Ecovillages

Ecovillages are communities where people aim to live in harmony with each other and with nature.

This page is part of an ongoing, open-ended online collaborative database, which collects relevant approaches that can be used by city-makers to tackle unsustainability and injustice in cities. It is based mainly on knowledge generated in EU-funded projects and touches on fast changing fields. As such, this page makes no claims of authoritative completeness and welcomes your suggestions.

General introduction to approach

Ecovillages are communities where people aim to live in harmony with each other and with nature. The Global Ecovillage Network defines an ecovillage as an “intentional, traditional or urban community that is consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes in all four dimensions of sustainability (social, culture, ecology and economy) to regenerate its social and natural environments” (Website GEN 2017). While this definition explicitly includes traditional villages, we in this Wiki-page focus on the intentional community version of ecovillages in both (peri-)urban and rural areas. The Foundation for Intentional Community defines an intentional community as “a group of people who live together or share common facilities and who regularly associate with each other on the basis of explicit common values”, which includes ecovillages, but also cohousing, cooperative houses, communes and other shared living arrangements.

While there are many fundamental differences between all hundreds/ thousands of specific ecovillage projects across the world, there is an overall shared approach that can be characterised as living in community with several connected households, engaging in collective life-style change striving for (more) socio-ecological justice and participation, and very often the collective ownership of land and (some of the) houses. The TRANSIT research project includes a number of case-studies on ecovillages and the Global Ecovillage Network as manifestations of social innovation in the sense that they explicitly engage with changing social relations, involving new ways of doing, thinking and organising (Kunze & Avelino 2015).

The Pathways project includes a case-study of Bromarf ecovillage in Finland as an example of alternative “transition pathways as patterns of changes in socio-technical systems unfolding over time that lead to a fundamental reconfiguration of technologies, business models and production systems, as well as the preferences and behaviour of consumers”.

The Transformative Cities initiative features Cloughjordan ecovillage in its Atlas of Utopias as an example of “inspiring stories of communities challenging entrenched power and boldly developing alternatives” and “cases [that] show how public solutions, based on principles of cooperation and solidarity rather than competition and private profit, have been more successful in meeting people’s basic needs - and, perhaps just as importantly, in creating a spirit of confidence and empowerment that strengthen communities for many other challenges”.

Shapes, sizes and applications

Estimations on how many ecovillages exist in the world today highly depend on (self-appropriated) definitions and vary from 4.000 to 15.000 ecovillages (Jackson 2004, Kasper & Schyndel 2008). The Global Ecovillage Network mentions over 1.000 ecovillages across the world. The Eurotopia directory (1998-2014) indicate a high fluctuation and increase in projects who call themselves ecovillage. 90% of these new community attempts are reported to fail in the first 5 years, due to the challenges of finding affordable land and planning permissions, and to maintain self-sustaining economies (Dawson 2006, Avelino & Kunze 2009).

Ecovillages often function as ‘experimental gardens’ (Kunze 2012) to experiment with a diversity of approaches to tackle ecological sustainability and/or social justice, ranging from permaculture, ecological construction of houses (e.g. strawbale houses , earthships , and low-tech technological innovation in e.g. renewable energy), to experiment with alternative decision-making formats such as sociocracy (see e.g. TRANSIT case-study on Ecovillage Bergen) or alternative modes of (non-violent) communication and community-building.

Ecovillages come in many shapes, sizes and sorts. If we exclude traditional villages (which are often much larger), the size of intentional ecovillage communities range anywhere between 8 to 250 residents. More importantly, however, are the many visitors that temporarily visit and work in ecovillages. Most ecovillages have an explicit aim to contribute to the transferability of their approaches and “act as centres of research, demonstration and (in most cases) training” (Dawson, 2006). Many ecovillages are a member of the Global Ecovillage Network, which was founded in 1995 as a bottom up network for education, exchange of experiences and political lobby work and has branches on each continent and many national networks. Within these international, regional and national networks, ecovillages share the insights from their ecological, technological, economic and social experiments at events and through the open source Solution Library.

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

While there are several ecovillages that are integrated in urban contexts, the majority are located in peri-urban or rural areas (Moore & Wight 2007). Although many ecovillages would like to be (more) integrated in and connected to urban contexts, they tend to be impeded from that by high land prices and tight zoning regulations (Kasper/Schyndel 2008).There are however many developments in the urban context that can be related or even traced back to the ecovillage movement, such as the [Transition Towns] movement or eco-city projects such as the BedZed project(Avelino & Kunze 2009). The global ecovillage movements has widened its orientation from merely ‘creating more ecovillages’ to transfer and translate ecovillage learnings to mainstream society through e.g. retrofitting urban contexts or diffusing ecological designs and lifestyles such as e.g. the Tiny House movement (ibid).

A particular feature of the ecovillage movement is its holistic emphasis on connecting ecological, economic, social and cultural dimensions of sustainability. The Global Ecovillage Network and many individual ecovillages explicitly claim to not only tackle ecological challenges, but also social issues, by “reacting to the alienation of the individual due to institutionalisation of traditional support functions, the breakdown of the family, and the marginalisation of the weaker members of society” (Jackson, in Avelino & Kunze 2009). As formulated by a member of the European Global Ecovillage Network office: “The ecovillage movement is the most radical approach amongst the alternative movements because it touches all areas of life. […] The ecovillage concept is very complex, not many people can agree to it when they first hear about it.” (quoted in TRANSIT ecovillage case-study report Kunze & Avelino 2015).

Ecovillages are particularly interesting in their collective ownership models (see []co-living, co-working and intentional communities]]) and community land trusts, which they experiment with in many forms. Moreover, there is an interesting intersectional work on ecological justice, relating ecovillage approaches to peace activism and conflict areas. An interesting example to illustrate their international work at the intersection of ecological sustainability and social justice is the Global Campus Palestine (GCP) initiative, with experiments in e.g. Farkha village and the Hakoritna farm, regarding “traditional stone terracing and swales for rainwater retention, mixed-culture permaculture, composting toilet and a small biogas digestor”. The idea is that increasing self-sufficiency regarding water, food and energy can be a “power resistance tool” for marginalised communities is disenfranchised communities and conflict regions, which is an interesting example of how ecological and social justice can be combined. As formulated by Fayez Taneeb, the owner of the farm since 1984: “From Tamera I received the message that water, food, and energy are available to all humanity if we work with the laws of nature (...) That’s a powerful resistance tool, because water, food and energy are things that Israel does not want us to control.”

However, as the development of ecovillages implies large scale mobilizations of capital and material resources and often faces significant regulatory and institutional barriers they tend to reproduce, within their internal dynamics, hierarchies and exclusionary tendencies existing in wider society. All these factors underlie the tendency for ecovillages to be ‘susceptible to self-selective homogeneity, dogmatic purity, and assuming away cultural differences’, as well as become ‘habitats for demagogues’, vulnerable to cultic deviations, and experience high rates of attrition and failure.