How I'm building a regenerative village project in Italy - Village Builder Insider #1

The Village Builder Insider series is the diary/documentation of my journey of designing or consulting for regenerative villages. Every issue I include 3 lessons I learned this past month and what I believe were critical moments that could make or break the project + how I navigated them.

This is the only Village Builder Insider I will offer for free so people can see what they are like. The rest are reserved for my amazing paid subscribers.

The Village In Question

This month’s focus: Eternità, a regenerative village concept I am leading in the island of Sardinia.

Project Stats:

• 200 hectare, 50 million-euro beachfront land on the western coast of Sardinia

• Site of 40-year reforestation project, UNESCO world heritage site

• Owned by a company that represents several local families with 70% of the shares of the land, and the rest of the shares are owned by local people.

The Village Concept

I am very proud of my pitch deck so far. It’s currently private while we’re in investment rounds, but I’ll give you the general concept.

1. Smart Village

2. Longevity Research Center

3. Longevity Wellness Center

These are fully 3D printed buildings made out of 100% earthen materials. They come from TECLA, an Italian company I am investigating as one option to construct a building or two. Just for the sake of having a sustainably-3D-printed building, because that’s just dope.

The Story Up Till Now

Sante, the representative of the owners of the land, is an Italian-American man a few decades my senior. He and his wife meet my father in Mexico on vacation, and my father recommends us to work together.

We are introduced and hit it off.

The land opportunity sounds interesting, and Sante is inspired by the idea of a longevity village, but I know it’s going to be creating a community project from scratch. I am too busy with exciting

Regen Tribe

projects to commit any time to designing a village end to end.

A year passes without much happening. Every time Sante reaches out, he expresses wonder and enthusiasm as he discovers more and more about the regenerative village movement.

Meanwhile, at Regen Tribe we are connecting with different longevity-focused projects, and specifically tapping into the SEZ, network state, and coordi-nation movements. January to February 2024 my colleagues attend the two month Vitalia pop-up city at Prospera, which is entirely focused on longevity tech and startup societies.

I learn that Sardinia one of Italy’s 6 designated Special Economic Zones, apart from being one of the world’s 6 Blue Zones associated with a high number of centennials.

Sante also happens to be connected to a company that produces plant-based longevity supplements and a well-known doctor who writes about longevity and teaches at an American university that has an office based in Milan.

Things start to feel uncannily aligned.

Then Rhyzo falls into our lap via Sante. They are a collective of environmental professionals for land regeneration who specialize in Mediterranean bioregions. With Juan-Pablo Rodado, the project feels energized again and we start scheduling calls.

So Sante and I have several meetings, and then I finally meet the mysterious owners. They turn out to be some older Italian men who genuinely just want to bring value to their aging and economically degraded region.

90-95% of this will simply be kept under conservation of wild green spaces. Originally a potential investor was someone who wanted a golf course resort. Thank goodness they aren’t in the picture anymore.

After a few conversations of understanding each other’s intentions and presenting them with an initial concept design, they ask me to draft a letter of interest. I state in writing what I want to accomplish.

We also meet the engineer who has been stewarding the project for the past 40 years, a delightful 90-year old Sardinian man. He speaks Sarde more than Italian, and his face is obviously weathered by the outdoors. I tell him I want to adopt him.

And in this same call, I have the most anti-patriarchal moment of my life.

Here I am on a Zoom call with all of these older, successful businessman and Sante keeps passing the word to me when someone else is finished speaking, almost like he’s announcing a famous speaker. He keeps saying things like “You are our fearless project leader, and we are lucky to have you and will follow your lead on this”.

I felt like just this one hour melted away years of men interrupting me, talking over me, explaining simple things to me I already understand in subtly condescending ways, or just simply monologuing with no end in sight.

When we talk about New Earth, that is what I’m talking about.

Summary of Milestones

• Obtained a contract to help the landowners sell the land to an interested buyer and receive a commission

• Submit a letter of interest

• Created a first draft pitch deck with the concept and initial design of the village, research center, and wellness center.

Top 3 Lessons

1. It really helps to have a village co-creator with you. Sante motivates me and takes the lead when I am busy, and I take the lead when I am inspired and revved up. We have complementary energies and expertise, and this just reinforces the idea that building and designing community as a solopreneur just doesn’t make sense.

2. It’s okay for things to go slow. I think moving at the pace of nature and striking when the time is right is key.

3. Agreements come…second? This goes against everything I thought, but before you can create any substantial written agreements, you have to spend time getting to know and like and trust each other.

I felt impatient to turn our discussions into agreements because of fear (we’ve seen so many bad situations in our Regen Tribe work of people failing to get the right agreements in writing), but I realized that there is a natural exploratory phase at the beginning that will help you decide if you really are a fit. Focusing too much on agreements and deliverables is trying to raw dog a person, and it’s not the way.

So it’s okay not to rush for written agreements, although you definitely need them before you can make any major commitments and before any money hits the table.

Case in point: we want to pay Rhyzo to perform the site analyses, but we don’t want to finance something ourselves if our relationship with the land ends for whatever unforeseen reason.

I can’t wait to visit the land in September this year.

Next Hurdles:

Paying for site analysis - In May, we are planning to have our partners from Rhyzo conduct the necessary surveys before it’s too late in the season. We have to do this before the summer because of the timing of flora and fauna reproduction.

We will present the suggestion to the owners to have them take on this expense, because we can’t feasibly know if this project is viable without these studies, but it’s not an expense we want to take on.

Getting a legal agreement - Right now Sante has a contract to help sell the land, but the gentlemen would like to do this as a joint venture. I’m an infant when it comes to legal agreements, but the current advice is to let their legal partners draft the proposal and we can submit edits.

Have legal advice? Drop it in the comments.

They submit a very simple first draft. It outlines 4 major players: the owners, a designing company and subsequent operational entity (me and Sante), the investing buyer, and the local consulting company (Rhyzo).

The intention is to perform this as a joint venture with the owners, so I have to figure out exactly what kind of legal entity Sante and I (and other village designers I want to rope into the process) want to operate from to achieve our end goals.

Filling out an investment application — Luckily, our preferred potential investor provides a very easy (albeit lengthy) application to fill out to apply for funding with them. I am perfectionistic, so I am filling that out with care. One of the many tabs open on my computer.

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Should I Regret Telling You?

Some people I know are working on their village concepts pretty hush-hush. From a marketing standpoint, it makes sense to delay the dopamine of the “launch” of a project.

I’ve always been the kind of person to tell people what I am doing that I am excited about. For my own process, it actually opens up the idea to more perspectives and beneficial input.

Plus, I want you to be able to learn vicariously.

So, if you thought this was useful, let me know in the comments. What else would you like to know about regenerative village design?

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