Solarpunk: Post-Industrial Design and Aesthetics
[Eric Hunting — 7/20 — Illustrations by Dustin Jacobus]
Introduction:
Overview of the Solarpunk World:
Phases of Solarpunk History:
Core Principles of Post-Industrial Design:
Packaging, and Living Without It:
Energy:
Modular Building Systems:
Domestic Goods:
Clothing:
Architecture and Housing:
Furnitecture:
Vehicles and Transportation Systems:
Computers and Communications:
Robots:
Plants and Farming:
Introduction: In recent years a futurist aesthetic movement has emerged in response to renewed public concern for the environment and a seeming lack of reflection of that concern in much contemporary art and design. Deriving its name from similar aesthetic movements such as Cyberpunk and Steampunk, its roots lay in various eco/climate science fiction and Post-Industrial futurist literature and is considered ‘punk’ in the sense that it is reactionary, and in opposition, to both the naive corporate utopianism that dominated the 20th century and the dystopianism that emerged in its wake by the end of that century, persisting to the present. We now live in an era where pragmatism is a radical stance. Thus Solarpunk seeks to cultivate a positive, hopeful, vision of a future rooted in technologies and culture of sustainability, yet in the context of what it acknowledges will be dramatic changes in our way of life due to Global Warming and the environmental malfeasance of the past, the transition to a renewables-based infrastructure, and the collapse of Industrial Age paradigms. A culture that has weathered the dramatic disruptions coming with the end of the Industrial Age, taken its sometimes bitter lessons from that, and found a way forward.
What makes Solarpunk ‘punk’ is an underlying activist/revolutionary narrative it shares with the earlier punk movements tracing its origins to the narrative of one of Science Fiction’s earliest ‘antiheroes’; Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Long mischaracterized in film, the original character of Nemo is an Indian victim of European colonialism who is radicalized by the murder of his family by colonialists. He then appropriates and improves upon the technology of the colonialist powers not just to fight against them but to create a model egalitarian society of the future in the secret haven of the underwater underworld, beyond the reach of those colonial powers. Thus he becomes the prototype tech-hero, turning the oppressors/dominators technology against them and repurposing it for the benefit of the rest of society. But he still bears the psychological damage of the trauma of his family’s murder, his compulsion for revenge becoming the undoing of his dream of a better future. That’s a much more complex and radical story than the likes of Hollywood were ever willing to portray!
From this story came the essential Cyberpunk narrative of the hacker-hero, radicalized by corporate/government oppressors and forced to retreat to a kind of underworld — the digital Xibalba of Cyberspace — where they surreptitiously appropriate and repurpose the oppressor’s technology to use against them. Later, Cyberpunk returned to its roots with Steampunk, imagining an alternative future where an IT revolution was catalyzed much sooner, merging — for better and worse — with the culture the Victorian British Empire, and producing a broader assortment of variations on Nemo’s maverick tech-hero. Steampunk has had a great appeal among contemporary Maker-hobbyists.
The Solarpunk narrative, though less clearly developed, is again very similar. It revolves around a kind of Maker-hero who reappropriates technology — green technology in particular — deliberately suppressed by corporate and government interests for the sake of profiteering and social control and then applies it to the salvation of a world facing environmental catastrophe and the cultivation of a better, more sustainable, future. We see the first clear characterization of this new green-tech Maker-hero in a concept devised by writers/futurists Cory Doctorow and Alex Steffan and dubbed the ‘Outquisition’. They imagined the emergence of a nomadic activist movement from the ‘cloisters’ of eco-villages, hacker/makerspaces, Fab Labs, and online communities (another sort of underworld haven…) in response to the crisis created by the fall-out of environmental collapse and the creeping decrepitude of late-stage capitalism with its entrenched pathological institutions and economics. These nomadic Makers gather to intervene in communities left in crisis as the old system fails them and systematically retreats from the no longer ‘profitable’ mess it created. ‘Hacking’ and repurposing the detritus of the failing Industrial Age culture with their alternative energy, recycling, and production technology, these Maker-heroes create islands of self-sufficiency, seeding the culture of a new Post-Industrial era.
In some ways this relates to a much earlier concept envisioned by futurist-designer Ken Isaacs; the Urban Nomad. Yet another Post-Industrial futurist, he imagined a future nomadic youth sub-culture that lived by seasonally migrating among cities and cleverly repurposing the detritus of the collapsing Industrial Age found there, which inspired the notion of Nomadic Furniture based on the repurposing and upcycling of various Industrial cast-offs. Isaacs devised the concepts of user-built Living Structures, microhousing, and the DIY Matrix building system that would inform much of what we now refer to as Maker and Solarpunk design.
