event. In the short term, neighborhood streets that experience higher levels of traffic can actively reclaim their streets by blocking out through traffic either with physical obstructions or activities. The idea is to cease traffic and replace it with community activities like BBQs, weddings, sports events, parties, etc.

This is a radical action, and I encourage people to be bold but understand what the implications may be in your particular area. Asking your town hall may well get you a permission, so do ask and present your neighbourhood project in the best light possible to get them excited too. In the longer term, however, there are other kinds of measures that residents can do to slow and eliminate traffic.

Longer term activities to reclaim the street are based in shifting the physical feeling of the street. Drivers tend to become more careless, reckless and faster in driving when they are used to a street and the street activity is predictable (imagine going around a mountain curve that you have done hundreds of times).

However, the more unpredictability we can create in a street or intersection, the more drivers are prone to slow down and feel much more cautious. When street vendors or planter boxes, market stalls or street activities like concerts, break dancing groups or buskers, etc. are moving through and modifying the street activity, they create more unpredictability, which is naturally traffic calming.​

Likewise, the more we shrink the space for vehicles and reclaim a portion of the street for bikes, rollerblades, plants, trees, food, gardens, etc. the more space for fast cars is minimized.

Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED).

Obviously, crime is a systemic issue and happens for a variety of reasons, often related to socioeconomic inequalities and mental health. From a social-systems perspective, it’s important to address root causes to reduce crime rates.

From a design perspective however, we need to think about how to prevent crime by alleviating its opportunities in the built environment. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is an option for communities suffering from violent crime and theft.

In CPTED, much of the focus is on scale and flow, i.e. how much transparency there is in the environment. For example, in some areas, it may be more important to have taller trees rather than bushes and shrubs so there is more visual coherence in the area. Nooks and crannies, dark corners, and hidden spots with poor visibility should be reduced or minimized.

Another element is lighting. Many cities have very tall cobra head street lights, the kind you see on highways that are oriented towards vehicular activity. However, these put out a very bright and concentrated light onto the road to illuminate the path of the car. The bright light creates stark darkness by contrast, which can pose a risk for pedestrians. Pedestrian-scaled lighting is human-scaled (shorter) with diffused and warmer light, so it creates a diffused glow that stretches further and creates a mild but much broader light. These types of urban design elements are desirable and attractive, while contributing towards greater urban safety. These design nuances make a big difference in placemaking.

​Wherever you are, whichever type of existing, urban or suburban community you live in, it is sure to be a dynamic and changing environment. Your community is shaped by the economy, by energy, by transportation, and by the behavior of its inhabitants. Whether you’re in a suburban cul-de-sac or in a dense urban high-rise, there are factors that shape the design of your built environment. If you can identify these factors and address them in your design work, you can create neighborhoods that are more regenerative, equitable and connected to ecology.

​Village design

This section covers various physical, social and economic aspects (visible and invisible structures) to consider when designing a new intentional or master-planned community, co-housing or ecovillage, including considerations about the users of the space, their lifestyles and belief systems.

Introduction to Eco-village Design

Planning a new community from scratch can be exciting and sometimes nerve-racking. That is for good reason! Human societies are complex and it’s hard to point to an ideal community where all human needs are met amidst complete equity and justice. Humans are still attempting to define the ideal model for civilization.

The good news is, you don’t have to design a plan for humanity, yet! Small and slow solutions! Let’s start with our circle of influence, and who knows, the rest of humanity might catch on to the model.

There are two aspects to ecovillage design: physical and social (visible and invisible). In the visible/physical we can include the built structures and their relationship to the ecology around them. In the social, we can include all the invisible structures, including economy, as that is a social agreement.

Physical aspect.

There is a broad spectrum of how to enter into intentional community living. I first became interested in this through the Danish co-housing during my Masters in Urban Planning 16 years ago, when the movement for communal living was already decades old.

There are a number of ways to go about entering into an ecovillage situation. From a legal and land development perspective, an individual or a company can buy a piece of land and develop it, and not necessarily have the intention of living there. In movements like New Urbanism, urban infill, or newly planned communities, they are real estate development projects like any other.

