ReGen Villages | EFFEKT architects

ReGen Villages, B.V. and EFFEKT architects create a new visionary and regenerative model for energy and food self-sustaining eco-communities.

What is ReGen Villages?
ReGen Villages is a tech-integrated real estate development company with the purpose of answering some of the world’s most pressing global challenges – social, financial and above all environmental.

“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 James Ehrlich, Founder of ReGen Villages, B.V.

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, such as energy positive homes, renewable energy, energy storage, door-step high-yield organic food production, vertical farming aquaponics/aeroponics, water management 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.

With the integration of such technologies, ReGen Villages holds a potential in changing some of the challenges of a growing population, increasing urbanization, scarcity of resources, the growing global food crisis as well as reducing the global CO2 emission and reducing the burdens on municipal and national governments in dynamically changing planetary and economic times. But ReGen Villages is not only about reducing environmental impact and national burdens. It is also about creating. Creating a better model for a sustainable future, where the current living standards can be sustained by thinking smarter, not only smaller. A model that adds not only environmental and financial value, but also social value by creating the framework for empowering families and developing a true sense of community, reconnecting people with nature and consumption with production. An eco-system that also restores high biodiversity in the surrounding landscapes due to a significant smaller production footprint.

“We like to think of ReGen as the Tesla of ecovillages. We want to make it easy, convenient and accessible to choose a sustainable lifestyle of the grid,” says Sinus Lynge, co-founder of EFFEKT.

Why are we doing this?
Half the global population today lives in cities. The massive growth is expected to continue with 2.5 billion people moving to the cities in the coming 50 years. The massive urbanization is causing rising land prices and in many cases difficulties supplying basic rights and necessities such as clean water, energy and food to the growing populations. ReGen Villages offer an alternative to the massive urbanization, enabling peri-urban and rural development and smart, mid-density urban retrofits with local supply of all resources that will lift burdens on struggling municipal governments at both ends of the population spectrum.

Climate changes is the single biggest environmental and humanitarian crisis of our time. We are emitting 150 times more greenhouse gasses than a hundred years ago. A development that continues fast and exponentially, with a growing world population and emerging middle class. Especially agriculture has become the largest driver of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental destruction.

“Today we spent 40% of the surface of our continents producing food. Food production is the single largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, the biggest driver of deforestation and responsible for 70% of our global freshwater consumption. We ship our food from one end of the world to another just to waste 30% of the total production before consumption - and still 1/7 of the global population goes to bed hungry - we just have to come up with better models and ReGen is one of them,” says Sinus Lynge, co-founder of EFFEKT.

The time has come to redefine residential real estate development for the next 3 billion people coming to the planet with ReGen Villages setting out to joint venture partner in community development projects all around the world.

How does it work?
ReGen Villages Development company is raising a significant amount of funding from sovereign wealth funds looking to divest from fossil fuels into impact and knowledge-based investments. ReGen then acquires suitable areas of land in collaboration with national and local municipalities committed to this kind of partnership and collaboration. ReGen’s team of regenerative platform technologists contract with local architecture, construction and engineering firms in each country and region to adapt and optimize the village model to the local conditions. ReGen Villages then remains in every project, managing these regenerative platforms as a concierge level of services to residents, by aggregating data and building algorithms that improve daily thriving mechanisms.

ReGen Villages is being featured at the Danish architectural pavilion at the Venice Biennale this May of 2016, and the first ReGen Village pilot community is to be developed in Almere in Netherlands, with 100 homes breaking ground in this summer of 2016. Multiple other pipeline developments will commence initially on sites across Northern Europe in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany – encompassing the northern climate region context for ReGen Villages.

Further development plans for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, UAE, MENA, Malaysia, India, China, parts of Africa and further into the U.S. and Canada are part of the global scale initiative for ReGen Villages going forward.

Who is behind the project?
The current concept is designed in collaboration with ReGen Villages, B.V. a Dutch holding company and Danish architects EFFEKT based in Copenhagen.

ReGen Villages was founded by James Ehrlich, a successful serial technology entrepreneur who has self-funded regenerative organic food and bio-generator platform research and development. ReGen Villages was inspired in part by a 2015 UN Sustainability Platform Report co-authored by James Ehrlich of ReGen Villages and Professor Larry Leifer and Chris Ford (AIA) from the Center for Design Research (Stanford University). The vision being to create a platform for redefining residential real estate development and retrofit projects at the neighbourhood scale that can be applied to peri-urban, rural and urban areas.

Facts about ReGen Villages:

Location: Multible locations, first prototype is planned in Almere, The Netherlands
Client: ReGen Villages
Architect: EFFEKT
Collaborators: James Ehrlich, ReGen Villages, Holding B.V.
Program: Concept, Masterplan, Residential, Agriculture
Area: 15.000 m2
Status: On-going, ground breaking scheduled for summer 2016 for Almere, The Netherlands
Illustrations credits: EFFEKT
Website: www.effekt.dk, www.regenvillages.com