Constraint · 01
No lawful way to live there
You can own the land outright and still not be allowed to build on it, sleep on it, or take it off-grid. The deed is rarely the binding constraint — zoning, building code and sanitation rules are.
The Map · where a community has room to begin
Read the ground
before you commit.
The Community Suitability Index — CSI — is an open map of where a regenerative, sovereign community — an ecovillage or land project — has room to begin. It reads a place against the law, the land, the water and the welcome, in that order, and marks what it does not yet know.
3,309 regions, thirty signals, every number traceable to a public dataset. It will not tell you where to live. It narrows a world of options down to a shortlist you can actually go and stand on.
3,309 regions scored 30 signals · 7 domains Open data, cited
87 conf A
S1 · highly suitable
law
land
welcome
41 conf B
N1 · currently not suitable
S1 S2 S3 N1 N2 gated
Illustrative — the live map scores 3,309 real regions Open ↗
"Good soil in a country that won't let you build on it is still the wrong place."
Why the ground comes first
Most searches for land begin with a photograph.
They tend to end in a lawyer's office.
The place is chosen for how it feels — the light, the price, someone's cousin who knows a valley. The constraints that actually decide whether a community can live there are discovered months later, usually after money has moved. CSI is built around those constraints, so a group can meet them while they are still cheap.
Constraint · 02
Water that exists on paper
Annual rainfall averages hide the month that matters. Basin stress, extraction rights and who already holds them decide whether a well is a plan or a hope.
Constraint · 03
Rules about seed and food
Saving, breeding and trading your own seed is legal in some jurisdictions, restricted in others. A food-sovereign community that cannot lawfully keep its own seed is a contradiction it will discover late.
Constraint · 04
Money that cannot move
Capital controls, banking access for foreigners, and how a group can lawfully hold shared funds. This is the layer people research last and regret first.
Constraint · 05
Soil with no way back
Degradation is not automatically disqualifying — much of it is reversible, and cheap land is often degraded land. But you need to know which kind of tired the ground is before you buy it.
Constraint · 06
A region that does not want you
Cost of living, healthcare within reach, a road that works in the wet season, and whether newcomers are met with curiosity or suspicion. The quiet half of whether a place holds.
None of this makes the decision for you. It just moves the hard questions to the front, where they are still answerable.
What the map is, and isn't
A screening tool, not an oracle.
A map of where people might live is easy to misread — as advice, as a listing, as a promise. Here is the line we hold, carefully, on purpose.
It is An open, cited screening tool.
- ✓ A way to get to a shortlist.
It narrows 3,309 regions down to a handful worth a plane ticket — which is the decision the map can honestly help with.
- ✓ Ordered the way reality is ordered.
Law gates land; land gates life. Perfect growing conditions under a legal regime that forbids what you intend score like what they are.
- ✓ Traceable to public data.
Every signal points back to a named open dataset — SoilGrids, WRI Aqueduct, World Bank WGI, CHELSA/GAEZ, ThinkHazard — and each one is cited on the page.
- ✓ Explicit about its own gaps.
Scores carry a confidence grade, values are marked measured, modelled or proxy, and every region lists the checks only a visit can settle.
It is not And never quietly will be.
- × A recommendation.
It scores conditions, not futures. Nobody here will tell you where to move, and a high score is an invitation to go look — not a verdict.
- × Legal, tax or immigration advice.
The legal layer is desk research over public indicators. Before anyone commits money, a lawyer in that jurisdiction reads the actual rules.
- × A property listing.
It maps regions, not parcels. No prices, no plots, no brokers, nothing for sale, and no relationship with anyone selling land.
- × Finished.
v0.1. Resolution is coarse in places, some signals are proxies standing in for better data, and we would rather mark that than round it off.
How it reads the land
Three questions, asked in the order
that actually matters.
The order is the argument. Averaging everything into one number lets a beautiful climate cover for an impossible legal regime — so CSI gates instead. The law is read first and can close a region outright. Only then does the ground get a hearing.
01
The law first
Can you legally exist here?
Land, off-grid living, saved seed, your money, how your children can be taught. If there is no lawful path, no amount of good soil rescues it — so this gate runs before the others and can close them.
Legal entity & land frameworkLand tenure securitySeed & agricultural autonomyMonetary & capital sovereigntyEducation & schooling freedomPersonal freedomGovernance & corruption and more
02
Then the land
Will it feed and hold you?
