One of the first books I read in my village building journey was Together Resilient, by Ma’ikwe Ludwig, which is an incredible, data-backed examination of the impact of villages. Ludwig uses case studies and direct research to show how our ecological footprint is lower, our quality of life higher, and our lives literally longer in community. Fabulous read.

In this book, I was introduced to a concept that Ludwig herself developed, called the “Intentional Community Spectrums”, which asserts that communities differ from each other not in kind but in degree across a consistent set of design dimensions.

Spectrums reveal a village’s core values and vision. They address the vague notions of how ownership will be implemented, or what the attitude towards spirituality actually is.

I thought they were fascinating, and even took the time back in 2022 to do a minimal graphic version of the spectrums to share in a carousel:

Fast forward to early 2026. I’m mentally inventing different tools I think will be most useful to village builders. Two of my brain cells rub together, and the memory of the spectrums rushes to my mind.

I ask myself,

“What if I could use those spectrums to predict what type of community a project is?

What if I explored the conscious and unconscious design choices of those community types?

And WHAT IF I could diagnose the probable strengths and weaknesses of a project based off this resulting archetype?”

Well bam-boom, I have the idea for the Village Diagnostic Tool. Here’s how I implemented it.

My Methodology

Together Resilient first mapped 15 design dimensions.

Building on Ludwig’s foundation, I identified three critical gaps in the original framework. Ludwig wrote in the early 2000s, when communities looked different than they do now. She didn’t have language for ownership structure as a standalone dimension (who holds the asset is fundamentally different from how money flows). She had no dimension for residency and mobility—the rise of coliving, slow travel, and hospitality-integrated models created entirely new design questions. And her scale spectrum maxed out at village, leaving no room for network states or distributed models.

I expanded the framework from fifteen spectrums to eighteen, and revised the language everywhere to remove implicit value judgements.

Value Judgements

The intentional community movement in 2007 had strong ideological currents toward communal economics, consensus governance, and rural land stewardship as implicitly superior.

Ludwig's original language positioned the "full income sharing," "deep consensus," and "movement-driven" ends as the aspirational poles, and the "independent finances," "founder-led," and "quality of life" ends as compromises or less-evolved positions. The Terrenity revision makes both ends of every spectrum a legitimate design choice rather than a failure of character.

i.e. The original power structure spectrum used the poles "Flat Power" ↔ "Very Lopsided"

"Lopsided" is a loaded negative term that implies fragile unevenness, so the left pole reads as aspirational while the right pole carries moral condemnation rather than simply describing a design choice.

I evolved the poles into "Fully Distributed" ↔ "Founder-held Authority” and explicitly noted that founders often carry greater risk and liability, so both are legitimate design choices.

I also added more nuanced steps in between the extremes. Ludwig named each pole, and sometimes a middle step, but it was largely left to personal assessment to decide what the middle looked like (which decreases standardization and data control)

This resulted in developing 11 archetypes with 2 kinds of subtypes based on management style or location. I was very satisfied with the working and reworking that I did to arrive at these archetypes, their corresponding names, and the taxonomy as a whole.

The Surprise Archetype

Then came WuWei, a project in Guatemala I’m working with that broke my 10 archetypes framework. It had residential co-ownership, a professional hospitality operation, residents launching enterprises with revenue-share flowing back to the commons, and a deliberate commitment to local economic benefit.

On paper, it should have matched one of my existing archetypes. It didn’t. It fell between categories, and wasn’t one or quite the other.

That gap forced me to ask new questions: What about a community’s relationship to commercial revenue? What if members aren’t just living there, but building enterprises within the ecosystem? What if the hospitality layer is deliberately designed as a pipeline from guest to co-owner?

Four new spectrums emerged from that analysis—Revenue Architecture, Social Regeneration Commitment, Member Economic Participation, and Hospitality Function.

WuWei resolved cleanly into a new archetype, one I call Regenerative Development. Honestly, I should have seen it sooner, because it’s the most popular model today, as traditional real estate collides with regenerative village building. The old framework from Ludwig’s spectrums couldn’t have named this type, because it hadn’t yet been popularized in her time.

Feature Peep — Check out the Diagnostic Tool

The v1 tool is simple:

1. Draggable spectrums to select where on the spectrums a project falls

2. Instant report given in exchange for an email with archetype name, subtype, history, strengths, weaknesses, residency advice, and my professional take on this community type.

Most tools used to classify intentional communities ask you to choose: Are you income-sharing or independent? Consensus or hierarchical? Rural or urban? Spiritual or secular? The problem with binaries is they force real communities into false choices. The vast majority of communities don’t sit at the extremes. Instead, they’re hybrid, evolving, and intentionally positioned between the poles.

A quiz-based diagnostic can’t capture that. It forces you to pick a box. A spectrum reveals where you actually stand. This is why I coded the diagnostic tool so you can interact with draggable spectrums:

What’s coming next: paid deep dive reports, and the full typology of communities where you get to see all the archetypes.

This tool is not available to the public (yet), but you can be a beta tester

I built this tool for three use cases:

• Community founders who want to quickly put a finger on the pulse of what they’re actually building, and reveal their design assumptions that will cost them buckets of money down the road.

• Community seekers who want to figure out which community is structurally right for them. I’ve taken short quizzes assessing which community is right for me, but it was kind of like a culturally-focused, somewhat shallow personality quiz and not a values examination.

• Community consultants (like myself) who want to use a reference tool to understand the communities they are advising, and detect blind spots or design contradictions early.

If you’re curious about the build process, and want to be a beta tester with first access and ability to customize the diagnostic tool, sign up for this Friday’s webinar, June 12th at noon PST. This webinar is free for paid Substack subscribers

Sign up for the webinar

Subscribe now

The diagnostic tool is promising because it will expand our vocabulary for community design.

The ongoing principle behind all of this is simple: most founders are operating with borrowed language. They call their project an ecovillage because that’s the label available, not because it’s accurate. They say “commune” when the community doesn’t have income sharing, or “coliving” when they really mean cohousing, because they don’t have better words. Or like my dad, all those words are too strange, and they settle on something neutral like “family compound” to describe their communal property.

The archetype framework gives builders and seekers precise vocabulary by showing them where their actual design choices land relative to the full range of known community models.

And I’m floored to share it with you.

So sign up for the webinar to start your beta access, and let’s start building.

In my recent notes, I’ve been complaining about people ‘posing as experts’ and ‘treating villages like a trend.’

Then I realized: I was just jealous.

Jealous that cool girls are writing carousels that get more views than my anthropological research. Jealous that newbies to community-building are building huge followings while I’m still struggling for reach after 8 years of lived experience.

In the lack of visibility, I felt like my expertise and the lived experiences of villagers who’ve been fighting for this recognition for decades was being dismissed.

And that jealousy was about to make me gatekeep something that I care to my bones about, which is building villages.

So I pivoted. The main aim of the original article was to label the binary of modern village building approaches I’ve seen, which I call aesthetic revillaging and structural revillaging.

Instead of assigning superiority (like I was going to), we’re going to examine how these different camps actually need each other.

The risk I was afraid of

Aesthetic revillaging has been appearing in potluck carousels, influencer content on being a villager, and flashy monthlong pop-up villages in exotic locations. It’s what has been getting all the attention.

Of course, I was apprehensive that this could “village-wash” the movement, and I had already seen it start to happen in the form of AI-generated carousels oversimplifying community to just shared meals and group chats.

Marketing analysts have noted how brands have shifted from selling sex to selling community. As both a marketing tactic and a trend, aesthetic revillaging captures what draws people to community — belonging. Notions of belonging are easy to sell, because our primal need to belong compels us so deeply.

Meanwhile structural revillaging has been innovating in governance design, land acquisition, and conflict navigation for decades. My commitment to building villages ignited when I realized that it affords us the opportunity to fundamentally redesign how we live by taking back the control over our environmental systems.

My emotions were a cocktail of happiness at seeing village building take off and disgust at feeling like this new version would cheapen the vision. I was afraid that in all this noise, we’d get tacky, knock-off, pseudo-sustainable communities rather than the real solar punk world I want to build.

But I realized…

These approaches are not in competition—they’re incomplete without each other.

Structural revillaging has been a “grungy alternative lifestyle” for too long. Pioneers with their heads down have been doing the hard, unglamorous work. But rarely do they look up (or rarely do they have the bandwidth) to translate the findings of their work to be legible in mainstream contexts.

The thing is, structural revillaging NEEDS better marketing, visuals, storytelling, and aesthetics to reach people.

And aesthetic revillaging is making villages accessible to people who wouldn’t have discovered them otherwise.

Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and while I still think that structural revillaging is the end game, we can certainly combine the best of both.

The strengths & weaknesses of aesthetic revillaging

This type of revillaging focuses on the outwardly pretty aspects of community, of which there are actually many: sitting in circles, sharing meals, belly laughter, caring for each other’s children, being in nature, growing old together, and more.

Aesthetic revillaging strengths

• Makes community feel attainable, not intimidating

• Meets people where they are (scrolling Instagram, not reading 50-page ecovillage manifestos)

• Normalizes being a villager and creates cultural permission (“if they’re doing it, maybe I can too”)

• Acts as the on-ramp that gets people curious enough to go deeper

This approach is being practiced by content creators, creative professionals, event producers, and other cultural columnists who are brilliant in storytelling and skilled at visual curation.

Aesthetic revillaging weaknesses

• Oversimplifies the idea of a village and applies it broadly

• Doesn’t address deeper issues of social justice, intergenerational support, and emotional labor, to name a few.

• Usually fits into existing paradigms rather than challenging extractive systems

• Lacks the resilience and coordination for long-term impact and typically finds ways to bypass the uncomfortable or confrontational parts of community

Real community doesn’t let you stand at the center. It demands you decenter. It asks you to regenerate yourself, confront your shadows, and grow past the version of you that thought belonging would come easy.

This is quite difficult in mainstream media where you’re expected to have “main character energy” all the time.

The strengths & weaknesses of structural revillaging

Structural revillaging is what it sounds like—infrastructure, buildings, systems, and assets that support physical, intergenerational villages.

Structural revillaging strengths:

• Builds resilient systems that last beyond individual enthusiasm in the form of physical villages that support a better way of life

• Creates interdependence through shared land, pooled resources, and financial cooperation that make mutual aid automatic, not heroic

• Holds people accountable to grow because proximity makes your patterns visible and you can’t easily ghost when things get uncomfortable

• Restructures survival away from individual consumption by coordinating resources.

• Innovates on new governance, economics, and social technologies at local scale

This approach is being practiced by land-based ecovillages, co-housing communities, community land trusts, cooperative developers, and long-term intentional communities that have been refining regenerative community models for decades.

Structural revillaging weaknesses:

• Inaccessible entry points like buying land, navigating legal regulations, and understanding governance models require resources, time, and knowledge most people don’t have

• Poor storytelling where decades of innovation in cooperative living remain largely undocumented or told in academic/coded language that doesn’t reach mainstream audiences

• A rustic reputation that is often perceived as fringe, alternative, or only for people willing to sacrifice comfort and aesthetics

• High barrier to entry that requires confronting your shadows, navigating conflict, and tying your financial survival to others, which feels terrifying if you’ve been conditioned toward independence

• Slow to scale, because building physical infrastructure, acquiring land, and developing operational systems takes years, not months

The unglamorous reality is that structural revillaging is messy, uncomfortable, and requires systems, skills, and emotional capacity most of us weren't socialized with.

These communities are living laboratories that are testing what humanity needs to know about cooperative living, regenerative economics, and designing societies that actually work for everyone. But it’s practically impossible to find good stock photos of physical villages online.

Why they need each other

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: aesthetic revillaging and structural revillaging aren’t competing visions. They’re two halves of the same movement, and we’re crippled without both.

Aesthetic without structure creates unsustainable hype. People get excited, gather for potlucks, create group chats, maybe even attend a pop-up village. But without governance systems, conflict resolution skills, or shared ownership models, that energy dissipates the moment things get hard. Inspiration without infrastructure can’t weather storms.

Structure without aesthetic stays hidden from mainstream audiences. For decades, brilliant experiments in cooperative living, regenerative economics, and community governance have been happening in ecovillages and intentional communities worldwide. But most people have still never heard of sociocracy, community land trusts, or consensus decision-making because the people doing this work haven’t prioritized storytelling. The movement has stayed fringe, available only to those willing to dig through obscure forums and self-guided study.

Aesthetic revillaging gets the attention, but structural revillaging gets the results.

If the movement stops at aesthetics, and we treat village as lifestyle content instead of survival infrastructure, then we’ll build a trend that fades when the algorithm moves on.

But aesthetic revillaging isn’t the enemy. It’s the on-ramp. It’s how people learn that community is even possible. It’s the potlucks and group gatherings that can eventually lead someone to say, “Hey, what if we actually lived together?”

If the village building movement stays stuck in structure without learning to tell better stories, then we’ll keep the innovations locked away in insular communities most people will never discover.

The future requires people who can do both. And it requires aesthetic and structural revillagers recognizing what the other provides.

So how do we actually merge these approaches so that revillaging doesn’t just “have its moment”, but becomes a mainstream movement?

My breakthrough

I was horrified when I realized I was becoming a tone police officer. This kind of voice can be helpful to guide standards, but also sows discord in social movements and makes them unwelcoming places.

My job isn’t to dictate who gets to talk about community.

My job is to do the deep work AND tell better stories about it.

What I’m learning is that there’s an assumption in traditional village building that it needs to be unglamorous, serious, hard work. And often times that is what is required. But the serious attitude is kind of like leftover trauma from living in authoritarian paradigms. If we can’t have fun while we build a solar punk world, something’s wrong.

So What Do We Do?

I am committed to making villages mainstream.

Here’s what I’m resolving to do:

I’m going to stop resenting the aesthetic revillagers. They’re doing something I haven’t done well enough. I wasn’t making this movement feel possible to people who aren’t going to read a 3,000-word essay about societal redesign.

And I’m going to get better at storytelling. At visuals. At making structural revillaging feel as exciting as it actually is.

If you want to see some of the more accessible content I’ve been creating on village building, check it out:

Terrenity Instagram

Because the movement doesn’t need gatekeepers. It needs people willing to do the deep work AND people willing to make it beautiful. It needs village nerds AND content creators. It needs land-based communities AND pop-up villages that plant seeds.

It needs both. And I almost forgot that, because I thought being a “thought leader” meant doling out harsh criticism for what doesn’t meet the standard.

If you’re revillaging aesthetically, keep going. You’re the on-ramp.