But how to characterize this aesthetic? How to portray it? In this piece we will present some suggestions as to the nature of this future and the principles — with their reasoning — that go into the speculative design of its artifacts and architecture. These can only be suggestions. One cannot accurately predict the future nor can the interpretation of trends and influences on it be definitive. The futurist can, at best, capture the theme of the tune. Lyrics remain a toss-up.
Overview of the Solarpunk World: The footprint of a civilization is greatly influenced, if not largely defined by, the logistics of its predominant forms of energy and the modes of transportation they enable. This, in turn, establishes the context in which production must function with its subsequent techniques and materials influencing the collective aesthetic of the habitat. Archeologists deduce a great deal about past cultures through reverse-engineering its artifacts. How things are made tells you a great deal about how a culture works. Similarly, if we understand some things about how a future culture should/could work, we can deduce the likely ways things might be made and thus how they may look.
As its name suggests, the Solarpunk World is a predominantly renewable energy powered world. The most common sources of renewable energy are solar, wind, geothermal, sea (wave, current, tidal, and ocean-thermal), hydropower, and the chemical energy inherent in plant products converted to biofuels. Aside from biofuels, all those are most commonly utilized to generate electric power. Thus the Solarpunk habitat is a predominantly electric-powered one, constrained by the logistics of distributing that form of energy.
There would certainly be many other more-or-less ‘clean’ forms of energy in use, particularly expanded use of human power, perhaps some revival of other animal power, revival of use of sails for propulsion and wind turbines for mechanical power, and widespread use of solar-thermal systems and passive solar design in architecture. Many facilities would employ solar-dynamic/thermal collectors and furnaces for things like industrial processing, heating, and to power public kitchens. (much like the famous solar kitchen of Auroville India) But this would not be entirely ubiquitous as not every location/situation can work with that technology. Thus more flexible solar energy systems use would tend to predominate, and these typically produce electricity.
Similarly, biofuels offer solutions in certain situations, but because they still produce CO2, are ultimately not suited to widespread use. Being ‘carbon neutral’ may not be sufficient in the future. The culture must strive toward being ‘carbon negative’ to truly reverse the warming trend produced by the Industrial Age. They may become common as a fossil fuel substitute, particularly early in a transition to the new culture where technological progress may see some stagnation or reversion and in rural areas where, as a locally-produced form of power for farm machinery made from agricultural wastes, they would have a distinct advantage, but would not suit urban transportation or use in the new urban environment. New safer nuclear options are on the horizon as well, with a longer-term/later era prospect of fusion energy systems and a nearer-term prospect of alternative compact salt reactors. However, that technology is not likely to be employed in the transitional period of a Solarpunk history as it’s not suited to the ‘bottom up’ local development much of that transition to the new era would likely be based on. (as we will discuss in more detail later) For similar reasons, space solar power is not a likely near-term prospect as it is, basically, redundant to land and sea based solar, dependent on grandiose scales of development, and only perpetuates state and corporate hegemonies with their extortion of society.
Certain locations are more advantageous to one form of renewable energy exploitation or another, but in general it is diversely usable everywhere, and thus its infrastructure would be much more decentralized than fossil fuels. Indeed, this is a key motivation for its development as it breaks down the economic and political hegemonies notorious across the fossil fuel era. Every community may see experimentation — particularly early-on — with a spectrum of energy harvesting and storage, with some very novel and quirky concepts explored. Every flow of air or fluid and every surface in the built habitat with some significant solar insolation are potential (if not always practical) energy sources. Even the latent energy of casual foot and vehicle traffic can potentially be harvested, as well as the biochemical and thermal energy of human bodies and other organisms.
With electricity the most efficiently utilized form of renewable energy, it is most conveniently used where integrated and distributed by a wired power grid. New technologies such as High-Voltage DC transmission have much increased the reach of electric grids (even offering the prospect of a truly unified global energy network), and we may see such innovations as superconducting power lines as well, but for some time parasitic grid losses using existing tech may significantly limit practical reach, limiting the spread of a new built habitat, but that is just as well as we must return landscape to nature anyway.
Packaging and storing electricity in various forms comes with a variety of trade-offs and is generally less efficient than grid use. Batteries are the most convenient form, but limited to modest (but slowly growing) capacities, long (but slowly shrinking) charging times, high (but slowly falling) mass, and often reliant on scarce materials from problematic sources. Pneumatic power storage has long been of interest for vehicle and domestic applications (Buckminster Fuller was a fan of this for a time) but useful storage capacities depend on advanced materials and engineering for super-pressure compressed air storage. Conversion to fuels such as hydrogen, hydrides, or redox solutions come with many complications and their production and storage, much like old fossil fuels, is somewhat hazardous with a tendency to large system scales. These are unlikely in the domestic environment, but may be extensively used in municipal facilities or large vehicles and may be key to mass renewables exploitation on the open sea and distant tropical/desert areas. Long duration gyroscopes have long been used as short term electricity buffering in the computer and communications industry and some experiments have been tried in domestic use. But they remain limited to stationary use and, again, rely on advanced materials and engineering.
