ReGen Villages Oosterwold is a neighborhood of 203 homes on 25 hectares of former farmland, about 20 minutes from Amsterdam. The community sustains itself in energy, drinking water, food, and wastewater, running as a single closed loop. We joined the developer, ReGen Villages, in mid-2017 to design how that loop would actually work, from the urban metabolism and the masterplan down to the housing typologies and the landscape.
The food system runs on permaculture and agroforestry, with greenhouses, hydroponics, and vertical farming for vegetables, fruit, and herbs. Food waste becomes feed for on-site aquaculture, so what a kitchen throws out comes back as fish. The neighborhood is mainly car-free, with no driveways, rainwater filtered where it falls, and stormwater held across the landscape to cope with heavier rains and flooding, while the planting supports local biodiversity.
A neighborhood designed around the people who live in it, that feeds and powers itself.
We organized the design around daily life: community centers anchor work, education, social life, and celebration, with the energy and material systems sized to match. The Oosterwold rules were progressive but blocked connections between separate housing blocks, which made a genuinely integrated neighborhood hard to build, so we worked it through with the municipality until the masterplan received full approval in July 2018. Fast Company covered the project.