If you’re revillaging structurally, document it better. Tell the stories. Make it visible.

And if you’re doing both—you’re exactly what the movement needs.

— Nicole

PS If you’re a village builder, seeker, or community member, help us understand what’s actually working. Take the 2026 Village Building Trends Report survey and contribute to the data that this movement needs.

Support Terrenity

As a village builder writing in the service of a solar punk future, I’m determined to keep Terrenity free to read and publicly available for everyone.

Producing Terrenity, however, is not free.

If this work matters to you and you’re able to support it, please consider a paid subscription and help keep Terrenity going for as long as it’s needed.

Subscribe now

Or if you liked this article, you can leave a tip at ko-fi.com/terrenity

Online blogs were showing me a version of environmentalism and the kind of alternative, plant-based lifestyles that resonated with me (at the time), built on fantasies of getting away mainstream society.

And I was sold. This was my path. This was where I’d belong.

I’d be barefoot in nature, surrounded by fellow vegans eating mangos with big smiles on our faces. We’d grow our own food, live simply, and create the kind of belonging I’d been searching for my entire life. It would be idyllic. Easeful. We’d only cook vegan food. It would be refuge from a world that never quite made sense to me.

What I didn’t realize was that I was seeking the feeling of community, and my best guess at what community would feel like having grown up in a traumatically divorced family and carrying with me a childhood of numb grief.

Maybe in community I could find the acceptance, the connection, and the sense of coming home that I didn’t get growing up.

But I had no concept of what that would actually demand of me. I thought everything would be easy once I found my people. I thought I’d finally feel seen, and that would be enough.

I was wrong.

The person I had to become in order to become a villager

The first thing community asked of me was vulnerability I didn’t know I had to give.

When I was younger I was such a people pleaser that I struggled to tell people “I have to pee, can we stop?” while traveling long-distance in their car.

My childhood rewarded me for keeping my needs small and easygoing. I was the youngest of three, the last, the forgotten—coming after my Mensa-level brilliant brother and my special needs sister who required all the attention.

This turned into a part of myself that struggled to take up space. I call her The Adapter.

Besides that, confidence wasn’t in my toolbox. My introversion and self-rejection got amplified in groups, not dissolved. Multi-person conversations gave me anxiety, because I didn’t know where to enter.

But here I was, so committed to the idea of community that I was willing to walk on my own personal coals.

And when I quit my life to go visit ecovillages on my anthropological studies, suddenly I was living in jungle in Costa Rica with 100+ people who needed me to communicate. To show up. To say what I needed and ask for help and navigate conflict instead of withdrawing or using my other avoidant tactics.

The work was unglamorous.

It wasn’t blissful meditations and barefoot gardening, although those happened too. It was learning to sit in a circle with a talking stick and fearlessly speak my truth to a group that was grumpy, tired, and emotionally charged.

It’s no surprise that everyone brings baggage to community settings. Sometimes I can’t tell what’s more true: that community inevitably highlights our shadows, or that community attracts people seeking to escape their shadows.

The hardest part and identity breakdown

Life also changed. In 2023, I developed a mysterious illness that resulted in hormonal acne and fatigue. After a year of trying everything, I met a nutritionist while I was living at La Ecovilla in Costa Rica who was a champion of ancestral diets.

Despite my skepticism, I listened to the science he shared. I was desperate, so I decided to try eating animal products again after 12 years of a plant-based diet. Within a week and a half of eating eggs and meat, the illness cleared. It was almost entirely gone in a month.

For my health, I could no longer be vegan. Nor could I access the moral superiority the lifestyle once provided. This completely changed my identity, and my concept of what I was really looking for in community.

After that, a sturdier vision for belonging started to take shape for me.

I let the aesthetic of community fade, and discovered that community was a pathway to a better world, and a better me.

What gave me guidance

It was a blessing that I discovered the Global Ecovillage Network early on. Following GEN’s work was like following the constellations in the sky instead of a boy scout compass.

Even though I’ve been part of sexy regenerative neighborhood startups and pop-up village network states, I keep returning to the work that GEN continues to tend to, like a patient gardener.

GEN, which was founded the same year I was born, has been the wisdomkeeper of this movement since 1995. Their international team tends to the regions of their nonprofit on all 5 continents, and they have chapters to train the next generation of village builders.

They taught me that this global movement has been building for decades, long before people “discovered” potlucks for community building on Instagram last year.

I would argue that they are one of the primary reasons I dedicated my career to building villages, because they made me realize that this is one of the most important social movements of our time. Choosing the earth over profits and cooperation over competition are the beating heart of an ecovillage.

Now, 10 years later, I’m only more convinced that the village model is the most viable solution to redesign society. Living in a village means that Earth Day isn’t relegated to a box on the calendar of the chugging empire, but you live it every day.

Since it is Earth Week, I wanted to highlight that GEN is running a fundraiser right now through Big Give’s Earth Raise, and until April 29th, every donation made through their campaign page is doubled automatically.

This year the funds go toward the International Ecovillage Research Institute they launched in 2025, an upgraded platform co-created with FIC that maps and connects ecovillages worldwide, and the Core Circle work strengthening regional engagement across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

If this work has ever meant anything to you, this week it costs half as much to say so.

I didn’t figure this out alone. I followed elders. I learned from the work they’ve been doing for 31 years. They are the giants whose shoulders we stand on:

Support GEN

The real promise of community

Letting important conversations die inside my throat, avoiding accountability because flaws were shameful, and not letting myself have needs were my coping mechanisms to receive love as a child.

Looking back, community helped me heal those unmet needs. Community taught me what my family couldn't.

Sharing my life with others made me brave enough to overcome my terror to initiate a sticky conversation. I learned how to suck it up and be accountable when I messed up, without betraying my own truth. And not least, to ask for support when I was struggling (and even when I was doing great) instead of performing competence.

And that process—messy, uncomfortable, constantly humbling—changed my life.

Directly or indirectly, my relationship to the collective has fueled my personal growth. You’re sort of forced to evolve when you share life with others on such a deep level, but community also gives you the tools to fast track your growth.

But it’s not all wading through a swamp.

Yes, I have felt such profound levels of acceptance and being seen as a result of living in community. I have received support in community so touching that it made my whole heart sing. But that didn’t come from finding my perfect people. It came from doing the hard work of becoming someone who could actually show up as my authentic self in community.

Community didn’t hand me belonging. It gave me the structure that demanded I grow into someone capable of belonging.

Which I think is the more beautiful story anyway.

-Nicole

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As a village builder writing in the service of a solar punk future, I’m determined to keep Terrenity free to read and publicly available for everyone.

Producing Terrenity, however, is not free.

If this work matters to you and you’re able to support it, please consider a paid subscription and help keep Terrenity going for as long as it’s needed.

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I’ve seen this phrase plastered across Instagram carousels, think pieces, and self-help threads for months now. It’s framed as a damning diagnosis of modern selfishness, where we want support, but we refuse to give it.

But the claim is incomplete.

I’ve spent eight years living in ecovillages, colivings, and intentional communities. I’ve watched people transform from isolated, burned-out individuals into deeply connected villagers. And I can tell you: the problem isn’t that we don’t want to show up. It’s that the systems we live inside have made it nearly impossible.

This article is for anyone who's seen that phrase and felt a pang of guilt. For anyone who wants to show up but doesn't know how. For anyone who's been shamed for being 'too busy' when they're actually just trying to survive.

So let’s confront the challenges (and their small solutions) that we have in front of us to becoming modern villagers, including the idea that we’re all so selfish that we don’t want to.

The Problem with “No One Wants to Be a Villager”

This statement is often framed as an accusation.

Internet-search the phrase and you’ll find pages of articles with identical titles.

One of these authors1 writes,

“We long for community and a sense of belonging, for people to show up for us when life gets hard. And yet, when that same community needs us, we hesitate. We're busy. We have our own problems. We want connection, but we don't want the inconvenience that comes with it.”

This is definitely a reality, but it’s framed wrong.

While people are focusing on these as individual failures, they're actually designed outcomes of systems built on isolation.

Which brings me to my frustration. Writers on this subject seem to leave out the systemic ways in which we’ve been robbed of the ability to show up as a villager:

1. Environment — where our community members live in relationship to us and the spaces available to us that foster community

2. Time — having ample time and energy to show up for the village

3. Skills — the ability to organize collectively and navigate the village interpersonally.

4. Narrative — how we perceive ourselves and value the collective

Yes, some people genuinely are selfish. But pathologizing individuals for being exhausted, under-resourced, and relationally inexperienced is not only cruel — it's useless. Shaming people into better behavior doesn't work. Building systems that make showing up easier does.

To say we don’t want to be villagers is just not correct. We want crave to share life with others, but we have to dismantle the systems that turned it from a natural and easeful part of living, into a commodity you have to fight for alone.

Environment - How to overcome the structural barriers that have physically divided the village

Not too long ago, I was sick as a street dog. I had a deep respiratory infection, my whole back was in pain from coughing, and I was feeling emotional anguish. I dropped a simple message in the group chat of the intentional community I live in: “really not doing well, in a lot of pain”. Immediately, 5 different people visited my apartment back-to-back to bring me medicine, give me massages, bring muscle relief patches, and chat with me to make me feel better.

It really struck me how this would not be possible if they lived across town. It was only a feature of my life because I live in close, intentional proximity to people I care about.

Unfortunately, urban design has physically divided the village so that we aren’t living in intergenerational clusters. Where we live is sooner decided by proximity to work, affordability, or even our romantic partner, before our family and community members.

In the same stroke, third spaces have been removed from our public commons. There are fewer places to gather, and fewer forums for our community relationships to take shape.

We could fill books with the history of redlining, highway construction, and single-family zoning. Instead, let's focus on what we can actually do about it.

Small Solutions:

You don’t have to move to a land-based ecovillage to be a villager.

Urban revillaging works with apartments, neighborhoods, and existing infrastructure. The barriers are the same, but the solutions adapt to your context.

• Crawl: Find your third spaces Pick a consistent location where you’ll show up regularly, like a coffee shop, park bench, community garden plot, or the stoop of your building. Make it predictable. It should be the same place, same time every week. Let people find you there.

• Walk: Co-locate with intention Move within walking distance of people you want to share life with. Recruit friends to the same apartment building, block, or neighborhood. Create a neighborhood map of who’s where and start a group chat for your micro-village.

• Run: Build shared physical infrastructure Join or create co-housing, pocket neighborhoods, or cooperative living arrangements. Pool resources to buy a multi-unit building together. Advocate for zoning changes that allow accessory dwelling units, mixed-use development, and community land trusts.

The main takeaway is that land use is the root of our isolation.

Time - How to turn obligation & inconvenience from luxuries into shared life

I don’t agree when writers critique individuals for prioritizing convenience instead of community.

Effectively, they’re finger-wagging and saying “how dare we be too exhausted to show up”, when being overextended is an almost universal requirement to survive within the confines of the empire.

Take this opinion from Cassie McClure: “We habitually romanticize the idea of community while resisting its demands. We want deep friendships, but we don’t want to be the ones who find time in our schedules.“

Writers like her leave out that our schedules are packed full with the demands that individualism has already placed on us. We’re so busy trying to survive, that showing up in small kindness to others doesn’t even feel realistic.

(someone I am a huge fan of) writes about our resistance to show up for community:

What does it actually mean to be a villager rather than simply wanting a village? The distinction matters. Being a villager means accepting friction as part of connection. It means your neighbor might knock on your door when you are exhausted. It means the community potluck happens on the one evening you hoped to be alone. It means your carefully optimized routine is interrupted by other people’s needs. Annoyance, inconvenience, and unpredictability are not flaws in community. They are the cost of entry.

Previous generations understood this intuitively. The neighbor who borrowed tools without asking was often the same person who showed up when you needed help. The relative who arrived unannounced was also the one who helped you move or watched your children […] Support and irritation came as a single package.

Most of our living generations don't intuitively understand this reciprocity because it wasn't modeled to us. We were sold a story: success means outgrowing your neighbors, treating them as distractions or rivals, and never asking them for eggs or help moving a couch.

This narrative serves a purpose: it keeps us competing and consuming. As it stands, we don’t have nearly as much leisure time as we should while still being able to provide for ourselves or our families.

Here are just a few equations at play:

• Wage stagnation + rising housing costs = impossible to live near friends

• Gig economy + precarious employment = unpredictable schedules

• Student debt + healthcare costs = no margin for mutual aid

Within a generation, our availability to practice villaging has been stolen from us, and understanding this theft is much different than pointing fingers at people because they are too exhausted to practice compassion.

If we actually built villages with shared resources, collective care, and financial interdependence, then we’d need less from the empire. We’d be harder to exploit.

Small Solutions:

This is something that better time management cannot offer us. The antidote to time scarcity is building villages where distributed labor is the norm.

Here’s how to get your time and energy back:

• Crawl: Create standing rhythms Replace ad-hoc hangouts with predictable rituals. Standing weekly dinners (same day, rotating hosts) require zero coordination once established. Shared morning walks, Sunday meal prep sessions, or weeknight skill shares can create a rhythm for semi-predictable availability.

• Walk: Pool labor and resources Start a childcare co-op, tool library, or grocery-buying club. Collective action creates time: four families rotating dinner duty means you cook once, eat four times. Shared vehicles mean fewer car payments. Bulk buying means fewer trips.

• Run: Build economic alternatives Join or create cooperative businesses, mutual aid networks with pooled income, or housing arrangements where reduced rent = contributed labor. Worker co-ops, time banks, and community-supported agriculture all restructure how time and money relate.

The burdens of life are just easier to carry together.

Skills - How to reclaim what the Industrial Era and capitalism stole from us

Besides the crushing economic and social realities that make showing up difficult, we didn’t grow up with the skills to interact comfortably with community.

Capitalism taught us that relationships must be transactional, which has created a social atrophy compounded by media, massive layoffs, and the global pandemic.

In her article, Kacey Anderson calls this 'The Myth of the "Effortless" Community'. We have this idea that connection should feel as seamless as swiping on an app, so the friction of other people's emotions and expectations feels like a glitch to uninstall, instead of leaning in and navigating the uncharted territory.

What I can say from my deep experience in living in ecovillages, is that most of us haven’t had the opportunity to mature inside of community.

The skills it takes — communication, showing up with the sides of ourselves we deem unlovable, being held accountable, navigating conflict — are just not in our arsenal.

Without these skills, the pain of living life on your own and getting crushed by the system feels safer and more familiar than the threat of getting enmeshed with and being expected to show up for others.

We are simply underequipped to truly experience the support of a village.