Other lower-tech forms of energy storage tend to rely on large municipal construction projects limited by geography, such as the creation of dams and large pools for water, large high-pressure tanks and limestone wells for pressurized air storage, hill-slope rail systems for gravity storage, large stationary battery banks sometimes based on flow-battery technology, and similar schemes. These would tend to feature in the buffering of locally exploited energy, but given their scale, are not likely to be used in a transitional period unless repurposing some existing structures.
Given these forms of energy, the predominant forms of powered transportation would be electric vehicles — most-efficiently grid powered as with rail systems but more flexibly battery-based as with electric cars. Electric rail is ultimately the most energy-efficient means of land transit we are currently capable of and would be expected to expand in use and diversity on that premise.
Air and sea transport are more difficult problems for electric power. Battery-based electric aircraft and ships are currently emergent but may long be limited to short distance commuter transit. Biofuels could well substitute for conventional aircraft and ship fuels, but not at the scale of contemporary travel given they would ultimately still be carbon producing and, at that scale of use, their production must be industrial in scale, competing with food production.
It’s likely large sea vessels will turn to use of liquid hydrogen powering electric drive systems based on fuel cells or turbogenerators — with a trend toward electric drive systems already underway to facilitate use of cleaner — if still carbon based — fuels like natural gas. Minimum practical scale of such systems are large, but this will be less of a problem for large cargo vessels. However, safety concerns with handling cryogenic hydrogen may limit this mostly to cargo transit. This may ultimately demand the establishment of a new dedicated marine energy infrastructure to sustain it, likely based on technologies such as geothermal and OTEC. (ocean thermal energy conversion) But that development may be long delayed over a turbulent transitional era. So various hybrid sailing vessels are a likely near-term eventually. There will be much experimentation in these modes of transportation as designers/engineers struggle with these limitations and a likely revival of things like sailing ships, dirigible airships, and ekranoplanes in various solar-hybrid forms and using more advanced technology.
In general, all forms of transportation will need to seek progressively increasing energy efficiency which will often compel structural/logistical changes in the physical habitat and lifestyle as well. For example, it will soon make no sense to produce goods at a distance as it is far less efficient in energy and resources to ship bulky finished and packaged goods around the world than just the materials they are made from.
In many ways the footprint of a civilization based on renewables would come to parallel that of the Steam Age, with its reliance on bulky wood and coal fuel powering large locomotives and ships, thus compelling urban concentration. However, with the use of electricity comes smaller, lighter, more diverse, systems than were possible in the Steam Age with potential for safe and clean integration into residential environments. With the proper urban design, fully automated door-to-door transportation becomes a real option, as was long speculated in the era of PRT (personal rapid transit) experimentation in the late 20th century.
We can thus anticipate the likely physical organization of the Solarpunk civilization to be dominated by urban centers, satellite communities of smaller, but still urban, organization (higher density towns like that of the early rail era that served as hubs for the flow of farm goods, eco-villages based on denser co-housing arrangements, and perhaps some ‘proto-arcology’ concepts) arrayed along a smaller network of transit routes. Additionally, there would be an impetus to reduce the compulsion to travel/shipping in general with greater reliance on local facilities kept in closer proximity, rather than spread out in dispersed massive zones as was the virtually cult-ike compulsion of civil engineers in the fossil fuel era. A by-product of the expanded use of Basic Income schemes would be the elimination of much commuter traffic and the congestion caused by synchronized work schedules.
The sprawling suburbs and dense roadways that were the hallmark of 20th century civilization would be systematically abandoned for the sake of restoring land use to local food production and the natural habitat previously squandered. Development may be formerly constrained by planned ‘urban corridors’ flanking the fewer key transit routes, pollution-free electric transit often going underground or inside architecture, eliminating much of the negative aspects of living in its proximity which hampered urban quality of life in the past and drove the suburbanization trend. The use of free-standing housing would become rare with a return to earlier townhouse forms more common. Though we may never see a need for the vast arcologies and urban megastructures imagined by futurists of the 20th century, they may well influence the necessarily more self-contained and parametrically designed urban habitats of the future.
Coinciding with the transition to renewable energy and its transformation of the built habitat will be a very radical change in the nature of production already underway whose impact is often underestimated yet may be the single-greatest influence on future economics and politics. We commonly anticipate a future of increasing automation — decrying its likely negative impacts on society with the obsolescence of many jobs — but overlook the coincident evolution of that production technology itself. We are not just moving toward increasing automation but also — and much more significantly — the generalization of production, its localization with a shrinking scale and cost through robotization, and the globalization of production knowledge communicated digitally — what futurists often refer to with the terms ‘Industry 4.0’ or ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution.’
