VILLAGE DESIGN INSTITUTE

Educating for a Sustainable Lifeworld

• Place-Making • Co-Worlding • Ecopoiesis

The Village Design Institute (VDI) is an educational nonprofit registered in the State of Washington. VDI was founded for the purpose of creating, organizing, and disseminating a scientific, multi-disciplinary knowledge resource base intended for promoting and facilitating the design and implementation of sustainable human settlements for the 21st century. A fundamental working premise at VDI - and thus the namesake - is that the designing of truly sustainable settlements is most effectively conceived and accomplished at village-scale, with all that implies. We have elaborated this declaration in an essay entitled “Fundamentals of Village Design,” a title that will be expanded into textbook format.

At VDI, we take sustainability seriously, so seriously in fact that we are actively moving out of the indigent, 20th century ‘sustainability’ mindset. We are beginning to theorize, design, and think in terms of ‘beyond sustainability,’ beyond conditions of mere steady-state material maintenance to situations where human and planetary potential is being actualized – stirring, thriving, flourishing – in full evolutionary plenitude. Is it possible to include ‘consciousness expansion’ as a design criterion? For more on this perspective see the essays “Sustainability 1” and “Sustainability 2.”

At VDI, we believe that the emerging vision of the ‘ecovillage’ is the obvious solution to the ecological, economic, cultural, and spiritual challenges facing humanity at this dawning of a new millennium. We want to take the opportunity top explore ‘ecovillage design’ from a scientific, multi-disciplinary, educational perspective. Therefore, VDI defines ‘ecovillage’ as the sustainable ‘unit’ of human settlement in a theoretical ekistics for the 21st century.

The Village Design Institute was conceived and founded because of a perceived gap between the attention level of genuine student interest in matters of Sustainable Community Design, and the corresponding relative absence of such curricula in current Academia. Inspired by such distinguished examples as “Living Routes,” the Farm’s “Ecovillage Training Center,” and “Crystal Waters College,” VDI is attempting to fill the gap by formulating and offering intensive and extensive, leading-edge, high quality educational experiences in the multifarious dimensions of this emerging new field. VDI will eventually establish and become home to an accredited school, an holistic academy devoted to the conceptualization, design, and implementation of sustainable human settlements for the 21st century. Of course, we use ‘sustainable’ here rhetorically; we’re really designing for the ‘evolution of consciousness’ in prosperous condition ‘beyond sustainability.’

Ecopoiesis can be roughly defined as ‘home making.’ In consensus with the related words ecology, economics, ecofeminism, ecosophy, ecovillage, ecosystem, etc., the image here is one of returning human livelihood to a human scale. The ‘home’ being ‘made’ here is not the center of a nuclear family; nor is it a piece of real estate. Home is the encompassing, inclusive, co-evolving, greater environment in which one makes a living, and engages in the endeavors of raising a family, deriving meaningful work, contributing to a community, and entering into a relationship with greater-than-Self. In this sense, home cannot be excluded from the greater ecological and biospheric realities in which it is embedded. Ecopoiseis, then, is consciously creating a mutually beneficial relationship between the human community and the natural world. And, ecopoiesis is best conceived and designed at village-scale.