Small solutions:

No lie, community is inevitably going to feel so awkward and uncomfortable at times that you’ll want to hide in your room because you’re afraid of what people will think of you. I’ve been there.

We dissolve the shame of our nakedness when we make it safe to need each other.

• Crawl: Practice in low-stakes moments Learn to ask for help before you’re desperate. Practice saying “I need support with X” in your existing friendships. Read one book on communication or conflict (start with Nonviolent Communication or The Anatomy of Peace). Notice when you’re performing competence instead of being honest.

• Walk: Get trained together Take a facilitation course with friends. Attend a community governance workshop. Practice sociocracy or consensus decision-making in your book club or group house. Learn conflict navigation as a skill, not a personality trait. Bring in an outside facilitator when things get hard.

• Run: Build governance infrastructure Create formal agreements, decision-making processes, and accountability structures for your community. Establish regular check-ins, conflict resolution protocols, and transparent financial systems. Train rotating members in facilitation so the skills distribute instead of concentrating in one person.

I’ve spent eight years watching people metamorphosize in community, not because they read the right book or did the shadow work, but because they entered into community structures that made transformation inevitable.

When you have the skills, the stakes don’t feel as high. You trust yourself to weather the storms.

Narrative - How to recenter the collective

It’s so ironic that people are giving self-improvement advice and pathologizing the individual about why they suck at being a villager, when collective living is a collective experience.

The cultural script tells us we don't owe each other anything.

We’ve been taught to equate community with obligation, and to be scared of the responsibility that comes with it. But maintaining our autonomy shouldn’t mean losing our humanity.

Eva Harbourne pushes back against this in her article Everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager:

By rejecting the obligations we have to one another, we create a false narrative that we are more secure, but in actuality this only serves to detach us from the most important parts of our lives. We do not owe everyone we encounter all of our energy; this is not feasible, nor is it right. With this in mind, we are obliged to show unconditional humanity and dignity to those around us. We owe those closest to us commitment, presence and effort, even when it does not align perfectly with our schedule. It is imperative that we reject the idea that ‘we don’t owe each other anything’.

I agree with the spirit of this, but I think it misses a critical layer: we can’t obligation-shame people into showing up.

Are there people who want community on their terms only? Absolutely. People who take without giving? Yes. But those edge cases don’t justify framing exhaustion, isolation, and relational inexperience as moral failures.

Yes, we owe each other dignity and care. But most people aren’t refusing to show up because they’re morally bankrupt, they’re refusing because they’ve been conditioned to believe that needing others is failure. When ‘true success’ is framed as complete self-sufficiency, community is nice to have, but not essential.

This conditioning runs so deep that even when people want village, they relate to it through a lens of individual achievement and main character energy.

This is what I call aesthetic revillaging. It’s not bad, it’s a starting point. But it’s not resilient.

Aesthetic revillaging looks like: Community as personal brand. Coordinated brunches and curated group photos at potlucks. Showing up when it’s convenient, photogenic, and fits the narrative of your life.

It's the kind of pseudo-village where needing people gets labeled 'energy vampire behavior', because we're still centering individual experience over collective care.

So instead, we get a sanitized version of community that doesn’t threaten the status quo. One where we show up for brunch but not for breakdown. Where we share curated moments but not material resources.

Valerie Butron names this when she writes: “more and more, people seem drawn to community only when they can stand at its center.”

Are aesthetic villagers selfish? Maybe. Or maybe they're doing the only version of community that feels safe when you've been conditioned to see interdependence as failure.

Either way, shaming them won't build the structures to make possible the deeper connection that happens in structural revillaging.

Structural revillaging looks like: Intentionally choosing your 16 neighbors instead of accidentally having just 1. Buying pounds of rice together for cheaper because you coordinate your food shopping in bulk. Helping people who don’t look like you.

Personal growth and confronting our shadows and unconscious behaviors are inherently part of this revillaging process.

This kind of revillaging must specifically involve physical, intergenerational, resource-sharing villages where elders teach skills, parents share childcare, and kids grow up knowing twenty adult role models instead of two.

This is what creates the kind of village that shows up when you're sick, broke, falling apart, and way too sleep-deprived for the perfect selfie.

Small solutions:

We need to relate to the idea of community differently before we can experience it at the beauty and depth it offers. Not as lifestyle content, or as a social duty. But as a vital ingredient for co-abundance and mutual care.

• Crawl: Reframe obligation as reciprocity Stop saying “I don’t want to be a burden.” Start saying “I trust this will balance out over time.” Practice receiving help without immediately reciprocating. Notice when you’re performing independence and soften. Tell one person this week: “I need help and I’m not going to apologize for it.”

• Walk: Normalize interdependence publicly Talk openly about what you need and what you can give. Post the mutual aid ask in the group chat. Share stories of receiving help without shame. Counter the “we don’t owe each other anything” narrative with “we owe each other dignity, presence, and care.”

• Run: Build cultural infrastructure Create rituals that center collective care: mutual aid nights, community meals, work parties, care circles for new parents or grieving members. Develop shared code language for sending an SOS without needing to explain yourself. Write a social contract for how you want to treat each other. Make “asking for help” structurally expected, not exceptional.

With these shifts, we can change the stories that we tell ourselves about community.

So what do we do now?

We must stop treating village as metaphor and start building it as place.

Not a vibe. Not a group chat. Not Sunday brunch where everyone leaves in their own car.

A village. With walls you share and land you tend and children who know which door to knock on when they need help.

The inner work matters. Learning to ask for help, sitting through conflict, trusting reciprocity are all deeply part of this. It’s harder to conclude that you never again want to see that person who pissed you off that one time, instead of working out a disagreement maturely when that would require you actually packing your bags, not just blocking them on socials.

But you can’t learn these skills in a vacuum. You build capacity when you experiment with community.

People aren't inherently selfish. They're responding rationally to systems that punish interdependence and reward isolation. They’re surviving by buying solutions to problems community would solve for free.

But all that would change if we built better systems.

So stop pathologizing individuals for being exhausted. Start building the villages that make showing up possible.

That’s how we dismantle the empire — one shared wall at a time.

— Nicole

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Sources:

I am a village nerd.

It consumes my life, and it is the healthiest obsession I can imagine.

But I’ve found myself squarely disappointed with the lack of data-driven evidence around the village building movement.

Here’s what we don’t know:

• How many village projects actually fail in their first three years

• What really influences success or failure in villages

• What percentage of communities actually achieve financial sustainability

• Which development models correlate with long-term resilience

• Where the village movement is heading

We’re building villages on stories of what worked, maybe once, somewhere else.

I love a good story as much as anyone. But when founders are risking life savings, when families are uprooting to join experimental communities, when investors are deciding whether regenerative villages deserve capital….we need more than vibes and best guesses.

We need data that shows patterns, reveals failure points, and helps us stop reinventing the wheel every single time.

Six years ago, I read Together Resilient: Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption and felt lightning strike. Here was actual statistical evidence about community living presented in measurable health outcomes and positive environmental impact. This book treats the village movement with the rigor it deserves.

I haven’t seen anything like it since, and it was published in 2017.

That gap has been gnawing at me.

So I assembled a seven-person research team, consisting of 2 data analysts, 2 village designers, an open source web3 builder, a village founder, and a marketing professional focused on regenerative business.

Our goal was to design something the movement has been missing: a survey of the village building movement. The survey we created is like a census of village builders, seekers, researchers, and existing community members to provide necessary data.

We’re going to use this survey to create the 2026 Village Building Trends Report, designed to answer the questions that keep community builders up at night.

Why These Questions Matter (And What You’ll Learn)

Village failure is practically invisible. Founders burn out, communities dissolve, and no one documents what actually went wrong, so the next generation repeats the same mistakes.

This survey is designed to break that cycle by exploring these hypotheses:

Who’s building villages now, and why?

We’re testing whether terms like “ecovillage” are declining while “coliving,” “regenerative village,” and “smart neighborhood” rise.

Language shift may signal demographic change: younger, more urban, professionally embedded builders who want modern technology blended with ancestral wisdom—not a return to pre-industrial frugality.

Implication: Villages need to update their branding for a new generation

Where do projects actually fail?

We’re testing which phase kills projects the most. Is it visioning, land acquisition, funding, recruitment, or operations? We’re also examining if failure is primarily social and operational (governance breakdowns, conflict avoidance, burnout) rather than ecological or ideological.

We’re also challenging the common statement that 90-99% of communities fail in the first 3 years. The statistic is randomly tossed around, changes number frequently, and isn’t backed in data.

Implication: Failure is preventable with better training and support systems, and is more likely at certain phases (rather than a blanket likelihood of failure).

Which development models work, and for whom?

Developer-led models are surging. We’re examining whether hybrid approaches (where developers build infrastructure and residents self-develop homes) are outpacing purely community-led, grassroots models, and what that means for speed, capital access, and cultural coherence.

We’re also looking at how retreat centers, hotels, and community builders are converting existing infrastructure to community-oriented models.

Implication: Knowing which paths are viable helps you choose the right structure for your context, and avoid chasing models that only work with massive capital or institutional backing.

What economic and governance innovations are emerging?

Are villages diversifying their revenue streams beyond tourism? Is there an innovation adoption lag for new governance models like sociocracy, DAOs, and tokenized systems, and if so, why?

Implication: Understanding what’s actually being implemented (versus what’s just trendy) helps you avoid expensive experiments that don’t fit your community’s capacity.

What cultural and political factors are driving growth?

We’re investigating whether urban pressures (housing costs, isolation, burnout) are accelerating suburban and agrihood models faster than remote rural projects.

We’re also examining whether political polarization and authoritarianism are intensifying interest in villages as spaces of safety, autonomy, and mutual care.

Implication: Understanding why people are turning to villages help design villages that actually solve those issues.

What role does technology play?

Are people seeking tech-integrated communities or tech-averse ones? Is generative AI accelerating early-stage formation by helping builders visualize and communicate their vision, or is it just creating polished hype without substance?

We’re also examining the gap between interest in decentralized governance (DAOs, tokens) and actual adoption in land-based communities.

Implication: This shapes how you present your project and what tools you invest in.

Where is the movement growing and how are networks forming?

We’re tracking the shift toward networked, nomadic, and pop-up village models that prioritize flexible participation over permanent land-based commitment.

We’re also examining whether village concepts are gaining mainstream acceptance through sanitized narratives (i.e. “live with friends", mutual care) that distance from countercultural ecovillage identity.

Implication: Village concepts are modernizing and taking many forms

What You’ll Get (And When)

Survey responses will be synthesized into a publicly available report featuring:

• Data visualizations showing trends, correlations, and regional variations

• Case study snapshots of projects at different stages with anonymous failure case studies included

• Actionable insights for founders, investors, policymakers, and service providers

• Failure analysis of what kills projects, and how to design around it

• Trend predictions that indicate where the village movement is headed

The survey closes end of March, and we’ll release the report by May 2026. All findings will be open-access — this belongs to the movement, not behind a paywall.

How to Participate

If you’ve ever dreamed about starting a village, joined one, left one, funded one, or helped design one, then we need your input.

1. Take the survey

2. Support the report

3. Share with your network

The survey takes 10-15 minutes and covers everything from your project’s legal structure to what you wish you’d known before you started.

Take the 2026 Village Builder Census

Your responses are anonymous unless you opt to give your email to receive notifications about the report release. Every answer helps us build a clearer picture of what’s working, what’s broken, and what the movement needs to scale.

The survey is custom coded. If you find any bugs, you can report them here.

Support the Research

This is the first of many research projects I'm building through Terrenity and collaborations—and it's entirely self-funded

This project is an act of service to the village building ecosystem. So far, I’ve invested $175 in database infrastructure and survey tools.

As the dataset grows, so will the costs: data analysis software, visualization design, report production, and translation into multiple languages so this research can serve the global movement.

This report will be valuable to you, whether you’re a founder stress-testing your model, a funder evaluating opportunities, or a policy advocate building the case for zoning reform.

Consider contributing to its development.

Every dollar goes directly into making this research more rigorous, more functional, and more accessible.

Donate to Support the Report

We’re at an inflection point. The village building movement is gaining momentum with more projects, more capital, more public interest. But without shared data, we’re all building in the dark, repeating each other’s mistakes, and losing credibility with the stakeholders who could help us scale.

This census is how we grow up as a movement.

Take the survey. Share it with your network. And if you can, support the work financially.

Let’s build the evidence base our movement deserves.

—Nicole

Welcome back to Exiting the Empire Series

Read parts 1 & 2 here:

This 4-part article series was inspired by Andor, the Star Wars show.

I’m an ecovillage designer, and I’m locking in on how to disconnect from the empire that is currently crumbling around us by using village-scale solutions.

If you’ve seen Andor, you’ll know how disturbing it was to watch the empire spin a completely false narrative of “terrorism” on the planet Ghorman while they shamelessly moved to exploit the mineral resources that they needed to build their superweapon, the Death Star.

It was especially distressing because of the realism.

Surveillance, propaganda, and the exploitation of personal data are shaping up to be the most alarming way the modern empire exerts its control.

So of course, the 3rd exit is tech, data, and media.

Because if we don’t build our own media infrastructure inside our communities, our stories will continue to be told by institutions that do not understand or value them.

Don’t Just Unplug, Build

I’m not a hacker, I’m a village designer. My lens is social technologies.

There are already some great guides out there on how to disconnect from the tech giants, including this one from . “De-googling yourself” is already a major trend with plenty of how-to’s online.

That is not the focus of this article.

Instead, I want to talk to you about the village-scale media systems we can build as we outgrow the old system. Because as one of my readers quoted to me, “Fighting drains, but building sustains”.

Down the line, I promise you a case study on the solarpunk tech experiments we’re running in my own sustainable coliving community in California, like building locally hosted AIs and our own offline internet.

Exit 3: Tech & Media

Exiting the empire requires not just land sovereignty or resource sovereignty (as I talked about in parts 1 and 2), but digital sovereignty.

And the narrative monopoly represents a major artery of the empire.

Ask yourself these questions, which come from a recent video:

1. What does the system depend on?

2. How are we providing it?

3. What happens when we withdraw that support?

This is a great framework to ask yourself again and again in the discourse of exploring how to “build the village and starve the empire”.

I would argue that the 4th question is, “Now what can we build instead?”

My answer is a parallel circulation of information.

The Role of Disruptive Media

I’ve come to believe that media is one of the most decisive terrains of this historic transition.