What is the difference between industrialization, automation, and robotization? Put simply, it’s the transition of the information of design and technique toward increasing states of virtualization and thus portability. One might say, it’s the transfer of production knowledge/skill from the human brain into the hardware of machines and then to portable, digital, forms. The Industrial Age did not begin with machine production but rather with the massification and specialization of human labor. That was the first industrial revolution. The second was the encoding of design knowledge and human skill into the engineering of specialized mechanical machines to increase production volume and consistency — the initial form of automation which was also very dependent on geographically limited large scale energy sources such as water power. This is what we typically regard as the start of the Industrial Age — often conflated with the term ‘Machine Age’ as it coincided with the appearance of large production machines and steam engines. The third was the electrification of production, affording its wider geographic dispersal with the advent of grid power, followed by the digital/computerized control and management of those still specialized production machines. This enabled production’s expulsion from the urban environment to outlying regions affording larger facility scales, and the transformation of cities into centers of predominantly ‘white collar’ commercial and information processing activity.
Much about the nature of civilization across the Industrial Age was keyed to the reliance in these three first phases on such speculative massified modes of production and the necessarily large scales of capital needed to initialize it that could only be amassed by various schemes of mass social collectivization — society ultimately where all capital originates.
The fourth industrial revolution — now emergent — is in the digitization of design and technique for the control of robotic production machines of increasingly multipurpose capability with shrinking scale and cost. With that comes a transition from speculative, capital-dependent, distant mass production to non-speculative, direct, and local production on-demand. Like humans, robotic production systems use knowledge to allow them to perform countless different tasks with the same tools. The big difference is that knowledge is now in digital form, swapped out as needed and broadcast worldwide. We’ve completed an evolutionary circle from the originally local, generalized, direct human production of pre-industrial times to likewise local, generalized, and direct machine production, human skill now digitally unleashed from the confines of the brain to be made available everywhere. Hegemonies rooted in the exclusivity of ownership of the means and knowledge of production can be broken as that means — shrinking in physical scale and cost as it expands in capability — disperses into communities and even households.
A new cultural paradigm is emergent; cosmo-localization. Design and share globally. Make locally. As marginal costs shrink, design becomes the new basis of goods value, yet exists in digital form, infinitely replicable and globally shared like any digital media. It makes no sense anymore to ship bulky, fragile, wastefully packaged, finished goods long distances if you can simply transmit their designs for local production. This will supplant a global trade in goods, further compelled by the demand for transportation efficiency. And this is why, in recent times, corporations have become so obsessed with the control of consumer behavior and ‘intellectual property’ — often through manipulating law and state policy. It’s all they have left to maintain their old hegemonies in a world of dispersed digital production, where corporate designs must increasingly compete with open source ones coming from everywhere.
It’s hard to overstate the likely impact of all this on how the world works. This may be at least as big a deal as the invention of the printing press or computer. Yet it’s curiously overlooked when we think about future impacts of automation. We worry about losing jobs to machines, but there’s always one job that can’t be obsolesced; owner.
Another important area of change in this future Solarpunk culture is in the spectrum of commonly used materials, some to accommodate these new forms of production, but most significantly, to accommodate increasing environmental impact concerns. This is likely to have some of the greatest influence on the visual aspect of the Post-Industrial aesthetic. The biggest near-term changes in this would come with the recent awareness of the full environmental impact of plastics we grew so very reliant on across the 20th century. Already we see attempts at reducing plastic waste, expanding recycling, developing better substitutes, and minimizing packaging. In the Solarpunk culture we would anticipate a return to older types of materials, as well as adopting some new and unusual ones, in the domestic environment and attempts to completely eliminate packaging by structurally changing how we access goods. It’s unlikely that plastics will be entirely eliminated from the culture, particularly given their important roles in healthcare, but they will most certainly be much reduced and where they persist there will be pressure to employ easily recyclable, rapidly biodegradable, and agriculturally-sourced forms. With this we are likely to see a return to some product designs of the pre-plastic past combined with the new production techniques.
The Solarpunk World will likely experience disruptive political and economic change in its transitional era for many reasons — the social and economic impacts of Global Warming, the collapse of fossil fuel and industrial/financial hegemonies, and the advent of Industry 4.0 key among them. Many futurists anticipate a decline or collapse of capitalism and the emergence of Social-Democratic, Libertarian-Socialist, or various anarchistic systems. Some anticipate even an end of the Westphalian State and the irrelevance of national borders. Driving this change will be the already critical income disparity plaguing the world combined with the growing detachment from mainstream culture — if not reality itself — among political leaders and the upper-class. A likely product of this will be the rise of a Global Resilience Movement, hints of which are already emergent today.
