An increasing number of US landowners want to build commune-style villages that are completely self-sufficient and have a low carbon footprint

When a massive wildfire destroyed more than a thousand homes last year in the bone-dry hills of drought-stricken Lake County, California, about two hours north of San Francisco, Magdalena Valderrama Hurwitz and her husband, Eliot Hurwitz, were among those made homeless. Eager to transform their tragedy into an opportunity, they got together with a group of neighbors who had also lost their homes and began imagining a different kind of community.

Valderrama Hurwitz, a former non-profit administrator, and her husband, a retired Napa County Transportation and Planning Agency director, didn’t want to replace their house with an oversized energy guzzler, isolated from their neighbors. Instead, they began exploring ways to create a so-called intentional community: a neighborhood that could better protect them from climate change-related risks and be a model for how to live with less impact on the planet.

“We want to try to mitigate and prepare for future disasters, and for us that resiliency should include a new way to develop rather than the kind of suburban, single-family home with people isolated from each other living in their own castles,” Valderrama Hurwitz says.

More than 5,000 miles away, in Amsterdam, a California-based development company called ReGen Villages is about to break ground on a very similar project. When it’s completed next year, an off-grid development of 100 homes will aim to be almost completely self-sufficient. Each 25-home cluster will encircle several food production facilities for growing organic produce and raising chicken and fish using advanced agricultural technologies that require less land, like aquaponics and vertical farms. The settlement will generate its own wind, solar and biogas power and manage its wastewater in a closed-loop system that also captures waste to be recycled as energy and fertilizers.

James Ehrlich, CEO and founder of ReGen Villages, says the company decided to launch in northern Europe because the region has a solid track record designing housing that reduces ecological impact. ReGen – an abbreviation of regenerative – has plans to replicate its pilot project at sites in Sweden, Norway, Germany and Denmark in the next couple of years to further study the model before expanding globally.

“The EU has taken the lead in many ways on rethinking residential development in ways that support lowering carbon footprints,” Ehrlich says.