Who We Are

A hive mind for complex challenges.

Apiary X is a scalable, community-rooted consultancy working at the frontier of social infrastructure design, regenerative systems, and bioregional innovation. We build and convene the right team for each challenge — drawing from a networked pool of strategists, facilitators, researchers, and practitioners across the globe.

Like a beehive, we are designed for intelligent, distributed collaboration. No fixed hierarchy. No bloated overhead. Just the right people, doing deep work, in genuine partnership with the communities we serve.

Apiary X was founded on a simple observation: the most ambitious urban, ecological, and social projects tend to fail not because of bad ideas, but because of weak human systems. Too little trust. Too little agency in the hands of the people most affected. Too little visibility into the real dynamics at play.

We built Apiary X to bridge that gap — combining the rigour of systems analysis with the warmth and patience of genuine community practice. The name is deliberate: a hive is not a hierarchy. It is a distributed intelligence that works because every actor understands their role, and because the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.

The Principles

Bernd Herbert — Community Design Lead

Bernd Herbert brings deep expertise in regenerative community design, participatory facilitation, and systemic change. Based in Portugal, Bernd works with communities, governments, and mission-driven organisations across Europe and beyond — designing the social architecture that makes complex transitions work at the human scale.

His practice is grounded in systems thinking, regenerative principles, and a commitment to building with communities rather than for them. Bernd's work spans circular economy transitions, social infrastructure, bioregional development, and community governance — always with an eye on how local agency can be built in ways that outlast any single project.

Bernd is a certified Flourishing Enterprise trainer and serves on the board of directors of the Flourishing Enterprise Co-Lab — the organisation behind the Flourishing Community Canvas. This gives him both deep practitioner knowledge of one of the field's most rigorous community design tools, and an active role in its ongoing evolution and stewardship.

Frederick Peters — Research & Strategy Lead

Frederick Peters’ focus is on the future challenges of social infrastructure and community capacity building.  He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science, and MES (Planning) Degree, and writes on urban hard and soft infrastructure building and maintenance in the 21st century, in Europe and Canada.

He acts as co-lead for a flexible team of experts in urban planning, architecture, the legal and regulatory framework of city-building in different jurisdictional contexts. Each project needs the best, most agile team, and it is Frederick’s job to help bring them together.

Frederick Peters co-founded Apiary X with a background spanning urban planning, social research, and international collaboration. Based in Toronto, Frederick leads research design, stakeholder engagement, and the cross-ocean consortium building that defines the Apiary X model.

Partners

M-ReGen (Myengun Den ReGeneration)
Led by Michael Myengun Amos, M-ReGen contributes over a decade of experience in Indigenous housing advocacy and youth engagement. With deep ties to Toronto institutions such as the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto (NCCT), Michael ensures the project is grounded in community trust, cultural safety, and lived experience.

Brown and Storey Architects Inc.
A prestigious Toronto architecture and urban design firm, Brown and Storey, have shaped many of the city’s most high-profile civic and cultural projects — from public realm transformations to innovative urban design frameworks. Through the Office for Responsive Environments (ORE), their work explores architecture, landscape, planning, and Indigenous planning in ways that reconnect built form with social and ecological systems. Their expertise in housing forms, courtyards, and resilient urban design provides the architectural and planning backbone of the consortium.

Stack Aspect / Ian Penney
As Lead Technologist, Ian contributes over 25 years of IT and security leadership experience. His role focuses on building digital infrastructure for collaboration, data analysis, and community engagement — from web presence to mapping tools, dashboards, and evaluation frameworks that make the consortium’s work transparent, scalable, and funder-ready.