Increasingly, we can no longer count on ‘the system’, the authorities, our political leaders, and their institutions to do the right things in a crisis or maintain the essential social contract all government and the market economy represent. Upper levels of government are becoming decrepit and dysfunctional, corrupted by corporate influence and afflicted by an endemic cultural nihilism. Increasingly, we see certain demographic groups, certain communities, abandoned and betrayed by government and corporate/finance interests in times of crisis — often of those institutions’ own making. That’s the basic story of Flint Michigan. And it’s happening to a growing number of communities around the globe. With increasing frequency of environmental disasters and economic disruptions, this can only get worse. Who doubts for a moment that, as the costs of Global Warming abatement efforts for wealthy communities rise, the poorer communities will be overlooked and abandoned? And so some households, towns, and even cities are starting to realise they must cultivate contingencies for the sake of their own future survival.
In response we see some towns and cities assuming more local responsibility for their critical needs. They adopt open source software when they realize the exploitation and unreliability inherent to branded software. They develop municipal/cooperative telecommunications and power when corporate services turn into exploitative hegemonies. They cultivate urban farming in response to the often racially-motivated abandonment of poor communities by large corporate supermarket chains. They adopt local scrips — local money — to encourage patronage of locally-owned business and try to prevent that economic extraction by outside interests. And most recently, they are beginning to cultivate the local use of the new technologies of production in the hopes of encouraging more reliance on locally-made goods rather than those of extractive, distant, corporations. The envelope of ‘municipal utility’ is expanding in people’s minds to cover more of what our lifestyles depend on. This is the beginning of the Global Resilience Movement, though it still remains small in proportion to the emerging threats. There’s resistance, of course, but the trend persists because the ‘system’, at a fundamental level, simply isn’t doing its job anymore and people don’t just lay-down and die when that happens. They find another way.
And with this increasing local-reliance, be it on the household level, the community/neighborhood level, or regional networks of communities, will come the realization of an increasing economic and political autonomy and a waning of the upper levels of state authority — starved as it will soon be of tax revenue as the middle-class hollows-out and after the huge expenses of futile Global Warming abatement projects. Thus we can imagine the future Solarpunk World to be one where towns and cities have been compelled to evolve toward autonomy by the creeping decrepitude of the state expressed through its deteriorating higher-level infrastructures, thus becoming new default units of social and political identity. This would not be balkanization. Society might still hold its national and cultural identities for a long time. And communities would still tend to recognize the need for regional cooperation to maintain their shared infrastructures. Rather it would be a rediscovery of local identity combined with the discovery of a new global identity compelled both by the shared crisis of Global Warming and the cosmo-localization of the new modes of production.
Phases of Solarpunk History: Given the likely nature of this transition to a Solarpunk culture — particularly its potentially crisis-driven nature early-on — we can imagine a likely multi-phased history of that culture with certain characteristics of each phase reflected in the aesthetics and design of those times.
The Early Solarpunk era would be characterized by the hallmarks of this transition from an Industrial to a Post-Industrial culture, and, in particular, by an emergent global resilience movement with its community activism. ‘Post-industrial’ should not be confused with ‘non-industrial’. People would still be making sophisticated goods. But how they make them — by what paradigms — is what is radically changed in the new culture. Could it turn out to be a ‘soft’ transition where some critical mass of society collectively stands up in anticipation of the challenges, or a ‘hard’ one where most remain in denial or a nihilistic paralysis and have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future by crisis after crisis? Many are working toward the soft transition, but sadly, at present the latter seems more likely, promising years to decades of struggle for pragmatists. There could be a key catalyst for change as yet unanticipated (and a great subject for stories to explore), however, the longer it takes the farther backward standard-of-living may slide in many areas.
The old Industrial Age paradigms, systems, and institutions, decrepit and stressed under the dual forces of Global Warming and disrupted economic/industrial paradigms, are beginning to collapse into various kinds of dysfunction. Accelerating automation and AI are impacting all jobs and, in their chronic denial, many nations and corporations are as badly failing to address this crisis as they have the climate crisis. The wealth gap has turned into an ‘economic singularity’, the economy ejecting a growing portion of society as it contracts like a dying star.
Grandiose sea level abatement projects, intended to preserve the wealthiest or most politically important cities and their historic landmarks (and invariably planned far too late…), have generally turned into boondoggles and broken the backs of regional or national economies. The insurance industry has abandoned whole states or geographic regions, triggering real estate market collapse and general economic failure. Poorer communities are increasingly abandoned by their government to their growing spectrum of problems. There are shortages and infrastructure failures. Mass protests, riots, and looting. Violent crackdowns by increasingly desperate authorities. Mass migrations inland and northward. New settlements — with and without authorization — emerge in unlikely places, some created by the displaced and poor, some by militarized gangs, others by Survivalists and eco-activists, others by followers of crazed demagogues, religious fanatics, some fortress-like enclaves of the wealthy. Some communities turn into antagonistic armed camps, but often illicit a violent response from what remains of national militaries — their armories shrinking but deep. All sorts of community ‘movements’ are ascendent in the wake of waning central/upper authority.
