An ongoing climate crisis, heavy population growth and urbanization as well as a housing shortage, are amongst the realities that municipalities and property developers are racing. White and ReGen Villages Sweden will develop self-sufficient communities in and around cities as a way of tackling these challenges while meeting the Global Goals for Sustainable Development.
White Arkitekter will be in charge of the overall site planning and the design of energy-positive buildings, including housing. Over the last four years, ReGen Villages have met with several Swedish municipalities, landowners, property developers and stakeholder, the goal is for a pilot project to start in 2020.
A ReGen Village is based on the latest climate-smart technologies which are adapted to site-specific conditions. The need for food will be largely met by new technologies such as vertical farming and aquaponics, a closed system in which fish farming and crops are combined symbiotically. Energy will be secured through solar panels and biogas produced from local waste. Water is collected, cleaned and reused. The technologies are combined in an unprecedented way into a single circular system with the help of Village OS.
Village OS is developed by Regen Villages Holding and is based on AI technology and machine learning. It enables the development of similar self-sufficient communities around the globe. The system is reminiscent of so-called “smart homes” in which several home amenities are online and can be controlled from a central hub. Village OS can in a similar way make entire communities “smart“, something that has not been possible at this scale up until now. In practice, this means that all neighborhood systems can be run and balanced digitally.
Self-sufficiency and circularity make our cities and communities less vulnerable by lessening the load on central infrastructure. They are becoming key aspects of sustainable urban development and we are thrilled to be able to soon show what this can look like in practice.