Across eras, resistance movements tended to:

1. Disrupt centralized communication channels

2. Build parallel decentralized networks

3. Expose or disable surveillance infrastructure

4. Shift to analog networks when centralized tech was compromised

The White Rose leaflets in Nazi Germany were a key distribution of anti-fascist communication.

In the Soviet bloc, the self-published Samizdat dissidents avoided the state’s publishing technology by returning to typewriters, carbon paper, and hand-to-hand distribution.

And then there was the Polish Underground State, which created entire shadow universities, courts, media, and education systems outside authoritarian control.

In recent years, movements in places like Nepal, Bangladesh, and Madagascar have demonstrated how digital-native tactics—algorithm swarms, symbol compression, and meme warfare—can rapidly shape public perception. If we care about building resilient, ethical movements, we need to study how these dynamics work, not to manipulate, but to understand the terrain we’re operating on.

I highly recommend the Substack for incredible mutual aid and resistance tactics, documenting real world strategies.

Anti-authoritarian media tactics are skills we need to have, and media can be used to not only tell the full story, but to dessiminate the skills we need to outsmart the empire.

Right now, it’s clear that independent media ecosystems (that are still highly visible) are what we need for a better rebellion.

Here is why this matters specifically for villages.

Building Village-Scale Media

I’ve been extremely meditative this past week on what is necessary to make the village model more mainstream.

Right now, it comes off as a reckless leap into an alternative lifestyle. The perceived risk of social entanglement in community is considered greater than the pain of being isolated and extorted by the empire.

Community is foreign, thus dangerous.

My diagnosis: the shift is still too scary because it’s not perceived as safe or normal, and the narrative around community is still framed as a threat.

Even though there are already thousands of established, global village projects that prove it’s healthier to live in community, people are still deeply skeptical.

Villages have struggled to take hold in mainstream culture not because they are impossible. They fail because the story of them is distorted and mocked before people ever encounter the reality.

If we want villages to be perceived as the viable, safe, and intelligent social redesign they are, we cannot wait for legacy institutions to tell that story for us.

I’ve decided what’s under my control to do next.

The Terrenity Village Media Studio

As a village builder creating media in service of a solarpunk future, I’m starting a media studio inside my own community.

The studio will have capacity to record audio and video projects, as well as specialized tools for printing analog resistance materials.

I’m going to use a solar power array to charge a jackery for power, and set it all up in what is now an underutilized, informal music/storage room.

The tangibles:

• free educational content

• offline archives

• open source village stock media

• long-form documentation and short-form dissemination

• analog materials and object-based memes

My strategy is to infiltrate existing institutions (by licensing educational content), and creating a repository of media that can be used by others to spread the village model.

I’m also making it available to my community members, who specialize in topics like community real estate, shared ownership models, mutual aid networks, and more.

This will be just one node in a future network of village-based media studios.

I’m moving to Europe by the end of the year (because yikes, USA) to start another regenerative village project, and will build a 2nd studio there using the funds generated from the first. Then, I will launch a program that gets more place-based community creators equipped to tell the real story.

Terrenity will run this program to empower creators in different communities to:

• Document your experiments

• Archive and distribute your learnings (and keep offline twins)

• Train internal storytellers

• Own your distribution channels

• Create locally-hosted media nodes embedded in place

Right now I’m fundraising for the first media studio that will immediately empower 16 creators to produce content that builds the village and starves the empire.

I’ve been planning this media studio for awhile, and finally decided to make it public. In the few short days since I launched, we already have 53% of the funds raised.

If this vision resonates, you’re invited to help build it.

You can contribute to the first Terrenity Village Media Studio, or become a paid subscriber and participate in sustaining this work long term.

Founding partners in the media studio share in the upside. Details are available at the link.

Raise the Funds

Subscribe now

If you’re a creator who wants to participate in this media initiative, fill out this form for opportunities to connect and build more parallel media together.

This is an intermission article between the 4-part series “How to Exit the Empire (Without Burning Out or Going Off-Grid)” Read parts 1 & 2 here:

Magazines You Should Know

I’m running this publication and I could be focused on racking up subscriptions, optimizing funnels, and squeezing every drop of attention from the algorithm gods.

But regenerative mindset means we don’t have to cannibalize each other.

I learned that in the Amazon rainforest, there are over 1,000 different species of frogs with unique specialties. The village building world needs to coexist rather than compete for resources to be truly regenerative.

So in honor of Terrenity’s 2-year anniversary on Substack, I want to do something slightly rebellious and deeply aligned with the work itself:
celebrate the other publications that are helping us remember how to live differently.

These are the magazines and journals I return to when I want to be in deep communion with the regenerative movement. They are commons projects. They are slow, intentional, and stitched together by many hands.

And yes, if you don’t subscribe to Terrenity yet, that’s still your first order of business. But after that, welcome to the wider village.

Why Full-Length Publications Matter More Than Ever

As our collective attention span shrinks to caption-sized truths, I feel that long-form writing becomes an act of resistance. This is partly why it’s so pleasant to be on Substack.

But none of these other publications are based on Substack.

Most of these publications offer print/digital versions, and some are print-only, highlighting how rooted they are in the real world. These publications ask more of us: time, presence, reflection, digestion.

We need places where regenerative ideas can breathe. Ones where we can think at the speed of nature.

Here are some of the ones doing that beautifully.

COMMUNITIES - The elder of my village

COMMUNITIES Magazine has been around for 54 years. This is the one many of us found first. And it still holds.

Published by the US chapter of the Global Ecovillage Network, COMMUNITIES is the long-running archive of ecovillage experiments, failures, governance models, land struggles, and breakthroughs.

I’ve walked into so many intentional communities that have these magazines on display for others to read.

If you want to know what’s actually been tried over the last half century of village buiding, this is the record. You can order back issues, and versions in both digital and print form.

Subscribe to COMMUNITIES

Why it matters: Because regeneration without memory becomes reinvention fatigue.

Meander Magazine - The song of my village

Meander is a print-only magazine that will leave you breathless with its carefully curated elegance. When I read it I feel like I’m padding barefoot through a reverent forest.

They bring together writers on the topics of bioregional culture, slow living and regenerative futures, and I was published in their first issue.

Their issues feel like books you want to display on your coffee table. Launched only last year by Tom Greenwood and supported by and team, they are making lovely ripples in the regenerative pond.

Subscribe to Meander Magazine

You can also follow their Substack to get updates and sneak peeks of the physical magazines.

Why it matters: Because starting a print-only magazine in a viciously digital world is an amazing statement that we can still live in and love the real world.

The Weave - The shaman of my village

The Weave centered around bringing together the leading voices, the weavers, and the deep listeners of the Regenaissance.

It focuses on sharing what it calls “New-Earth intelligences”, or social technologies that help us midwife the new paradigm on our planet. Deeply spiritual and rooted, I can’t help but really admire this publication.

Inside its exquisitely illustrated pages, you’ll find deep interviews, stories, poems, and thought pieces from leaders of the regenerative field.

Led with grace by , the magazine has been on pause since 2023, but you can still explore issues 1-3 for free.

Access the Weave's Issues

Why it matters: Because we can’t build new worlds with old blueprints.

Terrenity - The hunter of my village

Terrenity was born two years ago from a simple frustration: There was nowhere to talk about village building in a modern context. I had all of these observations and opinions about my experience in the field all bottled up inside me.

I wanted to explore the complex, messy, beautiful design challenge of our time.

Since then, Terrenity has become a place where I can be obssesively practical with my systems thinking solutions.

Like a hunter, I don’t want to talk about food, or dream about food. I want to build the tools that will give us what we need, and then go out and obtain it for all of us.

This publication bridges the lifestyle experiments of early villages, and the possibilities of modern villages to build a future worth living in.

Subscribe now

Why this matters: Because we need a no-fluff bridge between vision and implementation attuned to the next generation.

I made a magazine about my ecovillage travels once, but only made one issue. Should I bring it back?

A Few Ways to Support the Ecosystem (and Terrenity)

The thing is, running a publication is a risky business. Many mags have gone under, because people just don’t read the way they used to. But we can make it fashionable again.

If this article resonated, here are a few ways to tend the commons:

1. Subscribe to Terrenity

Free or paid, you’re supporting long-form, independent work on regenerative living. Paid subscribers help fund research, tools, and shared resources for the movement.

2. Restack or share this piece

Discoverability is the real currency of independent publishing. Sharing helps the right people find the work.

Share

3. Support one other publication mentioned here

Follow them. Buy an issue. Gift a subscription. Regeneration only works if resources circulate.

4. Build something local

A reading circle. A discussion group. A village lab. These publications are seeds. They’re meant to be planted.

The Village Voices

We are moving beyond the old paradigm, beyond individual success, and beyond the single-voice thought leader model. Two years in, I’m more convinced than ever that we don’t need one dominant voice.

We need many voices in conversation.

We need a chorus.

We need a forest of frogs.

Thank you for reading, for building, and for being part of this ecosystem.

And if you’re here, reading this, you’re already in the village.

Last week we talked about land as the first step towards divesting power from the empire.

Now we’re going to specifically look at migrating resources away from these systems in the context of building modern villages and collective circles of care.

In other words, finding ways to stop fueling The Machine.

Exit 2: Resources

We are used to the narrative that we depend on these large systems to survive.

When you depend on systems that are built to extract from you, eventually you’ll feel yourself on the very sharp edge of survival, as many of us do now.

But the empire also survives on our consumer choices.

Our labor, our attention, our spending, our subscriptions, our time. Withdrawing these significantly weakens the empire.

This is where some village builders assume the solution is “grow all your food and weave your own underwear”. A charming fantasy, but ultimately another trap.

We can do much better than just returning to subsistence living.

In this article I lay out three concrete levels of resource exit: sharing, distributing, and divesting, to evolve from consumer to collaborator to co-owner.

I like to have something to run towards, rather than away from. This 4-part series on how to exit isn’t only about starving the empire — it’s about feeding the village.

Level 1: Sharing

Requirement: Trust

The systems I advocate for are built on community and circles of trust.

When you organize resources together, you don’t just save money. You save time. You reduce stress. You reclaim capacity. You build resilience.

This is where your energy actually comes back to you.

This looks like 3 people planting a microgarden, 5 neighbors bulk-buying food staples, or 10 families sharing a solar array. Think of a community tool library, instead of thirty identical weed whackers rusting in thirty lone garages.

My own coliving community saves $14,000 per year just from sharing our streaming service subscriptions.

This doesn’t include the other ways we organize our resources, like bulk food buying and monthly paper product subscriptions from package-free companies.

We aren’t abstaining from modern privileges. We’re refusing to be individually gouged for them.

Some resources are only possible to share when you live together, and others can be shared across neighborhoods, friend groups, or loose collectives.

Here are a few places to start:

• Digital resources
  Streaming platforms, paywalled news, meditation apps, creative software, language tools. Most already support multi-device use. You don’t need six identical subscriptions in one friend group.

• Plans that scale
  Cell phones, insurance, even utilities often get cheaper under family or organizational plans, especially if you have a shared legal entity.

• Food & consumables
  Buying essentials in bulk saves real money. The empire charges you more for snack-sized versions of the same damn nuts, so buy a big bulk order instead.

• Tools, Equipment & Occasional-use items
  Tool libraries don’t have to be industrial. It can be as small as a shared dog nail clipper. Consider things like a ladder, sewing machine, musical instrument, air mattresses, or event supplies. Borrowing beats buying things you’ll use twice and store forever.

You’re still participating in the system, but you’re just not letting it bleed you dry.

Why Sharing Doesn’t Come Naturally

Many people already share resources out of necessity, but many others — including people who need to — don’t.

Not because they’re selfish, but because sharing requires trust, and trust has been systematically eroded through scarcity conditioning. We’ve been trained to fear dependency, and equate independence with safety.

So we default to control instead.

For example, at my same community, quite a few of us have personal Amazon prime accounts (yes, I know we shouldn’t have anyone using this service, but it’s just one of those things we haven’t been able to replace yet).

Even though we adore each other, we don’t really trust each other to not accidentally charge the wrong card, and we don’t really feel like monitoring if that happens to begin with.

Most mutual aid advice that I read feels tone-deaf when it doesn’t acknowledge that it can be very challenging to overcome this conditioning.

You don’t need to start big. You just need to start together.

Start here

Pick one essential resource (food, water, tools, transportation) and ask: “How could this be handled better together than alone?”. Start building the trust it takes to collectively manage resources with others, and slowly add people to your circle of trust.

You’ll find that every resource you share multiplies. And for everything you save money together on, you’re weakening the engine of the machine.

Level 2: Distributing

Requirement: Coordination

The next level is distribution: reorganizing labor, responsibility, and ownership so that more of your needs are met without money changing hands at all.

This is where communities begin to feel like villages again.

Distribution looks like:

• Shared care
  Community childcare and eldercare pools free up working hours, reduce burnout, and create real interdependence. Care stops being a private crisis and becomes a shared effort.

• Distributed education
  Homeschool co-ops, skill-sharing circles, and intergenerational learning replace outsourced, expensive systems with knowledge that lives inside the community.

• Holistic care pots
  Instead of relying solely on insurance systems that profit from denial, communities can create shared funds for preventative, mental, and holistic care.

• Distributed infrastructure
  Solar microgrids. Shared water catchment. LoRa internet networks that you own. When infrastructure is co-owned, no one is held hostage by monopolies or outages.

  We’ll be diving more into sovereign tech choices as ways to unplug from the empire in the next issue. Follow along

This level is harder because it requires more than money or belongings. Besides time, which many of us are already short on, they require higher levels of coordination, clear roles, and organized systems. And crucially, the willingness to be in each other’s lives.

Start here

Map the people already around you using the social circles diagram. Not who you wish you had — who you actually have. Then ask where life feels tightest. Time, care, transport, food, money, energy. That’s your entry point.

With a bit of coordination, that pressure can become shared. Invite one or two people slowly inward and experiment. Needs get met faster when they’re held together, and often, relationships deepen in the process.

Level 3: Divesting

Requirement: Skill

This is the tier most people never reach.

Level 3 is when communities stop acting like consumers and start acting like financial ecosystems. When your money sleeps inside institutions aligned with your values, or institutions that YOU own, it wakes up working for your future, not against it.

• Cooperative business ventures
  Instead of working for extractive companies, communities build enterprises that they own to circulate wealth internally and serve real needs.

• Community real estate investment & regenerative funds
  Small amounts pooled together become meaningful capital for land, housing, food systems, and local sustainable infrastructure.

• Rotating lending circles & co-investing
  Friends and neighbors fund each other’s projects instead of begging banks for permission.