Many communities will be abandoned outright as their conventional infrastructures fail, are destroyed by weather events, or their anchor industries dry-up. Those that persist will need to adapt to a more mutualistic way of life than has been the norm for over a century. People will need to adopt a conserver lifestyle focused on rational needs, learn how their infrastructure works and is maintained, how the things they need are made, how their food is grown, and take their turn in mutual subsistence work. Most importantly, they will need to learn how to, once again, get along with each other without the anonymity of the ‘system’ and its bureaucratic mediation. In the process they may inadvertently discover a better quality of life than they have ever known.
Renewable energy tech and independent production spread quickly of necessity but — often dependent on high-tech industry — are sometimes hampered by materials shortages and financial problems. Things like photovoltaics, fuel cell systems, and computer systems require scarce and advanced processing facilities and materials. This compels a fall in standard-of-living in some areas and a reliance on at-hand ‘soft-tech’ approaches until the dissemination of ‘green-tech’ can catch-up. Implementation of the new technologies is somewhat makeshift and experimental, early generation designs bulkier, cruder, and often reliant on recycling and adaptive reuse of the detritus of the old culture. Local entrepreneurs, activists, and community groups start to widely implement communal production workshops implementing early generation digital/robotic production, most intended for open access and reliant on open source design.
The Post-Industrial culture is emerging in a ‘hacking’ of the Industrial Age as it falls apart. It’s a time of ‘cargotecture’, steel pipe and bamboo yurts, Tiny Houses, earthen architecture, and funky repurposed vehicles and buildings. CNC/laser cut plywood and rediscovered DIY ‘hippie’ furniture made from recyclables. Squatted and repurposed shopping malls and abandoned corporate towers. Barge, parking structure, rooftop, and backyard farms. A vast menagerie of quirky home-brew and human-powered vehicles. It is the most visibly ‘punk’ era.
The Middle Solarpunk era is one where the new Post-Industrial culture and its attendant technologies are coming into their own. The rise in atmospheric carbon has been, at least, suspended, though the inertial effects on the environment are fated to play-out for a long time to come. Greenland and the poles are becoming ice-free, glaciers are gone, and coastlines around the globe are drastically changed, leaving many major cities radically transformed or reduced to flooded ruins. Some Equatorial parts of the Earth have become uninhabitable for large communities, though some militant diehards persist even in the scorched middle-east, motivated by the historic/religious significance of their ancient homes and age-old conflicts.
The world is settling into a new routine. National governments have either fizzled-out or restructured into something more sustainable. New social/political/economic orders are fairly well established and working out their kinks. Cities and towns are largely self-sufficient in production and now forming new regional networks of cooperation as old institutions fizzle-out and old borders are slowly forgotten. Land is being reconsolidated into regional commons and individual land ownership is slowly disappearing in most places, replaced by Georgist property models after real estate markets collapsed. No mass confiscation of property was ever needed, except in places deemed uninhabitable due to climate impacts. Once the real estate market collapsed, there was no point to hoarding it. No money to be made when there’s no money to be had…
Inland and northern cities have swelled in size. Most climate refugees have resettled, though waning streams of them from more devastated parts of the globe persist. Most of society is urban or dense town based and use of free-standing homes has become rare outside of rural areas and persisting isolationist enclaves. Abandoned suburbs and their excess roads are systematically scavenged, razed, and converted to farmland and programs of mass environmental restoration — rewilding — are under-way in many areas. Engineered marshes and mangrove forests are being cultivated along many coastlines.
New architecture (increasingly modular or robot-built such as by large scale 3D printing) and adapted old architecture exist in equal measure, except in newly created settlements. (particularly in northern regions and along the Arctic coasts as the sea becomes ice-free and a primary marine transit route) More refined alternative/sustainable materials are replacing the old experimental alternatives. Goods based on them are now generally more refined in design. Every community has its own increasingly sophisticated urban farms and ‘fabs’ or ‘fabrication workshops’ and robots are proliferating in the habitat, but there is still a great reliance on personal and community labor. There remains an interesting menagerie of diverse electric and human-powered vehicles, many now semi-robotic and generally more refined in design.
Despite the spread of robotic production, the current generation has grown-up — in the previous transitional era — with broader, truly practical, industrial and social skills than previous Industrial Age generations as communities transitioned to self-reliance, independent production, and mutualism. Though cities can be quite large, they have self-organized into cellular complexes of socially connected neighborhoods with more active resident participation and self-reliance. There is still much lifestyle experimentation. Some communities are still quite high-tech, others deliberately more reliant on ‘soft-tech’, offering a more pastoral mode of living. Planned or ‘intentional’ communities emerge based on deliberate alternative lifestyle models, as centers of certain arts or sciences, or based on various hobby and aesthetic themes.