Soil, water, terrain, climate and hazard — measured as they are today, and again against what 2050 is likely to bring. Degraded land with good bones reads as opportunity here, not failure.
Soil qualityWater availability & qualityTerrain & buildabilityGrowing conditionsClimate & natural hazardsLand cover & degradationNatural building materials and more
03
Then the welcome
Could you make a life of it?
Cost, healthcare, connectivity, how far the nearest real town is, and whether the region tends to meet incomers with welcome. The half that decides whether people stay past year three.
Cost of living, labour & landHealthcare qualityConnectivityAccessibilityRemoteness / surroundingsBusiness & economic viabilityCommunity density and more
30 signals in total. The map lets you read any one of them on its own, or switch lens — balanced, sovereignty, agriculture, accessibility — to see how the ranking shifts when the priorities do.
Seven domains
One number is never
the useful part.
Every region reports across seven domains, so you can see where it holds up and where it pushes back. A region at 70 with a legal problem and a region at 70 with a water problem are not the same region, and they should not read like it.
Each region page also names the two or three domains actively working against it — the honest version of a headline score.
Legal & sovereignty
Whether the life you intend is lawful here at all.
Governance, safety & tenure
Whether the rules hold, and whether title holds with them.
Economy & cost
What a year costs, and whether the community can earn one.
Society, freedom & health
Care within reach, freedoms intact, disease burden known.
Land & water
Soil, water, terrain, cover — the physical ground itself.
Climate, growing & hazards
What grows, what threatens, now and toward 2050.
Autonomy & access
Energy, connection, and how far you are from everything else.
Read one for yourself
Open the map ↗Reading a score honestly
A confident number over thin data is worse than no number.
So the map shows its working. Every region carries a suitability class, every signal carries a confidence grade, and each page ends with a list of things a desk simply cannot check.
Suitability class
- S1 Highly suitable Nothing structural in the way.
- S2 Moderately suitable Workable, with known trade-offs.
- S3 Marginally suitable Possible, but it will cost you somewhere.
- N1 Currently not suitable Blocked today — could change.
- N2 Not suitable Blocked in ways that do not move.
The same S1–N2 scale agronomists use for land evaluation. A region with a hard legal block is excluded outright rather than averaged into the middle.
Confidence, per signal
- A Measured Observed data for this region.
- B Modelled Derived or interpolated from nearby observations.
- C Proxy A national or regional stand-in until better data exists.
A region scoring well on mostly proxy data is a lead, not a finding — and the map labels it that way rather than burying it in the average.
What we haven't checked
- ○ Zoning and land-use permission
- ○ Off-grid permits — water, sanitation, energy
- ○ Indigenous-land claim checks
- ○ Deep-legal research — entity, tax, residency
These are desk numbers from open data. The visit decides the rest — we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Built from open data
Every number traces back to something you can check.
No proprietary index, no private scoring, nothing you have to take on trust. Where we estimate, we mark it as an estimate.
Dataset
SoilGrids
Global soil properties at fine resolution.
Dataset
WRI Aqueduct
Water stress, depletion and seasonal variability.
Dataset
World Bank WGI
Governance, rule of law, corruption control.
Dataset
CHELSA / GAEZ
Climate surfaces and agro-ecological growing potential.
Dataset
ThinkHazard
Flood, drought, seismic, cyclone and wildfire exposure.
And the rest
See all sources
The full list, per signal, on the map itself.
Why EcoHubs built a map
We needed this ourselves.
So we made it public.
CSI is not a side project. It falls straight out of what EcoHubs is for — and out of a question we are actively trying to answer for our own first hub.
"To make regenerative community living — rooted in care for people, land, and life — structurally accessible, resilient, and replicable, reducing humanity’s dependency on extractive systems one community at a time."
01
The purpose
Accessible and resilient, structurally.
A map is one of the plainest ways to serve the first two of those qualities. It takes months of guesswork out of the start of a project, and it surfaces the water, hazard and legal risks that tend to break communities years later.
Read the purpose charter ↗02
Our own search
We are looking for ground too.
EcoHub One is being formed now, and it will have to stand somewhere. Rather than run that search privately and publish a conclusion, we built the instrument in the open — so the reasoning behind wherever we land can be checked.
Join the EcoHub One waitlist →03
The vision
One hub is not the point.
