When Alex Zagrebleny talks about the future of cities, he sounds more like a systems thinker than a property mogul.
“Sustainability isn’t enough,” he told Arabian Business’ flagship podcast AB Majlis. “We call what we do Generation 5.0: regenerative development for the planet, for communities, and for individuals.”
Zagrebleny is the founder and CEO of R.Evolution, the real-estate firm behind EYWA, a high-end Dubai project that promises to “give more than it takes.”
After 26 years in development and a parallel two-decade study of yoga and ancient design principles, he now wants buildings to act like living organisms: filtering air, activating water, shielding residents from electromagnetic fields and balancing their energy through a 16-tonne crystal core.
Yet his pitch is more than mysticism. Zagrebleny argues that regenerative design is also a hard-nosed business play.
“Hydroponic farms of 200 square metres can produce 15 to 20 tonnes of vegetables a year with a delivery time of five minutes from farm to plate,” he said.
“It costs about 300,000 dirhams to install, which is roughly a five per cent premium on construction. But the valuation of the building can rise by 15 per cent.”
Lower energy use and healthier air, he insists, feed directly into yield calculations: “If your saving is $12,000 a year and you capitalise it at a six per cent yield, you immediately increase the building’s price.”
His EYWA “Tree of Life” tower – keys due to be handed over in the second quarter of 2026 – uses non-toxic materials and a glazed-terracotta façade designed to last half a century without losing colour. Inside, activated “living” water and carefully controlled air quality aim to let residents “flourish,” a word Zagrebleny returns to like a mantra.
“Developers are magicians and sages at the same time,” he said. “They can make people flourish with their buildings, or they can destroy their lives.”
The developer, who has delivered 23 projects from Riga to Berlin, now lives in Dubai and sees the Gulf as the perfect laboratory. “Real estate projects take four to five years. You need to think about the world of the future, not the past,” he told AB Majlis.
Post-pandemic Dubai, where residents stay longer and value air quality and mental health, is ripe for a fifth-generation leap.
To Zagrebleny, sustainable development – what most of the industry still hails as progressive – is already “Generation 4.0”.
Generation 5.0 is regenerative: buildings that actively enhance the planet and the people inside. “Easy being is what we need now,” he said, “so you have time for what really makes sense in your life: your business, your personal self-development, your loved ones.”
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