• Local credit unions and community development banks
  Savings are used to strengthen your region instead of financing destruction elsewhere.

• Shared emergency funds
  Because relying on FEMA or insurance alone is a gamble most of us can’t afford.

If these feel rather complicated to pull off, honestly, I get it. My hands get clammy thinking about “building a fund”. Because I haven’t yet learned the skills of how to do this.

We can totally pull these off, though.

Start here

They didn’t teach us these things in school on purpose, but the resources to learn how to build these things are available online for free.

Pick 1 thing you want to learn more about in the next week — cooperatives, green banking, or community real estate — and find time for mirco-learnings. Just understanding what’s out there helps you peel your eyes away from the train wreck of the empire.

Full Exit

My most important thesis: The real goal is not just weaken the empire, but build alternative solutions that outcompete capitalism and become the new standard.

The economic dependency created in our lives — and the sense of inevitability when it comes to witnessing the system’s corruption — is very real and not easy to simply leave behind.

We begin to build parallel institutions when we invest each other to collectively to buy land to create a regenerative offgrid community, or purchase a broken down building to turn it into a mutual aid center and affordable housing for artists.

Exiting the empire only works when we combine all 3 levels and build new systems. Start learning how to pull each of these levels off by building these strengths:

1. Sharing takes high trust

2. Distributing takes high coordination

3. Divesting takes high skill

We start as consumers. Next we become collaborators. Eventually we become investors in each other.

Then the empire loses its grip on us.

The Real Checkmate

Whether you’re sharing a ladder or withdrawing billions in collective spending power, these principles remain consistent.

I live in the United States.

Currently, US citizens are actively planning a tax strike against the federal government for violating civil rights, and coordinating to withdraw money from big corporations supporting the violent, racist secret police.

I used to be bewildered that we weren’t rioting in the streets every day. While I’m outraged on a daily basis, I now understand something else. Violent rebellion gives the system exactly what it wants: justification for more force, more surveillance, more control.

Building alternatives starves it instead.

Whether it’s the Target boycott or the tax strike, withdrawing money from these systems is how it begins. As we peacefully allocate resources to nurture thriving communities we can actually live in, we’re building a world we don’t have escape from.

My mantras: Focus on what we can build. Focus on the positive choice. Focus on building the better alternative.

That’s the moment the empire has no leverage left.

Support Terrenity

As a village builder writing in the service of a solar punk future, I’m determined to keep Terrenity free to read and publicly available for everyone.

Producing Terrenity, however, is not free.

If this work matters to you and you’re able to support it, please consider a paid subscription and help keep Terrenity going for as long as it’s needed.

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The world building was exceptional, and the parallels were chilling. It felt far too relateable to watch a group of rebels resist a cold, calculating empire driven by hunger for power and resources. But it started a joke between me and a fellow solar punk, community-builder friend of mine about the movement and what “the rebellion” means to us.

We live inside a machine that insists it is too powerful to escape.

This conveyor belt humming beneath our feet keeps us working, spending, and numbing. How are we to have energy left to resist or rebel?

Most people feel this in their bones, even if they don’t have the language for it. Many of those that can name it feel trapped on the spectrum between outraged activism, existential hopeleness, and passive acceptance.

No more.

The first order of business as a village builder is to unplug from the empire. It only has power because we give it power, and because it has manufactured our dependency on it.

But divesting from the empire doesn’t require you to disappear into the woods, renounce electricity, or become a homesteader with 16 goats and a sourdough starter named Ezekiel.

It requires something far simpler, far more subversive, and far more communal:

1. A return to sovereign power.

2. A reclaiming of resource flows.

3. A switch of technology choices.

4. An unapologetic choosing of belonging over separation.

Let’s call these the Four Great Exits. They will the be topic of a 4-part article series of how to unplug from the machine published here on Terrenity.

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And they don’t take you away from society. They take you back into humanity.

Exit 1: Land

According to me, the societal ills and power dysfunctions we see all have a surprising root: land use.

Land allocation has historically been decided entirely by commercial interests, not social or communal ones. Yet all of our societal behaviors are dictated by how our environment is set up.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Where do you live?

• Who are you surrounded by?

• Does your survival depend on systems that do not care about you?

As it stands, building our environment is left up to urban planners forcing densification in the interest of big tech and real estate (when it’s been shown that it doesn’t actually lower the cost of living).

I assume that the majority of people reading this don’t have access to or influence over land. Much of wealth concentration has to do with creating a landless class. This creates economic dependency on others to work and survive for shelter.

So it would be insulting to simply tell you to go buy land when:

1. You might not have the capital and

2. You might not have friends or family you trust enough to do that with.

This isn’t as much about owning land, although that is ultimately crucial to truly exit. It’s much more about how land is used and what for. For example, rather than separating agriculture into giant farms miles outside of the city, shifting towards local urban farms is part of the solution that divests from the machine.

What’s important is understanding how land use is the foundation for your dependency on the empire, and orienting towards a future where you can control a bit more of land.

This is why I originally started this societal redesign journey with ecovillages, because control over land use is control over the systems we live inside of.

What You Can Do

The most ancient form of power is territorial, relational, and personal.

Even if you might not have the high trust relationships (yet) to buy land with friends or cofound a village, you can begin taking steps towards place-based autonomy.

1. Start with proximity

Choose where you live based on who you want to build with, not how close it is to work (or a Whole Foods). Even one aligned neighbor can change the math of your life more than 30 minutes shaved off your commute.

2. Grow food where you are

• Rent a plot in a community garden.

• Grow herbs in your kitchen window.

• Join a CSA run by someone you can hug, rather than feeding a supply chain that ships chemically sprayed lettuce across three borders.

Food is power. When you grow even 1% of what you eat, the empire loses a tiny tributary of control.

3. Live in clusters, not islands

If you want collective ownership someday, start with collective living now.

• Move in with friends.

• Choose a multifamily house.

• Coordinate so three of you rent apartments in the same building.

And here’s the thing: the cost curve flattens when you share walls.
One family might pay $800k for a single house. Three families could pay that same amount (each paying far less) for a larger shared property with more rooms, more utility, and more collective power.

Personally, I am able to enjoy 4 beautiful acres in nature on a creek with event venue space, an art room, coworking offices, an edible garden with fruit trees, a hot tub, and so much more because I live in an intentional community. Whereas normally I would never be able to afford living on a 2 million dollar property, I get access to all of this because I don’t care about needing my own kitchen.

There are many ways that you can go about cohousing and coliving in order to enjoy ownership despite weak purchasing power.

Eventually you might be able to form an LLC to buy property collectively instead of battling soaring rents like a Hydra that just regrows its goddamn serpent head.

This is important in an economy where the next generation only makes up 29% of home purchases.

In these times, collective living is almost an economic necessity, but it can also be a form of resistance.

The potential challenges

Reclaiming power is not frictionless.You will run up against:

• Zoning that privileges nuclear families

• Banks that don’t know what to do with cooperative buyers

• Families who think you’ve joined a cult

• Friends who balk at shared decision-making

• Your own internal fears about commitment

I was talking through the concept of ecovillages with a PhD scientist who leaned in and said “It’s like in school. I always ended up being the one who pulled the most weight in group projects. I’d be terrified of this same thing happening in shared spaces — always having to be the most responsible one.”

This is normal. We are unwinding 200 years of cultural conditioning toward isolation, and paranoia towards shared burdens.

The best way to start is to choose a place to plant roots — physically or relationally — and begin designing your life with people you trust rather than systems that assume your compliance.

Final Words

Power is the most misunderstood challenge we face in this rebellion.

At the writers retreat I’m hosting this month, someone is authoring a story about cats that correlate to different parts of the brain, and all of them are endowed with some special skill. I asked the man, “What are their powers?”

He sort of grimaced and said “Well, their functions are…” and it stopped me in my tracks.

Power reimagined as function doesn’t put valuation on the ability. Instead of discussing what has power over your life, you can ask what function it is serving. If you remove the functions that it serves, and fulfill that function somewhere else, well congratulations, you’ve just divested a little bit more from the empire.

The empire thrives on isolation.
Villages thrive on proximity.
Your first move is simply choosing not to be alone.

Read Part 2

Support Terrenity

As a village builder writing in the service of a solar punk future, I’m determined to keep Terrenity free to read and publicly available for everyone.

Producing Terrenity, however, is not free.

If this work matters to you and you’re able to support it, please consider a paid subscription and help keep Terrenity going for as long as it’s needed.

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Here are my takeaways for how you can turn these unique properties into communities and creative third spaces.

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Why Adaptive Reuse Is the Lowest-Risk Path to Community Right Now

You essentially have a spectrum to choose from when looking for your community property. Raw land on one end, and turnkey properties on the other. In the middle sits adaptive reuse.

I’ve previously advised founders that acquiring existing infrastructure is overall a quicker, less risky path to community. Most founders don’t realize they have a this middle option.

And adaptive reuse is one of the most underrated strategies for intentional community development. It’s a strategic advantage (not just a shortcut).

This strategy of community building avoids:

• permitting delays

• capital burn

• developing raw land and housing from scratch

• high purchase price of 100% turnkey properties

Economically speaking, everything is so uncertain right now. Imagine being in the middle of construction of your village and suddenly the price of materials double. You don’t want to be caught with that on your shoulders.

With adaptive reuse, you do have to wrestle with renovations or existing inadequacies of the property (especially if it’s 500 years old, like some of the buildings we saw). But you can focus on building relationships and optimizing systems in your community, not getting caught up in building roads and homes.

The Generational Handoff

Let’s talk about a unique opportunity happening in Europe right now. There are currently thousands of castles, villas, monasteries, boutique hotels, and agrotourism estates for sale with owners that are seeking to hand off their assets and retire. For the price of 3-bedroom mediocre home in California, you can get an entire castle in Italy.

At the same time, every community builder I know is searching for land, buildings, or a “home” that feels meaningful, affordable, and inspiring.

But this overlap won’t last forever.

What Scouting Properties With Other Builders Taught Me

Castle Quest was conceived of by the founder of the community I currently live in, Jordan Hammond. He’s launched and organized investment into 3 coliving communities built on shared ownership, and is specializing in community real estate.

He saw the signs.

So he organized Castle Quest as a gamified tour of these properties.

First Quest: Italy.

With his invitation, I joined other community builders to tour properties in Italy and imagine them as communities.

We set out to answer this question: What would it take to convert these legacy buildings into spaces built for community and modern culture?

The Quest was divided into 3 campaigns that lasted 1 week each. We explored several unique properties that lit up the imagineering in our minds with their diverse possibilities. We also visited intentional communities and colivings along the way to observe community building trends in Italy.

I might do a future detailed breakdown and case studies of the properties we visited. For now, here’s the meat of what I learned:

It’s a buyer’s market

Observation: There is huge generational handoff of property happening in Italy/Europe, but declining populations and urban migration leave no one to take the reins on projects like these.

Implication: This makes the properties affordable, especially if you’re fundraising collectively. is a great resource for learning how to approach this opportunity consciously and with a placemaking orientation.

These properties are move-in ready

Observation: These places come with kitchens, restaurants, pools, event spaces, and even staff, furniture, and existing business models, which you can choose to keep or pivot from.

Implication: This means you could move in with your community members right away and also have a business to run that can fund the community.

It’s easy to fund

Observation: Not only is the vision of a castle or estate just easier to sell to potential community members, it’s also easier to fund the renovation and restoration of these places due to Europe’s favorable grants and federal programs for this.

For example, we were shocked to find out that the Italian government reimburses you 50% of the cost of any renovation you perform on an agroturismo (one owner showed us a €90,000 reimbursement he’d received from €180,000 worth of renovation expenses).

Implication: You can dramatically reduce the overall cost of community development, and even get compensated for your efforts. The institutional alignment in Europe and opportunity for public-private partnerships completely changes the math on building your project.

Why Regenerating What Exists Beats Starting From Scratch

What is happening in Europe is a unique opportunity to reclaim and restore historic infrastructure and turn it into the “living labs” that everyone wants to build.

I wouldn’t argue that adaptive reuse is a superior method, just a less risky one. It also rejects the idea that we always need new and flashy things, and instead chooses to regenerate existing spaces that have rich historical background.

Creators with massive followings like Beau and Eutopia are documenting this village building trend in real time.

Chateau du Fey, Chateau Coliving, and La Vita Sukha are examples of actual coliving communities based in historic castles and estates that validate that this model works. There’s even projects like Dolce Vita Coliving, that have spread themselves across an entire medieval village in Italy.

The only thing is, you HAVE to do your due diligence.

What due diligence looks like in practice

In the spring, Jordan toured properties in Europe (specifically Italy) and he found one he thought was absolutely a home run. We refer to it as the Three Lakes Estate.

Castle Quest was actually an attempt to prove himself wrong — that there were potentially better properties on the market than this one.

So he brought together community builders, creative event producers, entrepreneurs, coliving consultants, and community real estate specialists to tour these properties and give their feedback.

Each campaign we were joined by even more questers, until we converged at the final estate. That week felt like a live-action design charrette: walking, observing, questioning, mapping, forecasting what it would be like to acquire this property.

The Castle Quest team developed a thorough due diligence process. Our visit covered 3 areas of due diligence:

1. Structural — evaluating the integrity of the historic infrastructure and the required renovations.

2. Conceptual — evaluating the community concept, its local relevance, and its likelihood of success.

3. Communal — testing out the relationships of the core team that would be involved in launching this community.

We also developed a rubric for evaluating properties for their suitability for community, which I’m sharing with my paid subscribers in our private thread.

Overall, the Quest was an excellent exercise in prototyping community models for existing spaces. I’m looking forward to attending the next Castle Quest, which will be in Spain next year.

This is how we can contribute to a broader movement of reclaiming private spaces back into the commons.

Are you a community builder who wants to participate in this experiment to either find you own property, or join a community project along the way? You can join their efforts to acquire this property (and others) for regenerative community building in Europe.

If you want to connect with Castle Quest, fill out their community survey!

Fill out the Community Survey

But what you decide has more ripples than you think.

“How big should my community be?” sounds like a logistical question, but it’s actually a design philosophy question.

Community size determines nearly everything else:

• How you design governance

• What kind of infrastructure you’ll need

• How complex your systems need to be

• Whether people feel seen, or lost in the crowd

And yet, too often, founders pick a number before they pick a model.

Here are 4 layers you can look at to model the size of your community in alignment with your values and constraints.