A network of small, place-based communities only works if starting one is realistically possible in more than a handful of places. A shared map is how that network finds more candidates than any founder’s intuition would.
Read the vision →Who picks this up
Useful to anyone weighing a place against the life they intend.
For founders
Choosing where to start.
Go from "somewhere warm and cheap" to four candidate regions you can defend to the people you are asking to come with you.
For existing communities
Weighing a second site.
Read your own region against the same thirty signals, then compare it honestly with the places you have been considering.
For people leaving
Narrowing a whole world.
If you are not building but looking, the map is a way to think structurally about a decision that is usually made on feeling alone.
For researchers
Arguing with the weights.
The lenses, the gating logic and the sources are all visible. If you think a signal is weighted wrong, that critique is useful to us.
Where the map sits in the EcoHubs project
The map answers where.
It deliberately does not answer how.
CSI answers the question of ground. It is deliberately narrow — the structure a community runs on once it gets there is a separate problem, with its own tool.
01 · Vision
A network of regenerative hubs.
Small, place-based communities, each adapted to its land and culture, woven into a shared commons that gets stronger over time.
Read the vision →02 · CSI· you are here
Where the ground allows it.
An open screening map of law, land, water and welcome — so the search for a place starts from evidence rather than from a photograph.
Open the live map ↗03 · RCOS Standard
What you build on it.
Communities rarely fracture over soil. They fracture over rules nobody wrote down — which is the half the RCOS Standard is for.
Read about RCOS →The map finds the ground. The standard shapes what stands on it. Neither one is much use without the other.
Honest questions, honest answers
About the map, specifically.
Does a high score mean I should move there? +
No. A high score means a region has fewer structural obstacles than most — nothing more. CSI reads public data from a desk; it cannot read the neighbours, the local mayor, the road in March, or how you feel on the third morning. Treat the map as a way to build a shortlist, then go and stand on the ground.
Why does the legal layer gate everything else? +
Because it is the only layer that can make the others irrelevant. Soil can be rebuilt and water can be caught, but if the law forbids you from living on your own land, saving your own seed, or moving your own money, the best terrain in the world does not help. So the law is read first, and a hard legal block can exclude a region outright rather than being averaged away.
Where does the data come from, and how current is it? +
Every number traces back to a public dataset — SoilGrids for soil, WRI Aqueduct for water, World Bank WGI for governance, CHELSA and GAEZ for climate and growing conditions, ThinkHazard for hazard exposure, among others. Each source is cited on the map, and the full list is published at csi.ecohubs.community. Update cadences differ by source; where we are working from an older release or a stand-in indicator, the value is marked as a proxy.
What do the confidence grades mean? +
Each signal carries A, B or C. A is measured — observed data for that region. B is modelled — derived or interpolated from nearby observations. C is a proxy — usually a national figure standing in for a region until something better exists. A region scoring well on mostly C-grade signals is a lead, not a finding, and the map says so rather than hiding it in the average.
How precise is a region? Can I look up a specific piece of land? +
Not yet. CSI works at administrative-region resolution, which is coarse enough that two valleys inside the same score can be genuinely different places. It is built to eliminate regions, not to choose parcels. Parcel-level questions — this slope, this well, this title — are exactly what the site visit and a local lawyer are for.
Is CSI trying to sell me land, or take a cut? +
No. There is nothing for sale, no brokers involved, no affiliate arrangements, and no relationship with anyone selling property in any region on the map. CSI is free to use and free to argue with. If that ever changes, it will be stated plainly on the page before it does.
How does CSI relate to the RCOS Standard? +
They answer different halves of the same question. CSI reads the ground: whether a place can lawfully and physically hold a community. The RCOS Standard reads the structure: how the people on that ground make decisions, share resources, and repair conflict. Communities rarely fracture over soil — they fracture over rules nobody wrote down. You want both.
I think a signal is weighted wrong. Can I say so? +
Please do. The gating logic, the lenses and the sources are all visible precisely so they can be disputed, and a specific objection with a dataset attached is the most useful thing you can send us. Get in touch, or bring it into the community as a member.
The map is free to read
Read it. Argue with it.
Then go and look.
3,309 regions are already scored. The weights are visible, the sources are named, and the gaps are written down — so you can disagree with it precisely.
Open data · Cited · Free to use · v0.1, and honest about it