EFFEKT designed new sustainable homes for local communities in Almere, Netherlands, which yields organic food production and energy for self-sustaining urban eco-communities '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. ReGen Villages will be presented at the Danish Pavilion during the Venice Biennale.

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 power positive homes, renewable energy, energy storage, local organic food production, vertical farming aquaponics/aeroponics, water management and waste-to-resource systems.

With the integration of such technologies, ReGen Villages holds the potential of radically changing the conditions of a rapidly 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 is about more than reducing. It is 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, where people become part of a shared local eco-system, reconnecting people with nature and consumption with production. An eco-system that restores high biodiversity in the surrounding landscapes due to a significant smaller production footprint.

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.

Project Facts

Project name: ReGen Villages

Typology: Master plan, residential, agriculture

Location: Almere, The Netherlands

Year: 2016

Status: Ongoing

Size: 15.500 m2

Client: ReGen Villages

Collaborators: James Ehrlich

Design Team: Tue Hesselberg Foged, Sinus Lynge, Kasper Reimer, Esbjen Jensen, Toni Rubio Soler, Christoffer Gotfredsen, Laura Gobbi, Yulia Kozlova, Lavinia Andreea Marcu, Evgeny Markachev, Weronika Marek, Rikke Aaskov

All images courtesy of EFFEKT

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