“We exist, and life exists on Earth, because of 12 to 14 inches of topsoil. When that goes away, we go away,” said James Ehrlich, director of compassionate sustainability at Stanford University. It was an offhand and exasperated tangent more than an hour into a lengthy interview for this article and one of many sobering observations made during the conversation.
It’s no secret that our relationship to the natural world is under tremendous strain today, and according to Ehrlich, many of the emergencies we face can be traced back to how we design and manage modern communities. Simply put, the way we build and operate our living spaces is destroying the environment and fueling a global mental health crisis of loneliness. Ehrlich’s work focuses on both. As the world continues to urbanize, this is a recipe for chaos, he says.
In our discussion, he pointed out that humanity has experienced a dramatic shift in the past 70 years. Before 1950, about 70 percent of the global population lived outside cities, many in small communities with varying degrees of self-sufficiency. Since then, rapid urbanization has transformed societies around the world, with over half of humanity now living in cities.
“My thesis has been and will continue to be that cities are brittle and that urban infrastructure is capable of experiencing, like a domino effect, a cascading set of failures,” he says.
Ehrlich emphasizes that we can’t only retrofit modern cities with more sustainable infrastructure but must also develop new communities that more closely resemble the life of our ancestors.
He doesn’t appear to be alone in that thinking.
VillageOS
In recent decades, there’s been rising interest in self-sufficient, environmentally sustainable, and socially and economically resilient communities, often called ecovillages. Today, there are more than 10,000 such communities in a variety of forms ranging from the secular to the spiritually oriented, each seeking to create thriving spaces aligned with their environment.
While designing and operating an ecovillage is complex, Ehrlich’s startup, ReGen Villages, a Stanford University spinoff, is developing software tools to make the task easier.
Their core planning tool, VillageOS, can help conceive residential infrastructure incorporating everything from clean water systems and housing to renewable energy, organic food production, and even robotic and autonomous systems.
It’s like an industrial SimCity for regenerative living spaces.
VillageOS courtesy of ReGen Villages Holding, BV
“Very often, architects, engineers, and planners prioritize maximizing building density or minimizing costs which focuses on profit rather than environmental impact or sustainability. VillageOS takes a different approach by first asking, ‘What is the land telling us?’” says Ehrlich.
In that sense, VillageOS is a high-tech listening device that can assess the land’s natural capacity and resource flows. It works by pulling in geospatial maps and then aggregating everything from historical data about climate and weather to soil maps and an array of local regulations, building codes, and permitting information. With the data, VillageOS uses generative design to blueprint community spaces that maximize any number of intended outcomes while minimizing its environmental footprint.
The goal is to design flourishing spaces that embed sustainable practices from the start.
A user who wants to enhance water resilience, for example, can set objectives like “maximizing rainwater storage” or “reducing runoff.” The software can then identify the best location to place a reservoir on a real parcel of land. It can do the same when designing housing and energy systems or choosing appropriate climate-resilient crops and where to harvest them.
The software’s user interface is key to the project. Built in Unreal Engine, it pulls 3D map data from Cesium and makes use of photorealistic, 3D visual renderings. By incorporating a game-like design with slider bars and controls, even non-technical users should be able to use the tool as easily as playing a video game.
“I get joy imagining that we can sit down with elderly farmers who own a piece of land, and without instruction watch them type in their address to load their land, start to get the climate data, and then explore the possibilities for what might be possible for that piece of land,” says Ehrlich.
One benefit of Unreal Engine is its ability to generate realistic lighting conditions in real time, a relatively new breakthrough that’s already having a dramatic impact on industries like real estate and film production. That means VillageOS users can plan and visualize exactly how a space would look and feel during different seasons and times of day or how foliage might cast shadows and change lighting conditions. It may seem trivial, but architects spend significant amounts of time exploring how lighting changes our use of public space.
The photorealism allows planners to communicate exactly how a resident can expect to experience a living space. The system could even allow customization, like setting a user’s height to that of a child so designers can take a variety of stakeholders into account.
Another element of VillageOS is its potential to serve as a digital twin and tool for managing a community’s ongoing operations. Digital twins, as I’ve written elsewhere, use a virtual replica of a real system to interactively engage with, ask questions of, or make predictions about that system. This might prove useful when deploying and managing autonomous robotic systems designed with ecovillages in mind, like drones or robotic fruit pickers.
“We’re going to see all kinds of robotic interventions capable of redirecting water, redirecting solar panels, and doing different kinds of autonomous interventions for the benefit of improving and refining the living conditions of these communities,” Ehrlich says.
The VillageOS software is still in development, but Ehrlich plans to release the climate data aggregator as an open-source API as soon as its ready. In the meantime, ReGen Villages is working with landowners and developers to train the VillageOS software.
System Reset
The scope of Ehrlich’s mission touches almost every aspect of how a society functions and addresses nearly all the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One of his work’s clearest ambitions is to curb the potential disruption from climate-related displacement and migration. Ehrlich sees a future where flourishing communities with socially affordable and climate-resilient housing developments reduce burdens on governments around the world and foster a mentally and physically healthy society—a big goal of his work at Stanford.
“Compassionate sustainability is about mindfulness—reducing the amygdala’s response related to cortisol release. How we live and where we live can actually improve health outcomes. There is a definite correlation between my work at Stanford and health outcomes based on this kind of design thinking.”
Living in small intentional communities might not only be an environmental solution to global challenges but could also make us happier and healthier. VillageOS might one day help us get to that better future.
Image Credit: ReGen Villages Holding, BV