1. The Social Bandwidth Layer

Let’s start with what humans can handle.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that we can maintain about 150 meaningful relationships, now called Dunbar’s Number. A lot of community builders fall back on Dunbar’s number as either the “perfect” number, or the maximum number. But in practice, those relationships break down into layers:

How to apply this:

• For an intentional community where people share space and governance, 30–150 is usually the sweet spot.

• Below 20, relationships tend to become too enmeshed.

• Above 150, you need formal systems to preserve trust and coordination.

If you’re still in the early visioning stage, imagine: How many people can truly know each other by name, and hold shared agreements without bureaucracy?

Ask yourself and your founding team:

1. How many people can I emotionally track right now?

2. How many can I collaborate with before it feels like management instead of community?

3. What number still allows for shared rituals, decision-making, and celebration without overwhelm?

That’s your maximum viable size.

2. The Infrastructure Layer

Community size should also be a reflection of your spatial and economic realities.

Ask these questions:

1. How many people can your land hold comfortably?
   Think beyond bedrooms.
   Consider parking, garden capacity, sewage systems, event space, and acoustic tolerance (yes, that’s real).
   A regenerative system means you’re in balance with your land’s carrying capacity — not just its square footage.

2. What is your intended housing model?

3. What can your operational model sustain?
   Each new member adds income and complexity.
   If your governance is participatory, every added member multiplies communication channels exponentially.

A simple rule of thumb:

The more democratic your structure, the smaller your group should be.
The more hierarchical or modular your structure, the larger it can scale.

3. The Purpose Layer

Your why should dictate your how many.

There’s no “right” answer, only what aligns with your intentional density.

A monastery of 12 has a completely different energetic logic than a co-living ranch of 40 or a regenerative district of 200.

4. The Scaling Layer

Once you hit your “natural ceiling,” growth should become modular, not massive.

Think nested villages.

A 200-person ecovillage can function beautifully when organized as:

• 4 pods of 50 (each semi-autonomous)

• A council-of-councils for shared decisions

• Shared spaces (like a kitchen, garden, coworking barn) to maintain cross-pollination

This model allows for both intimacy and scalability, and coherence without coercion.

Community Size:Governance Cheat Sheet

COMMUNITY SIZE →          | GOVERNANCE NEEDS →
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
6–15 people (Coliving)    | • Agreements can be informal  
                          | • Conflict handled relationally  
                          | • Decisions: consensus or vibes  
---------------------------------------------------------------------------  
20–40 people (Micro-Village) 
                          | • Need meeting structures  
                          | • Light roles + responsibilities  
                          | • Decision-making: modified consensus  
---------------------------------------------------------------------------  
50–150 people (Ecovillage / Campus)  
                          | • Sociocracy, committees, circles  
                          | • Formal conflict processes  
                          | • Stewardship roles become essential  
---------------------------------------------------------------------------  
150–500+ (Network Village)
                          | • Federated governance  
                          | • Elected councils + pods  
                          | • Digital platforms to coordinate  
---------------------------------------------------------------------------  
500–5,000 (Movement / DAO)
                          | • Protocol-based governance  
                          | • Tokenized or reputation systems  
                          | • High specialization roles

The best number for your community is the one where:

• Every person feels their absence would matter

• Meetings still feel like conversations, not conferences

• The system can self-heal without a manager

Buuild you community with your ideal ratio of connection to complexity.

The “right” size for your community is not how many people fit — it’s how many people can belong.

Want personalized consulting on your village project?

Work with me

The challenge is that for many, this way of life is inaccessible.

Yes, many dream of living in nature in community, but relocating to isolated rural areas is often a privilege. Jobs are fewer, public transportation is shoddier, and access to culture and essential services is diminished.

In fact, this just poses ecovillages as a different kind of suburb to aspire to.

It’s time to create a blueprint that works for many, an actively dismantles what DOESN’T work.

Enter a playbook I’m building that I’m going to call, “Build the Village, Starve the Empire”. I read this slogan on a carousel promoting how to build neighborhood resources in a time where authoritarianism is somehow back in vogue.

What absolutely gagged me with joy is seeing this concept become more mainstream.

As I contemplate the future of Terrenity, I am acutely aware that the audience I serve is very niche. To reach the actual tipping point we need to get us out of this polycrisis, us village builders are going to have to develop models that work for a broader public.

This is the next resource I’ll be building in 2026 (after the Village Building Trends Report) so that you can revillage wherever you are.

The Idea

Build the Village, Starve the Empire is a practical framework and a guerilla-culture toolkit that equips incremental developers and civic weavers to transform existing neighborhoods into regenerative micro-villages.

Through pattern language, it trains a new generation of community builders to restore belonging, shared care systems, and ecological reciprocity at the local scale.

The central outcome? Create post-capitalist neighborhoods, now.

The framework this is built around

This solarpunk municipalist framework is in progress, but here are the “families” of this pattern language that I’m developing:

1. The Commons: How to steward the physical, shared life-supporting systems.

2. The Civic Economy: How to exchange & resource ourselves

3. Governance: How to make decisions and distribute power

4. Shared Care Systems: How to create well-being through belonging, care, and parallel economics

5. Social Fabric: How to cultivate relationships, ritual & cultural memory

6. Land, Housing & Place Design: How to reform housing patterns to determine positive social patterns.

The playbook will provide models of how to revillage these areas of civic life.

Models will span how to create everything from a food cooperative to mutual aid networks to alternative economies that dismantle inequitable systems.

If you have additional families you’d add to this framework, comment below.

The Format For Change

Theory alone is a dandelion puff against systemic oppression. That’s why I’m focusing the models on implementation in the most accessible, practical ways possible.

Most “movement trainings” fail because they assume:

• time abundance

• emotional capacity

• willingness to study/work

But my actual audience (civic weavers) are already overstretched, under-resourced, and carrying the emotional labor of holding others.

So the model must fold into existing life without adding extra homework to the burnout.

And it also has to be fun, because we need more joy and hopecore.

What I’m building is low-lift, ultra-scalable spread.

Here’s how I’m going to help futurists build a solar punk future.

1) The Playbook

A practical guide / pattern language for retrofitting cities into villages.

Includes:

• Implementation plans how to build in every pattern language family listed above.

• Neighborhood mapping tools

• Community capacity + governance scaffolds

• Case studies & typologies of successful movements and micro-villages

• Economic models how to start them (community finance, shared utility models, cooperatives, co-ownership, land trusts, etc.)

• Implemenation plans for shared infrastructure (kitchen, gardens, care networks, mobility hubs, etc.)

2) Microgrants for Local Guilds Implementing This Playbook

I was very inspired by The Cabin’s “Supper Club” model that sponsored people all over the world to get together in person to share a meal under the Cabin member identity.

This framework could do the same by sponsoring groups of at least 7 people to gather, study the frameworks like a book club with a peer learning model, and follow a monthly micro-shift challenge.

This will also include a guide for organizers to make this fun and easy.

And rather than hope that people join organically, I’m going to make sure this initiative involves warm outreach to incremental developers, urban planners, community organizers, and regenerative architects & placemakers.

In this busy, extractive world, providing the free tools is not enough. You have to create the opportunity for others to gather and build in-person alliances.

3) Object-Based Meme Toolkit for Signal Boosting

Memes travel faster than models. They’re the “gateway drug” for paradigm shift.

These should be visually loveable, easy to share, identity-reinforcing, and mostly non-linguistic (cross-cultural).

With the future in the hands of internet-native generations, it is important to respect the power of mimetics. Dissemination of ideas in a highly digital world must involve compelling graphics and visual language.

So ideas of this include card decks, on-demand printable signage / poster kits, and mini field guides.

Inspired by the little free library and geocaching models, there will be a virtual store where you can get free resources/designs to print out or build yourself, or a done-for-you toolkit sent to you.

How TF Do I Plan to Do This?

To make this possible, I am cultivating sponsors and recruiting culture geniuses.

MORE. THAN. EVER we need tools to revillage.

It’s not just about rural offgrid communities anymore. It’s about pockets of community resistance and us refusing to let each other down.

Do you want to help build this? Reach out to me.

Now or never

Maybe your heart has been crushed by carrying the weight of everything you can’t change. I know mine has.

This is an anti-burnout, pro-hope project.

Built on the pretext that societal change is more accessible, and more sane, at the local level.

Especially while I’m riding the highs of the Mamdani win in New York, and feeling hope breathe again into my heart, this is my gift to the future.

Support Terrenity

As a village builder writing in the service of a solar punk future, I’m determined to keep Terrenity free to read and publicly available for everyone.

Producing Terrenity, however, is not free.

If this work matters to you and you’re able to support it, please consider a paid subscription and help keep Terrenity going for as long as it’s needed.

Subscribe now

Prefer a one-time contribution? You can donate at ko-fi.com/terrenity

In other words, a settlement.

This is a rampant problem as the village building world collides with real estate development practices.

I’ve talked about eco-gentrification of villages before, but this is a threat that even low-budget, homegrown ecovillages face.

Where land is affordable, most villagers end up being transplants from other places. They have the minimum requisite privilege to relocate, and usually have a slew of other privileges.

For example, a Mexican-American couple visited our community in California with hopes to live there, but didn’t feel comfortable with there heavy presence of border patrol given the current US political climate.

No matter how much integrity your project has, it can cause people morally allergic reactions. Or have “accidental” lack of accessibility and inclusivity.

My commitment to building with high standard of the regenerative ideal is sabotaged by my (and our) ignorance of what it takes to build something that adheres to that ideal.

In my Village Builder Insider #5, I dove into the weaknesses of my own regenerative placemaking plan.

Here’s are the resources you need to build and refine your own placemaking plan.

The Danger Zone

Villages are at risk of these factors that determine whether their land project is just a greenwashed settlement:

• enclaves > local relationships - Intentional communities naturally turn inward. Tribal instinct, countercultural ideologies, and just the sheer work it takes to run them all contribute to this.

• privilege > accessibility - In building a community with a specific vision for its membership, you often take certain privileges for granted. Lack of things like wheelchair accessibility, affordable housing options, or youth opportunities will squeeze out entire demographics of people from participating.

• extortion > contribution - Assuming positive impact on local areas is a common mistake. Villages designed in developing countries or poor rural areas are almost inevitably neocolonial. Conversely, some projects get away with extorting excessive labor from members in the name of “community”.

• homogeneity > diversity - The biggest oversight here is assuming that your community is accessible and welcoming to people of all backgrounds. Saying you are inclusive is not enough.

These are the common patterns of negligence when visionaries set out to build a utopia and find out their vision for paradise isn’t available to everyone. You can see that many operate on assumptions.

I’m curious, so comment below which of these your community is at risk of. Add any additional categories that you observe.

Placemaking Strategies

The core elements of regenerative placemaking are as follows:

• Systems thinking: Understanding a place as a complex, interconnected system of social, cultural, and ecological elements to find mutually beneficial interventions.

• Community engagement: Involving the community in a meaningful way to gather their stories and co-create solutions that reflect their needs and aspirations.

• Ecological regeneration: Going beyond just preservation to actively revitalize and improve natural systems, such as building soil health, increasing biodiversity, or restoring waterways.

• Socio-cultural and economic revitalization: Creating spaces that foster economic opportunity, social equity, and cultural vibrancy, and weaving them together in a way that strengthens the community.

• Temporary activations: Using temporary projects like pop-up parks or art installations to test ideas and build momentum for more permanent changes.

• Holistic design: Designing spaces that consider the long-term health of both people and the planet, for example by incorporating elements like walkable streets, public spaces, and mixed-use buildings.

How to Get Placemaking Savvy

1. Learn the Basic Frameworks

I like Village Well’s Regenerative Placemaking Model because it’s simple and built around Doughnut Economics.

The Regenerative Placemaking Framework by is a great foundation, with a focus on urban planning and design. You can also participate in a Placemaking Salon with Future of Cities

Really Regenerative has their Power of Place course, which comes highly recommended by my colleagues that have taken it.

This is Future Village’s placemaking model:

2. Read a Book

On my website I added a library database that links to my favorite books, with a section dedicated to Regenerative Placemaking.

I highly recommend books like Reimagined Worlds for narrative-based placemaking, and Placemaking Sandbox for emergent strategies to create thriving places.

3. Chat with a Placemaking Consultant

Even though I am a community consultant, placemaking is not my specialty. I believe it takes years to build wisdom in this area.

Here are the high-integrity placemaking and sensemaking consultants in the village building world:

• Bob Tomlinson with Village Makers has 20 years experience in building villages, and specializes in pattern sensing and building projects that are locally relevant.

• Sky Blue from InCommunity is an amazing resource with 20 years of experience living in and building communities.

• Mark Lakeman from The City Repair Project and Communitecture is well known for his placemaking discourse and transforming neighborhoods to village-style communities.

• Sara Rickards is a storyteller and regenerative placemaking consultant that works with individuals and organizations.

• Neal Collins with Latitude Real Estate is deeply embedded in the intentionality of creating agrihoods and regenerative real estate projects with deep attention to placemaking.

• Mathilde from The Urban Mycelium provides great placemaking visualization services and free placemaking resources.

• Gertie Farenas is an inspired narrative cultivator and placemaking consultant. I work with her on Terrenity to build globally informed narrative.

That’s it!

Share this article with a colleague who is also passionate about bringing regenerative placemaking to the forefront of all place-based projects.

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Want to take your village project to the next level? Email hello@terrenity.org to get started.

And I always end up wondering, “Why are so many of us doing it alone?”

At first, it feels fine. You tell yourself it’s just a focus era.

Village building is often a solopreneur kind of venture. You’ll just “get through this phase” as you focus on your project.

You’ll be able to connect once you’ve found the community that you want to move to, or built the physical community of your dreams.

But then you start solving everything alone. The vision, the strategy, the stress. You might be looking for forums or group chats to join, but even when you post on those, you don’t get a whole lot of fish bites.

The irony of it is painful. We dream of togetherness, but spend our nights staring at screens building websites, masterplans, and Discord servers. Alone.

But I know that you can only go so far by yourself before you feel burnt out and lonelier than when you started.

Lately, I’ve been building community alone, too. (Even while I live in community!)

I stopped engaging with my global network as much as I used to.

Not because I stopped caring, but because I was managing the endless logistics of being human. Deadlines, relationships, finances, health. The maintenance of just being alive can distract us from the mission and the joy.

No doubt you’ve experienced the same.

But here’s what I know from experience. Isolation withers our motivation to keep going.

Without connection and collaboration, even superstar visionaries burn out.

And that’s when you realize: community shouldn’t just be “built”. It’s something you have to live inside of to keep your own flame alive.

