Maisha EcoVillage designing a regenerative community with the water, not against it.
A regenerative masterplan for a roughly 2-hectare ecovillage on the edge of a protected wetland near Cabarete, Dominican Republic.
Maisha’s founding team envisioned a place that could be both a home for a semi-permanent community and a public-facing destination for regenerative lifestyle experiences: retreats, farm-to-table hospitality, permaculture education, co-working, and ecological connection. Regenerates helped translate that vision into a full-site masterplan for a flat, flood-prone, sandy site inside a conservation buffer zone. The work moved from collaborative goal-setting and site assessment into an integrated design for areas of use, structures, access, water, earthworks, plant systems, animal systems, and phased implementation.
A beautiful wetland edge, and a site that had to be designed around water.
Maisha sits on a flat, roughly 2-hectare plot near Cabarete, where coastal, wetland, and limestone-hill ecologies meet. The opportunity was rare: a chance to build a regenerative ecovillage at the interface with a protected wetland landscape, with community living, retreats, food production, hospitality, and ecological experience all held together in one project.
The constraints were just as real. The site is nearly flat, with very little elevation to work with. It floods during heavy rainfall, sits within the wetland watershed, and has sandy soils that drain quickly and do not easily hold ponds without lining. The property also lies inside a regulated conservation buffer zone, where development and land use need to align with the ecological sensitivity of the reserve.
The design challenge was reconciliation: public and private, development and conservation, water risk and water opportunity, community life and visitor experience. The work was to turn that complexity into a coherent masterplan that worked with the wetland edge rather than fighting it.
Co-design the vision, read the wetland-edge site, then build the masterplan.
The process combined co-design, technical site reading, and masterplanning. The founding team stayed closely involved throughout, so the final plan was not only spatially resolved, but understood by the people who would need to build and steward it.
Capacity building and collaborative goal-setting
Built the team’s shared fluency in permaculture and whole-systems design, then surfaced priorities across hospitality, community, residence, food production, ecological experience, and long-term stewardship.
Whole-site survey and assessment
Combined site visits, drone capture, GIS analysis, and field observation to read a compact site defined by its wetland edge, flood exposure, sandy soils, access, vegetation, and surrounding ecological context.
Technical land and flood analysis
Modeled elevation and slope across a nearly flat site, ran flood simulations at three depths, and assessed the sandy-soil and high-water-table conditions shaping ponds, structures, drainage, and planting.
Integrated masterplan design
Organized the property into four areas of use and a full set of zones, placing structures and systems by the logic of water, wind, sun, access, privacy, ecological sensitivity, and energy efficiency.
Water and earthworks design
Designed a water-management landscape for both flood and drought: raised paths and embankments, stilted and mounded structures, lined ponds, a natural pool, roof catchment, cisterns, and greywater reuse.
Plant, animal, and implementation systems
Developed plant systems, species selection, animal-system logic, nutrient cycling, soil-fertility, sanitation, and phased implementation strategies so the site could be built and managed as a living system.
The site read, and the masterplan it produced.
Selected material from the assessment and the masterplan, including drone capture, elevation and slope analysis, flood-simulation maps, sector mapping, the integrated masterplan, water-management and earthworks design, and bungalow and structure concepts.
A complete masterplan, from flood logic to implementation phasing.
A masterplan design report covering whole-site analysis, integrated design, structures, systems, and strategy, giving the team a full foundation to build from.
Whole-site assessment
A detailed reading of the site covering climate, sectors, topography, hydrology and flood risk, geology and soils, vegetation, structures, access, and the legal buffer-zone context.
Integrated masterplan
A resolved site plan organizing the property into four areas of use and a full zone structure, placing structures, water features, plant systems, and access for ecological function and energy efficiency.
Water and earthworks design
A water-management landscape addressing flood and drought together: raised paths as embankments, raised and stilted structures, lined ponds and a natural pool, roof catchment, and greywater reuse.
Structure and accommodation design
Concept designs for the communal cafe and event space, service buildings, and seven resident bungalows, drawing on Dominican vernacular architecture and passive, flood-resilient principles.
Plant and animal systems design
Seven plant-system types with a full species matrix, plus animal-system design suited to the site’s scale, wetland-edge setting, soil conditions, and management constraints.
Management and implementation strategy
Strategies for plant-system management, nutrient cycling, soil fertility, and sanitation, with a phased implementation approach organized by scale of permanence.
From wetland-edge constraint to phaseable ecovillage masterplan.
A buildable, financeable masterplan.
The team moved from vision to a complete spatial plan covering structures, systems, and phasing, creating a foundation for development, financing, and implementation.
A site that works with its water.
Rather than treating flood risk as an afterthought, the design used raised paths, embankments, stilted and mounded structures, lined ponds, drainage, storage, and reuse as part of the site’s core logic.
A plan aligned with the reserve.
Designing within the buffer-zone context turned conservation restrictions into design logic, favoring low-impact structures, ecological integration, and land uses aligned with the project’s mission.
Public and private uses reconciled.
The four-area structure allowed the site to welcome visitors at the hospitality edge while protecting resident privacy and quieter wetland-facing retreat zones.
Flexibility across business models.
The masterplan was built to support different operating models, from regenerative tourism experience to semi-permanent community, so the team could test concepts before committing.
A team able to steward and phase it.
The capacity-building and scale-of-permanence implementation strategy left the team better able to manage the build in the right order and evolve the site as a living system.
On a wetland edge, the design either works with the water or loses to it.
It is tempting to masterplan a site like this from the buildings out: place the café, bungalows, pool, gardens, and paths where they look best, then solve drainage later. On a flat, flood-prone, sandy site bordering a protected wetland, that approach creates problems quickly: water moves where it wants, ponds leak, structures sit too low, access fails, and conservation constraints become obstacles instead of design logic.
The value of this work was reading the whole system first: water above all, but also soil, wind, sun, access, legal context, community use, hospitality, production, and ecological restoration. Designing with the wetland, and with the people who will steward the place, is what turns a constrained site into a regenerative community that can be built, adapted, and cared for over time.
Maisha was not only a masterplan for an ecovillage. It was a way to make a difficult wetland-edge site legible, buildable, and stewardable.
By combining co-design, flood analysis, site planning, structure concepts, water management, plant systems, and implementation phasing, the work helped the founding team understand how community life, hospitality, food production, ecological restoration, and wetland conservation could fit together on one compact site.
Start with the land you want to build on.
Start with one site, however constrained, and one vision for it. We read the whole landscape, water, soil, climate, access, ecology, and the rules that govern it, then turn that understanding into a masterplan where the place and the program work as one system.
Start a conversation: hello@regenerates.co