Design largely focuses on the idea of facilitating local production/recycling and optimizing end-user self-reliance. There is a general goal that nothing in the domestic environment should be beyond the skills and means of a solitary individual to build, install, or repair. Utility leads over style and most goods are ‘open source’ in design origin. There is much reliance on, and much more standardization in, refined modular building systems in architecture, home furnishings, and domestic articles. Housing is rarely available ‘finished’ as inhabitants now freely adapt it to their tastes without special skills.
The Late Solarpunk era sees the impacts of the most advanced sustainable technologies, the restoration of environmental balance, and the general realization of a post-scarcity culture. It is the most utopian of the phases. Things like nanotechnology and advanced forms of energy have come into general use, though solar-electricity still predominates. Almost everything is as easy to recycle as to create and something of a throw-away culture has returned, though without the waste and pollution of the past. Most people’s important possessions are digital in nature. The temporary contrivance of Basic Income has evolved into an Integral Basic Income soft-coded into the infrastructure, with all basics available free on-demand from most anywhere in the built habitat, usually by online order.
Architecture has become self-fabricating and commonly parametric in design — except where mimicking stylisms of the past or fanciful themes — with the urban corridors now largely conjoined into verdant contour-terraced ‘urban landscapes’ built of carbon-sequestering materials. Like a living reef hosting civilization. Elaborate interior streets, valley-like thoroughfares, or caldera-like public centers host most public activity. Some cities, still similar in architecture but physically isolated, float out on the sea or have been setup on the coasts of the ice-free Antarctic continent — now the focus of a kind of terraforming project intended to reestablish its former frozen state. Towns and cities are now, essentially, cybernetic organisms, self-managed by integral AI, perpetually aware of the environment and public communication alike, and anticipating most needs. Production has fully merged with the rest of the self-maintaining municipal infrastructure and has either gone inside homes or underground along with most long-distance transit routes. Few surface roads remain, vehicles rarely seen outdoors except for human powered/personal scale ones, aircraft, and ships and once sprawling solar and wind farms have been somewhat reduced in area through their steadily increasing efficiency and the establishment of very long-distance power grids tapping the energy of the largely uninhabited tropical regions.
Human augmentation by various means has become common, transhumanist lifestyles are emergent. Some people comfortably and casually wander the restored wilderness — or even the open seas — as nomads, their bodies augmented to withstand even the harshest natural outdoor environments without shelter while carrying inside them all the communications, computing, and VR/AR imaging capability they need to be continually connected to the rest of the world. The aesthetic lines between the organic and the inorganic have blurred. Robots are common but seem as much animal/plant as machine — and many people likewise.
The transformation of the footprint of civilization is largely complete. It is now a lace-like network across the face of a largely restored natural environment that coexist in closely integrated symbiosis. Global Warming has been stopped and is slowly reversing to pre-industrial levels, but the world remains forever changed. Attention has returned to space.
By now the reader may already be forming a mental image of this future Solarpunk World. Let us now elaborate on the details of that in the context of design. What makes designs Solarpunk? How are they different from those of the past?
Core Principles of Post-Industrial Design: The most important principle of Post-Industrial design is the principle of a circular goods ecology, which can be simply summarized thusly;
Reuse > Repurpose > Upcycle > Recycle > Downcycle > Dispose
-The longer things last and can be reused, the less often they need to be replaced. There is no excuse for designing to suit sliding scales of economy. That’s consumerism. Anything that is not designed to be best in functional quality by default only deliberately creates waste — an environmental sin. Design things right, design things to last. Resist obsolescence by ‘design for repairability’, the employ of modularity where possible, and the avoidance of ‘destructive construction’. (ie. glues, paints, nails, screws)
-Repurpose that which is obsolete in its original use where you can to extend its use-life. Few things are truly limited to a single purpose. Many can be endlessly repurposed with creativity. Modularity and simplicity in design facilitate this.
-Upcycle when direct repurpose is not possible. Upcycling is generally a process of specialization, physically modifying a thing, which can increase the utility and lifespan of something in that context but can come at the cost of later future repurpose.
-Favor recyclable materials and design to facilitate it, but consider the overhead of that recycling — its energy, process complexity, and process wastes. Merely being recyclable isn’t automatically sustainable.
-Apply circular design/planning. One system’s waste stream can be another system’s feedstocks. Design with the larger resource ecology in mind. Pollution is a waste of resources, typically rooted in the ignorance, stupidity, and casual indifference to the consequences of cost externalization.
-Dispose as a last resort and avoid from the start those materials which nature cannot re-assimilate.