What changes when you stop building alone

When I first entered the village building movement years ago, I observed quietly. Everything launched for me when I started engaging differently.

I joined communities of community builders. I showed up for monthly calls. I took courses in live cohorts with other village builders.

Like that, my career took off. I got recommended to design projects abroad. I joined a startup that paid me to travel the world building regenerative neighborhoods. I was recruited to design a certification for regenerative communities and visit indigenous tribes in Colombia to research the criteria.

I made friendships with other village building nerds that inspire me endlessly with their own work.

What I noticed is that there are 2 diamonds that come out of building community with your kindred thinkers:

• Opportunities provide you with the resources to fuel your project.

• Relationships provide you with the resources to fuel yourself.

This is what we really need, and it’s time to anchor this in.

I realized that…

A change is rumbling in for Terrenity.

Maybe you’ve noticed that I’ve been experimenting with the voice and tone of this publication. I’ve also been meditating on its highest purpose.

Rather than write from my ivory tower, turning my articles into evermore heavy essays, I have shifted the focus from content to value.

In this new model:

• I solve specific, personalized problems for you.

• I offer tangible solutions that you can implement today.

• We get to build community, together.

That’s why I’m shifting the structure of my publication.

I’m turning Terrenity into what it was always meant to be — a research-backed knowledge commons for the modern village builder.

I believe the wisdom of community building should be shared freely, and what deserves investment is the capacity to act on that knowledge.

Translation: I’m getting rid of the paywall on all my articles and focusing paid membership on community, mentorship, and direct guidance.

Paid subscribers, don’t freak. You’re actually going to get more value, and here’s where it’s going to be:

• Monthly live “Ask Me Anything” sessions — launching November

• 50% off all Terrenity templates and courses

• Access to the Village Builders Guild — a collaborative group of community builders troubleshooting their problems together, with special guest speakers and exclusive recorded podcast episodes when you can’t make the live sessions (launching January)

And for Founding Members, access to everything listed above plus

• Monthly 1:1 consulting sessions with me, tailored to your project

If you want to build community with me, not just read about it, this is your invitation.

Remember, my articles focus on specific resources and hacks that you can’t find out from AI, because it’s stored, not in the internet, but in my brain.

The processes I’ve built, in-depth case studies of what works, and lessons learned from my own journey.

I want to offer these articles to the village building movement so that we can all build more villages, faster, to reach the tipping point that we need.

So that means that when you support Terrenity, you do it because you care about this work, not because I’m dangling a content carrot in front of you.

If you feel called, this is your space.

This paywall-fall retroactively applies to all my previous articles.

If there was a paid article that you missed out on like the 2025 Village Building Trends Report or How to Fund a Regenerative Village or Survey Your Land with These Professionals, you can access them now.

These are the deep-dive, behind-the-scenes essays where I share the real frameworks, templates, and consulting insights I use with my clients and communities.

If you find them valuable, restack your favorites! It helps others discover Terrenity and keeps our village of thinkers growing.

I’m done building community alone.

I’m done worrying about being “cringe” or sticking to my own little world.

This work matters too much to hide behind a platform.

Terrenity has always been about experimenting with better ways to live, build, and connect.

This next chapter is about doing that together. Quietly. Powerfully. On purpose.

Thank you for being part of this growing movement.

Learn how to stay connected, even when it’s hard.

I just developed a 7-session training perfect for communities and colivings. This training allows you to train your community to navigate conflict.

What’s included:

🌿270-page PDF presentation

🌿 7 workshop sessions that last ~90 minutes

🌿Group prompts, pair activities, and role play exercises

You’ll be able to teach your community how to listen deeply, communicate when it feels sticky, and grow stronger together.

Download the training kit

But it happens.
Every. Single. Time.

When we share space, unresolved sh*t surfaces.
Tiny misunderstandings turn into passive-aggressive group chat messages.
Unspoken boundaries become unspoken resentments.

Even if you’re an amazing human, your personality will inevitably sandpaper against someone else’s.

Suddenly, instead of feeling close to your community members, you just feel worn down.

I’ve lived through this.

Over the years, I’ve lived in 11 different intentional communities, from artist incubator houses to large-scale ecovillages.

I’ve seen all kinds of disagreements that involve emotional Jenga.

Once, I even had to be part of a council formed to ask one of my own dear friends to leave the ecovillage because she was being disruptive and stopped paying to live there.

Conflicts in community usually start small: pets, cleanliness, chores.
Simple issues that shouldn’t be hard to solve.

But when people’s sensitivity combines with poor communication skills, you’re in for a pointless rollercoaster.

The Conflict That Changed Everything

These past conflicts were tough for me, but bearable. But then, at my current community Wild Seeds, I collided with another community member, hard.

It gave me an immune system-frying type of stress. I started questioning if this place that had felt like my dream community was really the right place for me. If community is just an infinite hamster wheel of dealing with others people’s BS.

This one started when I unintentionally offended one resident multiple times.

It snowballed into a deep dislike of my as a person, from being “too nice” (aka fake) to my personality reminding her of her ex-boyfriend.

I sometimes joke:

That’s when conflict is at it’s worst. When disagreement distorts your entire perception of someone.

While her story and trauma were valid, even her best friend was telling her that she was being extreme. In the process, I had felt bewildered, frustrated, and villainized. But also pushed to grow.

We resolved our argument through a ritualized, vulnerable mediation that I built the container for. It was the greatest test of my tools so far. Before she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me. It ended in a tearful hug.

But it took every last thing in my communication toolkit to get there.

The Turning Point

I grew up in a family that avoided conflict. Silence was the strategy. It gave me sea urchins in my throat, and I felt stuck and unable to communicate.

That’s why I’ve invested 14 years into studying all the methods in psychology, mediation, and communication tactics.

After years of improving my own communication skills and using them in community settings, I decided to share my methods with my community members.

Using my experience as a facilitator, I painstakingly put together a presentation designed to share these methods. I pulled from existing frameworks, and created my own based on my own community expertise. I designed games, exercises, and prompts to explore what conscious communication looks like in action.

My community members showed up week after week for the training sessions.

It changed everything.

What my community members experienced during and after my training:

• We started holding each other accountable to confront conflict instead of avoiding it

• Members were proud of themselves for becoming aware of their blind spots and choosing their “more evolved self”

• People weren’t scared to initiate conflict resolution, because they trusted themselves and the process.

Here’s the truth:

Most communities don’t implode because of conflict.

They implode because they never learned how to have conflict consciously.

No one ever gave us the manual for emotional repair.
For speaking our boundaries kindly but firmly.
For de-escalating situations tactfully.

And let’s be real, most attempts at community mediations are just long, circular debates about who is “right”.

Conflict is not the problem.

Avoidance is.

You think staying quiet keeps the peace.
That things will just resolve themselves.

We avoid conflict because we lack the confidence to deal with the inevitable discomfort. We lack confidence because we lack the right skills and tools.

BUT when we have the tools, we discover the conflict is actually an incredible invitation to grow together.

Signs that Conflict Is Brewing

Ever noticed how one person’s silence can change the entire energy of a house?

I compare conflict to a tea kettle. Sometimes you don’t know anything is heating up until you’re bombarded by the whistle.

If you see these happening, it’s already time to intervene:

When you notice these, you don’t need to panic, but you do need a process.

Train Your Community To Handle Conflict

If your community keeps spinning in emotional loops, I built something for you.

It’s called the Conscious Communication in Community Training, a complete 7-session toolkit with facilitator notes, slides, and exercises you can run with your group.

I built this for colivings, ecovillages/intentional communities, and even just community house roommates.

You’ll learn exactly how to:

• Prevent small issues from becoming blowups.

• Repair trust after conflict.

• Empower community members to advocate for themselves instead of relying on you

• Create agreements for conflict that everyone agrees on.

P.S. I also wrote an in-depth Conflict Resolution Toolkit for Meander Magazine by Tom Greenwood (aka ), a curated print-only magazine on regenerative topics. You can preorder that here if you want to stack your tools and support their amazing work.

If you’re ready to practice this work, not just read about it, the training is your best move.

Get the Training

Among the overwhelmingly positive responses, there were some questions asked with a critical angle:

• ”Why aren’t you reclaiming existing infrastructure and revitalizing existing villages?”

• “Why would you build in Sardinia when they are facing coastal loss?”

• “This just looks like another resort”

Despite my thorough responses about not building directly on the coast, the dedication to native habitat restoration, the necessity of the hospitality aspect to the idea of immersive wellness, and the local municipality desperately requesting tourism, it all rang somewhat false.

I’m currently in Sardinia. I’ve visited the land and the future site of Pando. I’ve talked with the landowners and local stakeholders. I’ve made observations about the region as a whole.

Here’s an honest and rigorous report on the weaknesses in my own placemaking plan, and how I intend to mitigate them.

Read more

Serious and exhausting.

When people can bring joy and whimsy together with firm resolve for social impact, it gives me a startlingly rare feeling — hope.

This is something that Castle Quest, a new community real estate (ad)venture, is doing spectacularly well.

I am privileged to know Jordan Chandler Hammond, the founder of the vibrant sustainable community in Southern California where I now live, and the creator of Castle Quest. We met in Berlin the summer of 2023 as part of a Cohere residency at a bathtub factory converted into a radical urban community known as MOOS. The high-caliber people I met that summer still ripple through my life.

Jordan’s vision was to build a shared ownership model for community real estate, something Cohere attempted to do but couldn’t materialize. He’d already designed and implemented the model for his own community, Wild Seeds, while other people were still theorizing. On top of that, he was able to cut out the banks with collective investment alone.

But if you’ve ever known a visionary like Jordan, their scope is always the horizon.

He’s been formulating this project Castle Quest as a playful yet innovative way to explore community properties. Since US politics are a playground full of sewage, he’s taking action.

Scouring tens of hundreds of properties in Europe — castles, villas, old estates — he’s inspired by the fact that the historical multi-bedroom infrastructure is perfect to convert to sustainable coliving. And he’s not the only one. Several projects like Chateau du Fey, Chateau Coliving, and La Vita Sukha have already done just that. The trend is proven.

While he’s ostensibly found the perfect property for a creative wellness coliving in Italy, he’s organizing a group road trip to tour potential European properties to see if he can prove himself wrong. The whole theme of the experience is RPG solar punk video game.

And it’s going to be hella fun.

The Plan

The plan is to rent a huge van to drive from Genoa to Lake Trasimeno, visiting castles (and more) for sale, and staying at communities and colivings along the way. 8-10 selected individuals can ride in the van, but more can join via caravan.

The People

Jordan’s onboarded a team of magicians to organize Castle Quest and start the community property journey in Europe.

Malena Grosz, former Director of Community Operations at Cohere, is organizing the road trip. In Berlin we used to say “Everyone needs a Malena”, because she’s so freaking good at orchestrating logistics.

Previous Cohere cofounder, tokenomist, and engineer Josh Burnett is advising the ownership and investment models.

There’s Ian, who’s worked for Uber, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, and direct action groups like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Occupy Oakland. He’s tackling international immigration support.

Julie, Director of Communications and Creatives at BUILD.org and prior work with the United Nations and Peace Corps, is on communications and design.

Map/Schedule

The best experience will be the full month of road trip, but you can join for any of these legs of the journey:

Campaign #1 (Oct 29 – Nov 5): Genoa + Piedmont Region + Milan, Italy (5 seats available)

Campaign #2 (Nov 5 – Nov 12): Milan + Lake Region + Florence, Italy (5 seats available)

Campaign #3 (Nov 12 – Nov 17): Lago Trasimeno (stay at key property + collective decision week)

Each Campaign Includes:

• A week-long adventure with a curated small group

• Opening campaign dinner

• Property/community visits + cultural excursions

• Contribution toward trip coordination

• 7 nights accommodations (shared & private options)

• Van seat + fuel

• Options:

  • Add a partner to same room/bed

  • Book own travel and accommodations

Properties to Visit

Jordan has been scouring properties for about a year, and has collected some of the most promising ones for sale. Here are some that we can expect to visit during the trip:

The big finale will be at a property in Lago Trasimeno, which Jordan intends to purchase and convert into a creative wellness community. He’s already raised half of the purchase price through community-organized investment, once again removing the banks from the equation.

This 16,684 sq ft estate is set on over 376,000 sq ft of land in Castiglione del Lago, Umbria. This property is already designed for mixed-use living and hospitality — a promising foundation for a creative, wellness, and innovation-focused community.

Highlights include:

• 60 total rooms, including 28 bedrooms, 19 kitchens, and 12 living rooms

• 2 swimming pools with panoramic countryside views

• A restaurant, already fully equipped and locally staffed

• Improvements include converting a 15-car garage into a co-working and innovation hub + rooftop event space

• Situated minutes from Lake Trasimeno, one of Italy’s most enchanting regions

I intend to move here and call this place home as I build my village in Sardinia, so I’ll be joining Castle Quest on the final campaign.

This isn’t just about touring people of the property he intends to purchase, though. We’ll be learning the ins and outs of acquiring community real estate, learning from Jordan how he’s successfully done 3 capital raises for shared ownership colivings, and foment ideas for innovating in community owned real estate.

You got a community to build and love the idea of doing it in a castle or villa? You want to invest in projects like these? You’ll probably find a perfect property along the way.

Castle Coliving Realities

I’ve known other ventures to acquire castles to build community that ended anticlimactically. Castles and old villas have a unique set of challenges, high maintenance or repair costs, and typically a remote location.

But the key is in acquiring the right property in well-kept condition.

With their multi-bedroom layouts, unique side rooms, multiple buildings, and fun bonuses like pools or orchards, these properties are uniquely suited for communal living.

Also, I just love the idea of inhabiting what used to be the symbol of obscene aristocratic wealth with a community of revolutionaries who want to build a more beautiful world.

Watch the Castle Quest Webinar

Join the road trip

See you on the road 🫡

PS I'll be in Italy October to mid-November. If you find yourself close by, let's meet up.

For the past few years, I’ve been quietly working behind the scenes to give hands-on support to regenerative village projects. I help them clarify their vision, choose the right land, recruit aligned members, and design financial + governance structures that actually work in the real world.

Consulting villages has been energizing, but also very private.

My consulting work has historically come through direct referrals and projects approaching me for support. I've been too buried in it all to share this side of my work publicly, even though it’s some of the most impactful work I do.

However, it’s been a joy to translate these village lessons here on the Terrenity publication since January 2024, and the publication continues to receiving glowing response.

Subscribe now

Truth is, village builders need more support than blog posts and free resources can provide.