Nonetheless, in the New Urbanism movement, ethics and community priorities are reflected in the character and style of the development. These are often small, individual/single-family homes that are internally focused around a common green or communal gathering space. The idea is to return to the days of old where children could ride their bikes, and residents could walk to the local coffee shop, park or grocer without having to use a car.

This can provide an option for an improved sense of community, but doesn’t give residents much voice in the planning and design. In this instance, the developer/owner is erecting the structures on site and residents move into ready units.

A person or group of people who intend to live together can buy a large piece of land and divide it into plots and sell or rent those plots to newcomers. Often in co-housing situations, there is an arduous interview process to screen would-be residents for compatibility, alignment with the group’s values and ethics, and presumed willingness to put the effort into the collective vision. It could be that houses are built and sold, or that plots are empty and await development by the new residents to construct their own house in accordance with the vision of the community.

A group of people can buy land outright (or borrow) and collectively design and develop it for themselves, based on a shared vision referred back to continuously throughout the design and building process. The aim is to have a cohesive vision around which residents will be unified.

The legalities of ecovillages can take on every form of land ownership, from individually owned to shared leases and complex ownership agreements. The scale of ecovillages also spans a large spectrum of possibilities. A modest ecovillage includes a small number of homes situated within a minimally sized plot with more dense living conditions, less privacy, shared community assets and responsibilities.

For example, some ecovillages, including many co-housing communities, have a shared community and dining area. This means that residents have their individual homes, but share meal times with neighbors in a community kitchen or dining hall. There is a lot of shared time potentially through co-homeschooling, shared childcare, shared food production in gardens, and responsibilities around recycling and waste management.

On the larger side of the spectrum, ecovillages can be expansive master-planned communities with elaborately planned and integrated designs that even look like small cities, such as Auroville in India, Ithaca in the US or Findhorn in Scotland (funny how all three were founded by women!).

​From a design perspective, there are obvious considerations in planning an eco-village, including sector analysis and how and where to place, space and orient structure. Principles of earthworks and passively harvesting and managing water throughout the site play an important role.

The following are additional physical elements to be considered when planning an ecovillage, which are most often rooted in social and ethical priorities, depending on your aim.

Zoning. The ecovillage concept was originally conceived to reduce the ecological footprint of living in the modern world. Much of this can be anchored in the zones-and-sectors part of the ecological design process, understanding where energy is concentrated and how it dissipates throughout a site.

Internal focus. Many ecovillage designs are internally focused on remedying the social disjointedness that can be experienced in modern and conventional neighborhoods. Translated into a physical/visible solution, it could look like homes sited around a common area. This would bring greater transparency and informal surveillance among neighbors and properties, which would be especially useful where small children are involved. This is very helpful when having a communal approach to child rearing and integrating child-friendly design. Homes can be situated around a common green or even a central structure such as a community center equidistant from each house.

External access and vehicular orientation. The modern world is designed for the vehicle which has shaped cities large and small across the world. Many co-housing communities and ecovillages are based on a design that physically turns its back on the vehicle. That can take on many styles but generally, once vehicles enter the site, you can only take them in as far as a central parking space which then allows a network of foot or bike paths to dominate the site. This creates a human-scaled space where pets and children are free to roam without the threat of dangerous vehicles.

Common spaces. A recurring theme regardless of the size of the ecovillage is the use of common spaces. This is to increase convenience while decreasing costs and minimizing the ecological footprint. Examples of these include:

Greens/open spaces. ​The notion of the village green. A community gathering space where children can run free and play and the village has ample room for outdoor events and gathering.​

Greenhouses and gardens. ​One benefit of living together is sharing the burden of one individual or family. Many intentional communities will have shared garden and farm work, as well as livestock. However, there are also cases where space is rented in a community to a non-resident to produce dairy, for example, which is used by the community.​

Shared structure/built spaces. Another way of lowering building costs while increasing community interaction is to have shared built spaces and structures. It is typical to find a common building or community house where meals are shared and events are held, or just a casual community living room in which to relax together. In some communities, members have very small homes and eat meals together as a community in a shared kitchen and dining area. For others, there is a fine balance between nurturing the social elements and needing to maintain respectful space and individual privacy. Studies on ecovillage-designs offer guidelines that dwellings should ideally each be no further than 140 feet from the central community center.Clusters of farm homes in southern Poland outside of Zakopane along the border with Slovakia.Community Rice Harvest, Ubud Village, Bali, Indonesia 2006.Tented Camp for De-Miners, Aid and Development Workers

Social aspect, human governance, and scale

A lot of research has been carried out about the most effective way for humans to physically organize themselves. If we start to think of villages in an indigenous manner (thinking of the economic, social, ecological relationships between clusters of people, society if you wish), we can visualize how the size of groups of people living together in neighborhoods, within a larger village context, influences their impact on the larger scale systems they are nested in.

