Ecovillage Boekel: Discover the Netherlands' award-winning, sustainable housing community

From the sky, it looks like a flower house. The Ecovillage Boekel is an almost self-sufficient housing community and was voted the most sustainable organisation in the Netherlands in 2021.

In a world beset by crises, war and climate disruption, this European project offers concrete solutions for social, economic, and cultural regeneration.

"The United Nations said that in 2030, half of all humans will have problems with climate change. We are trying to be self-sufficient for food and water and a lot of our energy," said Ad Vlems, the project manager of Ecovillage Boekel. 

"Ecovillage Boekel is part of a worldwide project of eco-villages searching how to be more resilient to climate change."

The Ecovillage Boekel in the south of the Netherlands is made up of 36 pioneering sustainable flats. These climate-positive round buildings retain 800 tonnes of C02. 

Forty-eight adults - fervent campaigners for the circular economy - are involved in this European project where nothing is wasted, not a drop of water, not a kilowatt of energy.

"The fun thing is that most projects have a lot of problems with laws and regulations. That makes it difficult for them," Ad Vlems explains. 

"But our ministers and ministries were so happy with us that they granted us to be part of the law and the Crisis and Recovery Act. "Only sustainable, innovative projects [can come under that law]. If what you do works, then they change the regular laws. So in the Netherlands, over the 26 projects, laws have been updated by experiences from the projects in the Crisis and Recovery Act."

Annemarie Wilhelmund Hendriksen has been living in this community for a year and a half. The houses are built with bio-sustainable materials such as wood and hemp, and this is one of