Dear fellow human ,
I have a plan to start an Ecoregion around Argentat in France. The Ecoregion is a local economy with an ecological basis. This summer I am going to give presentations on all aspects of autonomous and self-sufficient living. You are welcome to come and see if the area appeals to you and to make contacts. An Ecoregion is big enough to live comfortably on your own and small enough to do everything by bike. I myself am an ecological architect and I have started a building material shop with ecological and second-hand building materials. I focus mainly on self-builders and specialise in small houses that are insulated with straw bales, or that can be moved. The intention is to start up the local economy in parallel with the current economy and that a local currency is part of the plan. https://oikoslibre.org/ecoregion-en/ for a brochure and signup form for a holiday outside the box.
Explanation
The most important obstacle for the start-up of an Ecoregion is housing. In practice, there are hardly any sites for sale and if you have a site it is very difficult to find professionals who want to build your house and then they ask enormous amounts of money. For me, the solution is to build a portable house myself. If you have no experience and you start improvising, you will not get very far. If you can start with an Ikea-like building plan and also get help if you can’t manage. Then it is a different story.
My motivation for starting OikosLibre is to make a simpler and more unconstrained world accessible. Libre in French stands for free, unrestricted, available and accessible to all. Free from guilt, free from mortgage, free from poison. We are working towards an OikosLibre, a free home. To me, an Oikos is the environment where you spend 90% of your time. When everything becomes more local and small-scale, the quality of your Oikos is important and everything you like should happen there. Quite a few Oikoi together form an Ecoregion. The Ecoregions are in turn in contact with other Ecoregions that might as well be abroad.
I have designed 2 relocatable houses. Jade and Carnelian.
http://www.oikoslibre.org/jade.pdf
http://www.oikoslibre.org/carnelian.pdf
The aim is to find self-builders. You pay a one-off amount and then receive the construction book, with all the details. From 750€ ex. VAT you get a book to build the smallest module. You will then also become a member of OikosLibre and I will show what everyone is building, there will be a forum to exchange information and in the future I want to offer 2nd hand houses here as well. They are movable so there is always a place to find for a mini house. Each book gets a unique word, theme, or name and you sign your work with this name. You can apply to have your house certified according to OikosLibre quality and sustainability standards. You will then receive a 3D printed OikosLibre logo that you can place in your house in a nice spot.
By paying attention to quality and preventing bad copies, I want to give a kind of guarantee and ensure a certain durability and value. Furthermore, the openings and other equipment in the houses will be the same size, so that parts can be exchanged. Next, I want to look for investors who will invest in the materials. If the builder builds a certified version, this is a value stable investment. In this way, the whole story is also accessible to pioneers without a budget.
A number of houses are available for use by investors. No interest is offered. If you want to make money with money, you can do that on the stock market. Investors can also buy vegetables from the gardens around the houses for ‘material shares’, for example. In this way, the houses slowly become the property of the residents.
I also have a European design right for both houses. Carpentry companies could build the two houses under licence. My goal is to use the income to improve the designs and to organise more promotion. I would also like to build a number of houses for rental. Furthermore, I challenge anyone to come up with a crazy variant, without changing the module itself. The aim is to keep the parts interchangeable and the modules linkable. The most important thing is to use sustainable wood. Without felling the entire forest. I can easily get hold of that here in France at www.avenirforet.com. They are just around the corner.
My version of radical is that I will no longer ask permission from the government, nor will I peddle for subsidies. For me, the government is the problem. I would even argue that government is the only problem. In my start-up days, 30 years ago, I felt connected to the ‘kleine aarde’ and the ’12 ambachten’. Here in France, I am involved in a number of eco-villages that are not getting off the ground. That’s why I started looking for solutions on the scale of a small region. You’re not so close to each other.
