The Global Ecovillage Network’s interactive directory of communities, organizations, and individuals aligned with regenerative living practices. The map carries over 3,100 listings spanning ecovillages, intentional neighborhoods, cohousing projects, land-based communities, spiritual retreat centers, coliving spaces, and youth-led projects across every inhabited continent.
What it covers
GEN’s directory is the largest single catalogue of intentional communities organized around ecological and social regeneration. As of 2026, the map lists approximately 639 ecovillages, 393 intentional neighborhoods, 331 land-based communities, 229 spiritual retreat centres, 125 cohousing projects, 84 coliving spaces, and 34 youth-led projects.
Each listing carries structured data: location, community stage (from planning through to established), main language, primary purpose (ecological, social, spiritual), governance structure, resident count, openness to new members, visitors, and volunteers, economic model, dietary practices, and property status. The data is self-reported by the communities themselves.
Editorial approach
The directory is participatory. Communities, organizations, and individuals create and maintain their own profiles. GEN provides the platform and the taxonomic structure but does not curate entries editorially. This means the quality and depth of individual listings varies. Some carry full profiles with photographs, governance descriptions, and contact protocols. Others are stubs. The directory’s value is its breadth and its self-declaration structure: a community that appears on the GEN map has chosen to identify itself as part of the ecovillage field.
Where its coverage is strongest
Europe and the Americas carry the densest listing concentrations, reflecting GEN’s organizational history. GEN operates through regional bodies (GEN Europe, GEN Africa, GEN Oceania & Asia, the Council of the Americas), each of which feeds listings into the central map. Coverage in Africa and Asia is growing but thinner, and the communities listed there tend to be the more internationally connected ones. Communities that operate primarily in indigenous languages or outside the global ecovillage network’s organizational reach are underrepresented.
Traffic between the map and BioConomy
The GEN map and the BioConomy wiki address overlapping but distinct coordination questions. The ecovillage movement organizes at the scale of the intentional community: a group of people who have chosen to live together on shared or adjacent land under a shared governance framework. The BioConomy organizes at the scale of the bioregion: a geography defined by watershed, soil, and ecology. An ecovillage is typically one community within a bioregion, not a coordination node for the bioregion as a whole.
The overlap is in the ecological factory. Many communities on the GEN map are operating what the BioConomy corpus calls the ecological factory: restoring watersheds, building soil, managing fire regimes, producing food, tending biodiversity. They do this work at community scale. The BioHub aggregates this work at landscape scale and tenders it to downstream counterparties through commitment pools and tender compacts. The GEN map is a directory of potential BioHub cohort members: communities whose existing regenerative practice could, if coordinated at bioregional scale, become a tenderable ecological service.
BioConomy pages where the GEN map is relevant include Cosmo-Local Production (many GEN-listed communities operate on cosmo-local principles), federated cooperatives (GEN’s regional bodies are themselves a federation model), and The Two Factories (the ecovillage movement is one of the clearest existing expressions of the ecological factory being operated by people who understand themselves as producers).
Related pages
- The Two Factories
- Factory, Ecological
- BioHub
- BioRegion
- Cosmo-Local Production
- Federated Cooperative
- Michel Bauwens
- P2P Foundation Wiki
Provenance
Entry created 9 September 2026. Directory statistics and listing categories verified against the live map on the same date. The connection to the BioConomy corpus’s two-factory frame and the observation about ecovillages as potential BioHub cohort members are the author’s structural inferences.