Ecovillage
A community consciously designing its social, ecological, economic and cultural systems to regenerate the place it sits in.
This is a word people use loosely, so check it against what is actually held in common: land, income, decisions, or only good will. Communities that use the term precisely will tell you, unprompted, which of those they share and which they do not.
An ecovillage is a community — intentional, traditional or urban — that consciously designs its own systems to regenerate the environment it sits in, rather than merely harming it less. The Global Ecovillage Network, which has carried the definition since 1995, frames that design across four dimensions: social, cultural, ecological and economic.
The word to weigh in that definition is regenerate. A settlement that recycles diligently and installs solar panels is reducing its damage, which is not the same claim. An ecovillage sets out to leave the soil, water and biodiversity of its site measurably better than it found them — and the honest ones publish how far along that road they actually are.
What it describes, and what it does not
An ecovillage is a purpose, not a building type or an ownership model. It says nothing about whether homes are private, whether income is shared, or how decisions get made. That is why the label sits comfortably on settlements as different as a hundred-person rural project and a retrofitted urban block.
An example
Findhorn in northern Scotland is the most studied case, largely because it did the unusual thing of measuring itself: a 2006 ecological footprint study, conducted with the Sustainable Development Research Centre, put the community’s footprint at roughly half the UK average — the lowest recorded for a settlement in the industrialised world at the time. Sieben Linden in Germany and Tamera in Portugal are similarly well documented, each on a different axis: construction and water respectively.
What it is often confused with
Cohousing , constantly. Cohousing is an architecture; an ecovillage is an aim. An ecovillage very often _adopts_ cohousing's layout — clustered private homes around shared facilities — because it is a well-tested pattern, which is exactly why the two words get swapped. The other frequent confusion is with an eco-development: housing built to a high environmental standard and sold, with no community of any kind attached.Sources & further reading
- 1 Global Ecovillage Network — the network that carries the definition
- 2 Cohousing vs ecovillage — the two told apart properly
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
Related terms
A group who chose each other, live together or close by, and have written down how they decide things.
Private self-contained homes clustered around shared facilities — usually a common house — with residents managing the whole.