01 Regenerative
Heal more than you take.
Food, building, energy and water are designed to restore soil, biodiversity, and the cycles around us. Sustainability keeps what exists; regeneration sets out to improve it.
The Vision · what we are quietly building toward
A future small enough
to live inside.
EcoHubs is building a network of small, human-scale ecovillages: intentional communities designed to regenerate the land they sit on. Underneath it is our patient attempt to answer a question many of us already carry: what would a life worth being inside actually look like?
Below is the picture as clearly as we can see it today: the principles, the values, the horizon, and the way we plan to walk there, together and in the open.
Horizon · 2030+
From the manifesto
"EcoHubs are not perfect communities. They are learning communities."
The vision, in one breath
A growing network of small, human-scale communities —
designed to regenerate land, culture, and livelihoods through cooperation and shared responsibility.
i.
Rooted
Each EcoHub is deeply adapted to its local ecology and culture — the soil under its feet, the language at its long table, the seasons it lives by.
ii.
Connected
And every hub stays connected to a shared global commons, where what one hub learns reaches the others, so no one has to start from zero.
Small enough to know everyone by name.
Connected enough to learn from every other hub.
The principles that hold a hub
Six things every EcoHub is,
in its own way.
Each hub is shaped by its land, its people, its history, so no two will look the same. Underneath the difference they share six commitments, and a hub missing any one of them is not really an EcoHub anymore.
02 Shared
Hold things in common, on purpose.
Land, tools, kitchens, vehicles, knowledge. The default is shared, not owned, which means less waste, less duplication, and more resilience when one household has a hard month.
03 Of care
People before output.
Mutual support, conflict that gets repaired instead of buried, and decisions made with the people they affect.
04 Local
Adapted to where it lives.
A hub on a coast, a hub in the mountains and a hub inside a city will not look the same. Climate, culture, language, and local knowledge get the final word over any template.
05 Learning
Try, fail in public, refine.
Every hub experiments, and every hub documents what worked and what broke. Failures are shared openly, because they are what the next hub learns the most from.
06 Connected
Rooted locally, woven globally.
Each hub is sovereign, and none of them are alone. Patterns, tools, and people flow between them through a shared commons, the RCOS Standard, which gets better every year.
A vision needs edges
What this is not,
and never will be.
A vision like this is easy to confuse with a few similar-looking things. These are the ones we have decided, carefully, that we are not.
Not this
A retreat from the world
We are building places that stay part of the wider world and work at a healthier relationship with it.
Not this
A franchise model
There is no central authority that approves a hub. The RCOS Standard is forkable, so local communities decide what to keep, what to change, and what to throw out.
Not this
A spiritual or political ideology
We are not aligned to one teacher, one party, one belief system. People of very different worldviews can live well in an EcoHub if they agree on how decisions get made and how conflict gets repaired.
Not this
A speculative project
There are no tradeable tokens and no promised returns. The internal value unit (ECO) recognizes contribution inside a hub, but the reason to be here is the people and the work.
Not this
A revolution against the system
We are not trying to overthrow anything. Community by community, we are reducing our dependency on a structure that cannot heal itself, until a different way of life becomes ordinary.
Not this
An app that becomes the point
The platform is the smallest scaffolding we can build that lets a community see itself, with no engagement loops and no attention market. When it's working well, you mostly forget it's there.
The vision at three scales
A hub. A network. A generation.
The vision works at three scales. The smallest is a place you can walk across in a morning. The largest is a slow civilizational shift that will outlast any of us. Each one depends on the others.
Horizon 01 · this decade
A hub.
One small, locally rooted community where the way of life is honest, regenerative, and human-scale.
- ~50–150 people, multi-generational
- Land cared for by the people on it
- Local food, energy, work, learning
- Conflict and decision patterns written down
Horizon 02 · next ~15 years
A network.
Many hubs, in many climates and cultures, sharing what they learn through a living, open-source RCOS Standard.
- Hubs across continents, each one local
- Patterns, failures, and tools flow freely
- No central authority. No franchise.
- Resilience through plurality, not size
Horizon 03 · a generation
A generation.
A way of life that has stopped being alternative and become one of the ordinary, available answers to "how should we live?"
- Children who grew up inside hubs become adults
- Local resilience as a baseline, not a project
- Commons-stewarded land, openly governed
- Civilization, quietly, less brittle
We will probably not see the full shape of this in our lifetimes. That's fine. We are planting trees we will not sit under.
The cultural floor
Five things we hold
underneath all the rest.
Values are what stays when the tools fail and the patterns get edited. These are the five we keep coming back to.
Value 01
Regeneration over extraction.
We give back more than we take, and aim to leave the land, each other, and the wider world healthier than we found them.
Value 02
Cooperation over competition.
Most of the things we want, like belonging, resilience and meaningful work, can't be won. They are built together, or not at all.
Value 03
Make the invisible explicit.
We name the things that quietly break communities first: power, money, conflict, care. Transparency is a precondition for trust.
Value 04
Learn through real practice.
Theory loses to lived experience. A pattern only stays in the RCOS Standard if it survives contact with a real community, real land, real people, real failure.
Value 05
Everyone has a role.
A working community needs cooks, listeners, builders, carers, coders, growers, translators, organizers. Every local voice matters because every local hand is needed.
From idea to ground
How a vision actually becomes
a place you can stand in.
Most beautiful visions never leave the page. We have built the work as a loop, so every hub teaches the network something and the next hub starts from a slightly stronger RCOS Standard than the last.
- 01
Write down what we know.
An open, evolving RCOS Standard covering land, governance, culture, economics, and care, the things every community has to figure out anyway.
- 02
Test it in the real world.
A first community in Ecuador is already applying the RCOS Standard under real ecological, social and economic constraints. Whether and when a community becomes a fully-fledged EcoHub is a question we're answering as we go.
- 03
Document honestly.
What worked, what didn't, what hurt. Pilots only matter if their scars and their wins are written down where others can use them.
- 04
Refine the RCOS Standard.
Lived experience flows back into the patterns, so the next community starts from everything we already learned the hard way.
- 05
Replicate, locally.
New hubs fork the RCOS Standard. They keep what fits their land, their culture, their people, and change what doesn't.
- 06
Loop, in the open.
The cycle keeps running and every hub feeds the network, so each year the RCOS Standard gets a little truer, a little kinder, a little harder to break.
Where it ends · where it starts
We are building the future
one hub at a time.
If any of this felt familiar, like something you have already been quietly carrying, there's a place for you in the work. There are many ways in, and none of them require you to move tomorrow.
Non-speculative · Non-ideological · Built in the open