For example, a cluster of ten homes starts to share enough resources to make a viable economic impact and creates social functionality. Then, building out from that, if two more such clusters of ten families, anchored by their own nucleus of a community center, connect, we are talking 30 families, which is the point at which a living economy can begin.

We have concepts like Economies of Scale, where the cost of producing something gets cheaper as the organization grows, but only for so long. Too much growth and it is back to being more expensive. Combine this with the Dunbar’s number and we have guidelines for an ideal sized community.

​The Dunbar’s number study points out that the human capacity for maintaining meaningful relationships settles at around 150 people. That means that 150 individuals are, on average, the number of people the human brain can comfortably connect with while still being able to recognize them, their roles, their connections, etc. These ecovillages can then link up to larger bioregional economies whilst maintaining the positive and functional social relationships within their system.

Worldview, spirituality and ethics

People’s personal worldviews often compel them to seek out or create scenarios of socially minded collective and intentional living. People who find common ground on religion, spirituality or a values-based way of life can embark on a mutual effort to live out their ethical way of life for healing, personal growth or general personal fulfillment.

It is important to be clear on what your intentions and the intentions of others are when entering into a community commitment, to ensure there is philosophical alignment and a shared vision on how these ethics play out in the physical realm of the community.

Managing expectations.

Human governance is the most challenging part of creating or living in an ecovillage. This is evidenced throughout the world where people try to come up with new models and ways of living together.

There is a lot of literature available on various approaches to governance and decision making, including work on consensus building vs. majority rule. It can get very tricky when trying to bring structure to space, defining boundaries and expectation, agreeing on rules or dealing with the consequences when not abiding by those rules. This leads to mitigating and managing conflict, and the response to challenges in the human governance structure in general, which can include money.

There are strong economic benefits to different scales of co-housing, intentional communities and the larger ecovillages that lend themselves to scalable economic activities. It is very important, regardless of who is involved in the community, to understand what people are hoping to contribute and receive from a collective living situation, and what the legal and financial parameters are for all parties involved.

Creating a new ecovillage from a blank slate and envisioning family and friends living together in community can be exciting. Benefits include a sense of belonging and support from a group, cost savings and shared resources, security and safety of living, collective efforts towards regenerative food systems, and more.

​However, it’s important to be realistic and anticipatory about the types of problems that may arise over decision-making powers, financing, individual styles, and general personality differences. When entering a shared living scenario, invisible structures are as important as physical site planning, and design of individual and common spaces will have a direct impact on the success (or failure) of your community.

​Here are examples of villages and village life from various travels and work over the years:

If you live in an urban or suburban area, go out into your neighborhood and make a map of it. Observe and make a note of as many details as you can. Interview your neighbors, be it in your street or in your apartment block. Make a list of their names, jobs, interests, skills and needs. Use the Transition Towns tools if you want, they are very comprehensive. Come up with an activity to enhance your social structure locally. It can be as small as cat sitting for the neighbour in exchange for an hour’s use of her car. It can be as big as organizing a second hand swap or a mini festival in your street. Visualize it with your neighbors. Design it. Implement it.

If you live in a rural area, do the same. Make the map. Add distance and time needed to get to the next neighbor. Make your inventory of names, jobs, interests and skills just the same and organize a community-building activity.

Don’t get discouraged if you struggle to pull off the festival idea. Every big change starts with the tiniest of steps. Let us in on it. You are on your way!

​If you have land and want to start an intentional community on it, let us in on your plan. You have come a long way already in the course and you have plenty of tools to start designing. Highlight what you hadn’t yet thought of before this module and present us with your plan to implement.

How to build an ecovillage

An ecovillage is a whole-systems design. All of the same principles apply. In 5 easy steps?

