REGEN-01: Community-Led Regenerative Design

GEN Europe (Global Ecovillage Network Europe) is a network of more than 100 ecovillages and community-led initiatives across Europe pioneering regenerative practices in the built environment, land stewardship, and participatory governance. We bring grounded experience in translating regenerative principles into real-life neighbourhood-scale models that combine social, ecological, and architectural innovation.

Our Contribution:

• Living laboratories of regenerative design: GEN Europe’s member ecovillages offer decades of experimentation with bioclimatic architecture, natural building materials, sufficiency-oriented planning, and nature-based solutions that integrate buildings with local ecosystems.

• Context-sensitive approaches: We work in diverse bioregions—from Mediterranean to Nordic—enabling the testing of regenerative design in rural, peri-urban, and climate-sensitive areas, aligned with local cultural heritage and landscape identity.

• Co-creation and capacity building: Our network has strong expertise in participatory design and co-development processes that empower residents to shape their built environments as agents of change.

• Transdisciplinary knowledge: We bridge grassroots innovation with academic and policy research, offering a unique contribution to integrating social sciences, arts, and ecological engineering in regenerative design.

• Dissemination and impact scaling: Through our European network, we offer robust dissemination pathways, community-to-community replication models, and links to policy dialogues on sustainable building, circularity, and resilience.

GEN Europe is seeking to join a consortium as a key partner in co-designing, piloting, and evaluating regenerative neighbourhood strategies. We bring the lived experience, methodologies, and stakeholder networks to make regenerative design inclusive, place-based, and deeply transformative.

For more information, visit www.gen-europe.org