Build the Village, Starve the Empire.
A new plan to expand ecovillage frameworks worldwide.
I’ve long touted the ecovillage model as a way to redesign our broken society.
The challenge is that for many, this way of life is inaccessible.
Yes, many dream of living in nature in community, but relocating to isolated rural areas is often a privilege. Jobs are fewer, public transportation is shoddier, and access to culture and essential services is diminished.
In fact, this just poses ecovillages as a different kind of suburb to aspire to.
It’s time to create a blueprint that works for many, an actively dismantles what DOESN’T work.
Enter a playbook I’m building that I’m going to call, “Build the Village, Starve the Empire”. I read this slogan on a carousel promoting how to build neighborhood resources in a time where authoritarianism is somehow back in vogue.
What absolutely gagged me with joy is seeing this concept become more mainstream.
As I contemplate the future of Terrenity, I am acutely aware that the audience I serve is very niche. To reach the actual tipping point we need to get us out of this polycrisis, us village builders are going to have to develop models that work for a broader public.
This is the next resource I’ll be building in 2026 (after the Village Building Trends Report) so that you can revillage wherever you are.
The Idea
Build the Village, Starve the Empire is a practical framework and a guerilla-culture toolkit that equips incremental developers and civic weavers to transform existing neighborhoods into regenerative micro-villages.
Through pattern language, it trains a new generation of community builders to restore belonging, shared care systems, and ecological reciprocity at the local scale.
The central outcome? Create post-capitalist neighborhoods, now.
The framework this is built around
This solarpunk municipalist framework is in progress, but here are the “families” of this pattern language that I’m developing:
The Commons: How to steward the physical, shared life-supporting systems.
The Civic Economy: How to exchange & resource ourselves
Governance: How to make decisions and distribute power
Shared Care Systems: How to create well-being through belonging, care, and parallel economics
Social Fabric: How to cultivate relationships, ritual & cultural memory
Land, Housing & Place Design: How to reform housing patterns to determine positive social patterns.
The playbook will provide models of how to revillage these areas of civic life.
Models will span how to create everything from a food cooperative to mutual aid networks to alternative economies that dismantle inequitable systems.
If you have additional families you’d add to this framework, comment below.
The Format For Change
Theory alone is a dandelion puff against systemic oppression. That’s why I’m focusing the models on implementation in the most accessible, practical ways possible.
Most “movement trainings” fail because they assume:
time abundance
emotional capacity
willingness to study/work
But my actual audience (civic weavers) are already overstretched, under-resourced, and carrying the emotional labor of holding others.
So the model must fold into existing life without adding extra homework to the burnout.
And it also has to be fun, because we need more joy and hopecore.
What I’m building is low-lift, ultra-scalable spread.
Here’s how I’m going to help futurists build a solar punk future.
1) The Playbook
A practical guide / pattern language for retrofitting cities into villages.
Includes:
Implementation plans how to build in every pattern language family listed above.
Neighborhood mapping tools
Community capacity + governance scaffolds
Case studies & typologies of successful movements and micro-villages
Economic models how to start them (community finance, shared utility models, cooperatives, co-ownership, land trusts, etc.)
Implemenation plans for shared infrastructure (kitchen, gardens, care networks, mobility hubs, etc.)
2) Microgrants for Local Guilds Implementing This Playbook
I was very inspired by The Cabin’s “Supper Club” model that sponsored people all over the world to get together in person to share a meal under the Cabin member identity.
This framework could do the same by sponsoring groups of at least 7 people to gather, study the frameworks like a book club with a peer learning model, and follow a monthly micro-shift challenge.
This will also include a guide for organizers to make this fun and easy.
And rather than hope that people join organically, I’m going to make sure this initiative involves warm outreach to incremental developers, urban planners, community organizers, and regenerative architects & placemakers.
In this busy, extractive world, providing the free tools is not enough. You have to create the opportunity for others to gather and build in-person alliances.
3) Object-Based Meme Toolkit for Signal Boosting
Memes travel faster than models. They’re the “gateway drug” for paradigm shift.
These should be visually loveable, easy to share, identity-reinforcing, and mostly non-linguistic (cross-cultural).
With the future in the hands of internet-native generations, it is important to respect the power of mimetics. Dissemination of ideas in a highly digital world must involve compelling graphics and visual language.
So ideas of this include card decks, on-demand printable signage / poster kits, and mini field guides.
Inspired by the little free library and geocaching models, there will be a virtual store where you can get free resources/designs to print out or build yourself, or a done-for-you toolkit sent to you.
How TF Do I Plan to Do This?
To make this possible, I am cultivating sponsors and recruiting culture geniuses.
MORE. THAN. EVER we need tools to revillage.
It’s not just about rural offgrid communities anymore. It’s about pockets of community resistance and us refusing to let each other down.
Do you want to help build this? Reach out to me.
Now or never
Maybe your heart has been crushed by carrying the weight of everything you can’t change. I know mine has.
This is an anti-burnout, pro-hope project.
Built on the pretext that societal change is more accessible, and more sane, at the local level.
Especially while I’m riding the highs of the Mamdani win in New York, and feeling hope breathe again into my heart, this is my gift to the future.
Support Terrenity
As a village builder writing in the service of a solar punk future, I’m determined to keep Terrenity free to read and publicly available for everyone.
Producing Terrenity, however, is not free.
If this work matters to you and you’re able to support it, please consider a paid subscription and help keep Terrenity going for as long as it’s needed.
Prefer a one-time contribution? You can donate at ko-fi.com/terrenity
In my wanderings and research into the idea of Place, I’ve come across
many wonderful thinkers on the subject.
One of my favourites is C.S. Lewis, who once described joy as “the feeling we get of being home in a place we’ve never been before.”
That strikes me as exactly right. It’s that quiet resonance between a place and the human spirit, the sense that generations before you have left something intangible but enduring in the air.
The big question, of course, is: can we design that feeling into new places? Can you design in
belonging and community? I’d like to think we can, but only if we remember that joy, like
community, is built out of the small, ordinary things.
Bob
Your comment about the assumption of time and emotional capacity is spot on, I'm so fearful of where society is heading but I barely have the energy to keep my own family liferaft floating in a vaguely positive direction, let alone take on responsibility for a whole little community.