1. Find the right people.

2. Find the right place.

3. Establish shared ethics and goals.

4. Make a plan.

5. Do the work.

As is obvious, each of these steps will need a lot of time, energy, and understanding! It’s real easy to say “I want build an ecovillage,” but the very best way to become adept at this skills you will need to build one is by spending some years living in one (or several.)

Here are a bunch of examples:

Exploring Earthaven Ecovillage, a 25-year old community

My Life in the Dancing Rabbit Eco Village

Wana Duma Eco-Village

LA ecovillage: self-reliance in car-free urban homestead

Ecovillage Design Education Documentary Auroville | Youth Link | GEN | Auroras Eye Films

O.U.R. Ecovillage Permaculture Based Sustainable Community

Maitreya EcoVillage

Medieval Spanish ghost town becomes self-sufficient ecovillage

Parting thoughts

Ecovillages sound exotic and are sometimes seen as the way out of the mess we are in. There is no easy escape though. We are going to have to work hard, and we are going to have to work together to make it as a species. If you have a large property that can hold a community, then you are amongst the privileged. If you also wish to share it with others to collaboratively reach a lower ecological footprint and enjoy a more harmonious lifestyle, then that for sure is noble. Hopefully you have gained some more insight out of this module, as well as motivation to get it set up.

Not having land doesn’t mean that you cannot live in an intentional community. On the contrary, it is probably less of an effort, as in embodied energy, to start with what you have, or as the principle goes: start at your backdoor. A refit of a house is the more sustainable option over a new build. It is also widely known though that refits cost more time and money, so prepare well, search out other projects across the globe, like Transition Towns for example, for inspiration and support, and don’t give up when things go slow when dealing with your administration. Bureaucracy has its fame for a reason, but if you keep pushing, things change.

Homework

This module is part of the advanced section of our course. If you are working toward the advanced certificate in social systems design, please work through the homework sections of these modules with a reasonable amount of enthusiasm. You can still consider the homework “optional,” but you will need to create extra layers associated with these modules in your final design, in order to qualify for the advanced certificate. The deeper you go, the more you will learn!

Questions for Review

​Think about where you live now. Refer to your base map and beyond.

1. What are the physical elements of your existing neighborhood that can be improved with: more seamless interconnectedness, safety, food, places to sit and contemplate, or even physical orientation and building materials to improve flow and sustainability?
2. Where does your neighborhood get its water?
3. Electricity?
4. Food?
5. Name steps that you could take to organize neighbors, friends, and community members to mobilize for change.
6. Which local public processes, public fora, committees or representatives could you engage with to activate new initiatives to address the opportunities you identified?

Shift your thinking, and focus on your dream ecovillage.

Answer these questions:

1. How much land?
2. What are the challenges of a plot too big or too small?
3. Are you going off-grid?
4. What are the pros and cons?
5. How many people do you want to live with? Are they friends and family that you know, or would you invite newcomers into the community?
6. Do you need to own the land outright? Or are there parcels of land owned by friends, family or foundations that you could use in exchange for something? Land borrowed from a retired couple in exchange for upkeep?
7. Food?
8. Services?
9. Adding value to the land?
10. What is the timeline?
11. Do you need to live there for 5, 10, 15 years or more?
12. What financing options do you have? Do you need a loan?

Recommended Hands-On

• Include common spaces and shared community resources in your design.
• Survey your neighbors and co-imagine ways to make your neighborhood more like a village.​
• If you live in an urban or suburban area, go out into your neighborhood and make a map of it. Observe and make a note of as many details as you can. Interview your neighbors, be it in your street or in your apartment block. Make a list of their names, jobs, interests, skills and needs. Use the Transition Towns tools if you want, they are very comprehensive. Come up with an activity to enhance your social structure locally. It can be as small as cat sitting for the neighbour in exchange for an hour’s use of her car. It can be as big as organizing a second hand swap or a mini festival in your street. Visualize it with your neighbors. Design it. Implement it.
• If you live in a rural area, do the same. Make the map. Add distance and time needed to get to the next neighbor. Make your inventory of names, jobs, interests and skills just the same and organize a community-building activity.
• If you have land and want to start an intentional community on it, flesh out your plan. You have come a long way already in the course and you have plenty of tools to start designing. Highlight what you hadn’t yet thought of before this module and present us with your plan to implement.