Each project is unique—shaped by its land, people, culture, and local regulations. And the early decisions you make (ownership, governance, funding, development sequence) can make or break your village.

So for the first time this year, I’m opening up 2 consulting slots for founders who are ready to build with confidence.

About Terrenity

I founded Terrenity when my interest in ecovillages turned into my career. I’ve been writing, researching, and consulting ecovillages and intentional communities for 7.5 years. I’ve advised 17+ ecovillage projects across Costa Rica, Mexico, Italy, Guyana, Dominican Republic, Thailand, Germany, and the U.S., helping them avoid critical mistakes and go from losing money to thriving.

I just finished serving as Communications Director for the Global Ecovillage Network, helping connect a global movement of ecovillage and intaking all requests for their community consulting.

Case studies from my work include:

Project: 300-family ecovillage in Costa Rica

Outcomes:

• Recruited community members to buy lots in the community

• Designed “community glue” as part of their Social Layer experiment

• Created a virtual community management system platform

Project: Shared ownership sustainable coliving in California

Outcomes:

• Curated members to fill all living spaces and create positive cash flow

• Designed member onboarding systems to reduce confusion and misaligned members

• Implemented conflict resolution pathways and trained community members on conflict resolution skills

Project: Offgrid ecovillage in Mexico

Outcomes:

• Designed and implemented operating systems for better shared labor, finance, and hospitality systems

• Strategized plan for expansion and land tokenization

• Advised construction strategy for eco-housing projects

• Led mini docuseries to promote the village

Project: A 16-floor building in San Francisco building a “vertical village” for frontier technologies

Outcomes:

• Directed community marketing to recruit members for a 6-week pop-up

• Helped produce 3 summits in 6 weeks and convert participants to join the community

• Developed bespoke graphics and marketing materials for the community and its events

How We Build Your Village

I have a range of services to help you up the mountain. For this round, I’m focusing on my flagship package: Holistic Community Design

This is my full-spectrum consulting package, bundling everything you need to move your vision from dream to reality:

1. Visioning Intensive (your “why” and manifesto)

2. Land Selection & Feasibility

3. Community Recruitment & Onboarding Strategy

4. Ownership & Governance Structures

5. Financial Model & Revenue Design

6. Pitch Deck & Investor Readiness

7. Culture Design & Conflict Resolution Processes

Walk Away With:

• PDF Community Vision & Manifesto Document

• PDF Land Assessment Report

• Member Recruitment Map & Ideal Member Profiles

• PDF Community Marketing Strategy Document + Marketing Templates

• Ownership & Governance Framework

• Pitch Deck + 1-pager (editable)

• Revenue Model Map

• Investor Readiness + Investor Teaser Document

• PDF Community Culture & Conflict Pathways Guide

• PDF Onboarding & Integration Toolkit

• and more

Bonus:

You’ll also have access to my network of skilled service providers and database of village design solutions. We’ll be able to solve anything from shared ownership models, to village operations, to special legal zoning applications.

If you’re ready to design your regenerative village with clarity, confidence, and credibility, apply for one of the 2 exclusive slots. I will be closing the offer to take on new clients November 1 2025, so apply before then to be considered.

Why I'm Offering Consulting Slots

As I wrap up other projects, I find myself with the ever-present craving to share my specialized knowledge so we can 👏make 👏 more👏 villages.

If you don’t know by now, that's my all-encompassing, magma-hot life purpose.

So let's build your dream village together.

In the spring, my article Why "Building in Public" Is the Best Marketing Strategy for Your Community was wildly popular. But I’ve been ignoring my own advice. Why? Well, it’s just easier (and less scary) to keep your head down, dogging the things you need to do.

But silence doesn’t build movements. And for me Pando is an opportunity to redefine the movement of building villages.

So here’s where we’re at, what we’re building, and how far we’ve come.

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Vision

My name is Nicole Reese, and I’ve been an ecovillage designer for 7 years.

2 years ago, I was approached by my now-business partner, Sante Losio, to develop a 215-hectare property in Sardinia, Italy into a sustainable community.

The previous concept for the land had been a resort with a sustainable golf course (if such an oxymoron exists), but I decided to apply everything I knew about ecologically and socially regenerative design. With full creative freedom, I designed a community for futurists.

The result was a longevitown®, integrating cutting-edge longevity technology, sustainable living, and immersive, data-driven health optimization.

We’ve created a general plan to turn 10 hectares of the land into a pioneering longevity microcity. The project integrates residential areas, a longevity boutique resort, and a medical clinic and research laboratory focused on extending healthy lifespans. All built to extremely rigorous regenerative and circular standards.

• Longevity Village: A self-sufficient community designed using regenerative design principles, promoting environmental wellness and healthy living.

• Longevity Resort: A high-end wellness retreat offering personalized health programs, advanced medical treatments, and immersive accommodations to attract wellness travelers.

• Medical Clinic and Research Lab: A facility dedicated to providing medical services and conducting research on aging and longevity, enhancing the resort's offerings and contributing to global scientific knowledge. Managing production of longevity food products and supplements for export.

Pando is the culmination of everything I’ve learned as a village designer. The clarity of vision, the rigor of design, the capital strategy, the long-term cultural blueprint are drawn from my obsession of studying village successes and failures.

And now I’m ready to share it openly.

Why Sardinia

Leveraging Sardinia's status as a Blue Zone—a region renowned for its high concentration of centenarians—Pando aims to become a global hub for sustainable living, wellness tourism, and leading-edge longevity research.

Environmental Wellness

From microplastics to polluted air, it’s clear to all of us by now that we are facing systemic environmental attacks on our health. And our health is directly tied to the health of our ecosystems, as most educated people already know.

I’ve been fermenting the concept of environmental wellness in applied design for awhile. It draws on concepts you’re already familiar with, such as blue light and noise pollution disrupting our sleep, fertilizers disrupting our water systems, or wall paint disrupting our hormones. But it takes a holistic, scientific approach to building and stewarding spaces that optimize our health.

Pando is a thesis on how to challenge every single one of these deeply disturbing “facts” of modern life, using modalities from circular, non-toxic building materials, to lifestyle design, to positive neuroarchitecture. I want this to be a sanctuary for living longer, healthier lives, packaged under the resolution that to be healthy, we need a healthy planet.

Current Status

Here’s where we stand today:

• Land: We’ve secured a prime site in Sardinia with historic roots and agricultural potential. Most of this will remain in conservation.

• Design: The masterplan integrates residential, hospitality, research, and regenerative agriculture zones.

• Team: We’ve assembled an ecosystem of architects, wellness experts, technologists, and regenerative designers.

• Momentum: We’re in active conversations with investors, longevity researchers, clinic advisors, and wellness partners.

But this is still the early phase. We’re raising capital and forming strategic partnerships to move from vision into built reality.

Thanks to our project engineer, John Bello, we have a thorough financial model. Now we have to fund the ecological baseline studies, masterplan, and architecture.

What We Need

Pando is ready to move from concept to funding. We’re seeking aligned investors and partners who understand that regenerative longevity is not a luxury, it’s the frontier of human development.

We’ve been in talks with several potential investors, testing for alignment.

This is a project for visionaries who see beyond quarterly returns. It’s for those who want to seed a legacy of health, resilience, and regeneration.

💌Call to Action

If you know someone, an investor, partner, or visionary, who belongs in this story, we’d love your introduction.

👉 View the 1-Pager
👉 View the Pando Portal + Deck

Takeaway:
I believe that regenerative village builders have the chance to do more than build a few earthen homes and live in a bubble by ourselves (noble by itself don’t get me wrong). When we play it big, we have the chance to take control of the script of society.

Leave a comment telling me what you think of this vision, and don’t be afraid to be contrary.

Subscribe now

We can’t afford to trip when we are in a triathlon to a more regenerative world. So I’ve compiled my forewarnings to others that I’ve gained from consulting 17+ ecovillage and intentional community projects.

The last one I am personally facing while building my longevity village in Sardinia.

Not Securing Solid Agreements With Landowners

Many regenerative village projects begin by leasing land or entering into verbal deals with landowners. This can feel easier and more affordable than buying outright, but it introduces massive vulnerability if not carefully structured.

In general, handshake agreements fall apart. Without a written contract, projects have been evicted after years of investment because the landowner changed their mind, divorced, or sold the property. If you put money into masterplanning, site studies, and feasibility analysis, you may lose everything if the agreement isn’t enforceable.

Real Life Example: My friends Nico Alcala and Roxi Shohadee were designing la tierra in Costa Rica. They spent tens of thousands on a masterplan and deck, but the landowner changed their mind. Thankfully, they had an MOU that stated that all of their design work was their property, and that the landowner had partial financial responsibility to either compensate their work or buy the designs from them.

Mitigation Strategy: Even if you haven’t purchased the land yet, you can still arrange agreements where you own any design assets created for the land, or have the landowner agree to cover the cost of initial studies. Land can be worth 3x the original value just by adding a masterplan.

Developing Structures in the Wrong Order

In the design phase, you will have to timeline your development strategically. You can’t build everything at once, so you need to pick the most important investments first. The project timeline should be strategic, generate cash flow early, and give people the option to stay in or move to the community.

Real Life Example: I saw 2 projects in Mexico pouring buckets of money into “shiny object projects”, one building a natural lagoon and the other a tantra temple. Yet they were struggling to get people to commit. Even after years of offering the option to buy lots, few were biting, and the people who had bought lots were hesitant to move in, because there wasn’t any sense of community yet.

Mitigation Strategy: The sparkly things can come later. I recommend focusing on small hospitality options or a community house to actually get people living onsite. Although, there is still merit in building community amenities to get people on location, even if just for a day. You just have to be in touch with what will actually draw people in.

Underestimating Financial Realities

As visionaries, we are prone to make romantic budgets, which often underestimate infrastructure costs, permitting fees, and legal work.

With a lack of a financial model, your project will fail. Yes, it is difficult to monetize community when you want to focus more on the shared living aspect, but money has to come from somewhere.

Real Life Example: From Creating a Life Together, “Many cohousing communities […] increased their number of units by ten or more because they underestimated the cost of land (or the cost of development or construction), so to keep their homes affordable, they spread the cost out over a larger number of people.” Having to do this might compromise your vision for an intimate community, so be mindful.

Mitigation Strategy: Develop a clear plan for revenue streams like housing sales, rentals, wellness, agriculture, events, etc. Simplify your verticals to one or two to start with, otherwise you’ll be dizzy trying to launch 7 businesses and build a community at the same time. Directly translate how land costs will affect your community design.

Fuzzy Ownership Structures

Even when your project is just an idea, you must design a clear pathway to join. This will domino into other design choices that are critical to uphold your values.

• Unclear ownership stakes: Is the project owned by a single founder, a trust, or distributed among residents? How does this affect price of joining or pathways to ownership?

• No exit strategy: Do you have a system for buyouts, legacy sales, or turnover when members leave?

• Unrealistic affordability promises: Are you promising low-cost housing or membership while planning to build custom organic homes?

Real Life Example: Sweat equity is really popular in many village projects. I’ve seen a few that rely on work trade to make their community function, which in my eyes is a risky path. While it subsidizes labor costs, it makes people who are more transient in charge of essential tasks.

Mitigation Strategy: Design your community (physically and culturally) according to the ownership structure you intend to have. You want to favor and reward longer-term people who will invest time and energy into the community and offer them a path to ownership that doesn’t require capital.

Overlooking Legal & Regulatory Realities

The feasibility stage of village design is point blank crucial. You might buy land in areas where intentional living, tiny homes, or agriculture aren’t permitted, but those are a core part of your vision.

Real Life Example: Before buying Lost Valley, the founders researched the property and found it had a previous conditional use permit. While conditional use permits are typically attached to the property deed, this permit had lost its status because the previous owners lost title. Even though buying the property was an enormous gamble, they did it anyway. They went on to publicly document their public/educational activities, pay tax on these activities to the county, and 2 years later after reviewing their excellent record, the county re-instated the conditional use permitting.

Mitigation Strategy: Look into previous zoning permits that your land has had, they may be different from the current zoning status and can be re-established. I highly recommend chapter 11 “Neighbors and Zoning” in the book Creating a Life Together to explore how communities have solved for this.

In some cases, it is easier to petition the municipality to create a new zoning category (such as “Ecovillage zoning”) instead of trying to fit your project into existing zoning laws. This process, similar to a PUD, goes through public hearings and council approval, but gives you more flexibility by letting you define your own standards and regulating plan tied to your site concept. Unlike a PUD, a custom zoning category can embed long-term conditions and parameters into the city code, ensuring your vision is formally recognized and supported.

Ignoring Place-Based Realities

Land that’s cheap may be remote, water-scarce, or unfit for agriculture. Planning to plant crops or designs that don’t suit the climate and ecosystem creates an ecological mismatch. Not building relationships with neighbors, municipalities, or indigenous stewards endangers your freedom to pursue your vision.

While acquiring properties with existing infrastructure gets you a quicker move-in time, it can present less design freedom.

Real Life Example: A community I know acquired an amazing historic property with existing infrastructure, with the intent to turn it into a coliving and small business accelerator hosting artist and creator residencies. But they didn’t consider how the living spaces for the short-term people would mix and disrupt the lives of long-term residents. Or that distance from the city would be a barrier to getting people to come out. While they had a starry-eyed business plan for these premium overnight stays, they were forced to choose the more stable and modest income of long-term tenants.

Mitigation Strategy: Rather than see yourself as a bubble and everyone around you as others, weave friendly relationships in your local ecosystem. Forcing your vision onto a piece of land or into an existing community is not truly regenerative.

Paying Too Much for Services

Whether it’s my friend who spent $20,000 for a deck to promote a land project he couldn’t end up developing, or a community leader giving someone $5,000 to make a couple unfancy google docs to assign people chores, this is a general trap that is not talked about enough.

Yes, get ready for things to cost more than you expect, but also be wary. People will overcharge you because they misinterpret your project as a regular land development, rather than a distributed ownership coliving or an affordable ecovillage. If this is your first time doing this, you might assume you have to cough up for every potentially applicable expense. This is not the case.

Real Life Example: My experience with designing my own village in Sardinia is that once professionals learn I have a project, they are pitching me left and right for why their premium service is essential. Not unusual, but I’ve noticed people asking far above market rate for their services, which catches my attention. They want commissions, retainers, and bonuses on top of money upfront. I’m happy to pay people for quality service, but most proposals feel opportunistic.

Mitigation Strategy: Understand what is essential to spend money on, and be very skeptical of any proposal that comes your way.

Stay tuned for pt. 2, Mistakes in the Building Phase.