Don’t get me wrong. OikosLibre is not a movement against the existing society. It is a movement that is developing in parallel and everything is about creating an alternative that is as positive and inspiring as possible. The government is now making us feel guilty without a clear way out. This borders on a kind of mental abuse. There is an alternative and we can start tomorrow. If we wait for permission, nothing will ever happen. I have been waiting for 30 years. We will have to look for the margins in society, where change does not immediately meet resistance. When you see an OikosLibre house, I hope that everyone thinks: How nice! Very cautiously, I raise the question of whether our future should actually be shaped in a modernist way. My main input would be that I would like to play a role in designing houses that fit the atmosphere of the region. It may well be a bit trite, something like Anton Pieck. I want to connect the cottages with each other by a bicycle route. The whole thing must become a tourist attraction and some of the cottages can be rented. The idea of an Ecoregion is to recover a local cultural identity. The cottages could also be completely overgrown. An ecoregion in a suburb of a city could of course be quite modernist, but I am starting to wonder whether people are actually waiting for this. The population must have a much greater say in what our environment looks like. Small movable houses are that ideal testing ground for aesthetics. Self-building is the key to exceptional houses and if you are the owner, your efforts benefit yourself and you inspire and motivate others.
My project could also work in other places. You choose a region, work together with the farmers, and put small, movable, autonomous houses on the farmer’s land. I just want houses with a certain cultural or sculptural value. I don’t like standard Ikea houses at all. You make sure that the farmer and any neighbours are happy and get to work on small-scale agriculture.
It becomes a kind of one-sided Green Deal. The government should be absolutely ashamed that after 30 years they still haven’t come up with a single sustainable proposal that really makes sense. There is a lot of talk and fake sustainability. Biomass power plants are the absolute nadir in that respect. In one fell swoop you solve the housing problem and part of the Green Deal is that the participants take on the C/10 challenge. You divide your consumption by 10. In exchange, you ‘take’ the right to no longer participate and you go and live in a place where that’s actually not allowed #ikdoenietmeermeemee and ‘occupy’ get a whole new meaning this way. An absolute condition is that you don’t make a mess of it. Under your houses is a storage room or small studio. You have a bicycle and you rent a car. There is no garden. The whole thing is movable.
Apart from this, you can come to France for courses. In my studio, the houses are life-size. I can also adapt basic designs for an hourly rate. I can also help you remotely if you have questions. Furthermore, I like to work on tailor-made designs. The only problem is that it takes a lot of work to make a small house completely buildable. You are talking about hundreds of hours. That is why I sell basic models. I also like it when furniture makers or installers offer specific parts that are difficult to make and have a long lifespan. The idea is that the module itself is never thrown away. Perhaps the façade needs to be replaced after 50 years or the interior needs renovation. I want to break the cycle of cheap disposables and start thinking more in terms of things you can still find in an antique shop after 100 years. With a good design and some guidance, craftsmanship is also easy to do yourself. If you would spend half of the time that you currently spend on the internet and in front of the TV getting your hands dirty, you will notice that a lot is possible. Above all, building your own future is fun.
I am now working all this out and letting myself be guided by the question. I am going to focus on the area around Argentat in France. It is most convenient if I can help with the first cottages and solve any problems on the spot. Later on, there may also be a market for it in the Netherlands. I need people who are going to build a mini house themselves. In particular, I am looking for people who want to grow into this and who can then help others, not only with building, but also with setting up a vegetable garden or food landscape. If you build several houses at the same time in a kind of workshop context, this could become a very nice centre for innovation. Above all, I would like the name OikosLibre to be associated with it. I am looking for quartermasters to establish contacts and find sites for small movable houses, surrounded by the possibility of a large vegetable garden or food forest. Contact could also be made with farmers who, together with the pioneers, want to transform a piece of land into a food-producing landscape with light temporary buildings. You don’t have a garden and you don’t make a mess. When the project is finished, you move with your house to the next location. Finally, I am looking for people who want to take care of communication and daily management. I would also like to get in touch with someone who wants to work on the legal structure and company form. I am quite a recluse myself and in the future I would like to focus full time on designing and visualising a new world.
Greetings and I hope to meet you one day,
Peter Blok