Blueprint, pilots in Vietnam, Brazil, and Europe
Orchid City
A self-sustaining circular city blueprint, adaptable to almost any location on Earth.
A self-sustaining circular city blueprint, adaptable to almost any location on Earth.
Except researched, designed, modeled, and feasibility-tested the Orchid City blueprint, drawing on more than twenty years of its own and its partners' work, and ran pilot studies across three continents.
Orchid City is Except's blueprint for a city that feeds, powers, and waters itself. Embedded within a web of regenerative food production, a single Orchid City can support up to 50,000 residents with their daily food and water, alongside affordable multi-generational housing, good jobs, education, healthcare, and social programs. It is self-sufficient in food, energy, water, jobs, and services, and mostly circular in everything else.
The integrated approach answers a long list of pressures at once: climate change, sea-level rise, species extinction, food and resource shortages, an aging population, and the loss of affordable housing and stable work. Rather than treating these as separate problems, the blueprint resolves them through one design built around water, regenerative agriculture, agroforestry and permaculture, renewable energy, and walkable clusters where people live, learn, produce, and play close together.
Because no two places share the same soils, climate, or culture, the blueprint is built to adapt. Except carried out pilot studies on three continents. In Vietnam, The Delta is set in the Mekong region and designed to work with flooding rather than against it. The Valley, in southern Brazil, addresses an inland, lakeside hill climate at medium density, and a third study models a European setting.
What makes it regenerative is that an Orchid City is designed to give back more than it takes: restoring local ecosystems and biodiversity, and repairing the relationship between residents and their environment, within a business model meant to return a healthy margin to developers while adding value for the community and region. It is a blueprint with proven locations, not a single built district.