As we previously noted, archeologists can deduce a great deal through the reverse-engineering of the artifacts of ancient cultures. It’s not just the materials or styles of decoration that inform them but the many hallmarks of production technique which can reveal a great deal about how a culture works and its logistical situation. Through these hallmarks they can associate artifacts with very specific points in time and place on the globe. Very particular situations allow certain production techniques and design forms to evolve and flourish, sometimes turning into skeuomorphs as practical technique evolves — when the common design for a thing becomes a cultural symbol referring to its function/use/social role long after that particular design has become obsolete, as with the case of the shape of the classic telephone or the icon of a floppy disk.
And when archeologists inevitably look back on the detritus of our own time for clues to as to how our culture worked perhaps the chief hallmark of the 20th century they will look for will be a barely noticeable seam; the seam that denotes injection molding and the ‘clamshell’ enclosure design used with most of the electrical and electronic products of our time. Though not exclusive to the material, it evolved with the emergence of plastic and its most common use with injection molding. This hallmark is so ubiquitous in our environment today that, like telephone poles, we have come to ignore it. Learn to be aware of it and you will see everywhere. It’s the hallmark of our age.
What’s very interesting about design in the Solarpunk future — Post-Industrial design — is how this and other hallmarks of 20th century industry are about to change or disappear because we are about to turn down a very different path for how the world works and therefore how we must commonly make things. Materials tended to go gradually obsolete as alternatives of superior performance or economy emerged. But this time around we’re very deliberately choosing to abandon a ubiquitous set of materials we once relied very heavily on because we woke up to the realization that they — and their industry — were killing us and the environment around us. And the fully equivalent alternatives aren’t all there. We haven’t yet figured them all out. So there’s going to be some looking backward at past techniques and designs plastic previously obsolesced as well as a lot of experimentation looking forward to the new digital/robotic production and new materials.
In the early, transitional, Solarpunk era there will be many situations of crisis demanding a sudden reliance on local industry and scarce local resources. The Industrial Age systematically cultivated a desperately dependent society, overspecialized in knowledge, devoid of practical industrial and social skills, and reliant on a market economy for everything. Thus, in such situations, there will emerge a kind of spontaneous ad hoc design focused on low-tech means of production, recycling, and repurposing of the at-hand detritus and consumer/industrial wastes. What could be called Post-Apocalypse Chic. In the past this was referred to as ‘Nomadic Design’ and inspired the hippie-esque up-cycled furniture designs that were briefly popular in the 1970s. For all intents and purposes, many communities will indeed be in a Post-Apocalyptic situation, compelled to survive through the salvage and repurposing of whatever is at-hand in the local environment. This may become a design and engineering specialty, particularly among the Outquisition activists who must ‘McGuyver the hell out of things’ wherever they set down to work.
It’s really a very interesting, exciting, time for design, with so much of the stuff of our habitat now compelled to reinvention, yet most professional designers remain oblivious! Indeed, the cutting edge is now nowhere near their offices and studios — still obsessed as they are with ‘style’ and ‘brand’ and all those other irrelevancies of the old corporate culture. It’s now with the Maker-entrepreneurs who define the cutting edge, immersed in the emerging new fabrication techniques and energized — indeed, radicalized — by the new design imperatives the future is imposing on us and the emerging fight over control of the cultural commons of technology, production, and design knowledge. It’s in the Fab Labs and Makerspaces where our initial hints of a Post-Industrial aesthetic can now be seen.
We can obviously anticipate a revival of appreciation for old handcraft but this is also a problem because there are simply too many people today with too many needs to fill and so we cannot simply turn-back the clock on production technique. Rather, we must devise, through design, new ways to work with old and new materials to minimize skill-dependence and meet that demand. And all this will play out in that first, transitional, phase of the Solarpunk era which we’ve characterized as the most chaotic, experimental, and most ‘punk’ of our anticipated phases.
Packaging, and Living Without It: As we have started becoming more aware of the many problems associated with product packaging today, many alternative materials are starting to be explored. But this is ultimately a limited and still wasteful strategy. The problem isn’t just with the choice of materials but also the compulsion to packaging at all.
Much of this relates to the way the imperatives of the market economy have permeated the culture and the way it chose to deal with the consumer transaction through the venue of stores. Packaging is a key part of the marketing process, its design often as elaborate — and as costly — as that of products themselves. There is a bizarre psycho-sensory arms race playing out on the typical store shelf. One would think this would have started to become redundant by now as online shopping has supplanted the need for this weird shelf-competition. But companies have yet to start more minimally packaging goods with the new online marketplace in-mind. They seem to behave either oblivious to the reality of online shopping or reluctant to produce alternate runs of packaging. Old habits die hard…
Packaging does serve the important role of protecting products from damage, which is especially critical because of the nature of speculative mass-production. Mass produced goods sit in storage for long periods after being made and then are shipped great distances to the stores that distribute them. That is all inherently hazardous to goods. Packaging protects goods both by shielding them from impact and contact and also simplifying their often irregular shapes for easier packing into containers and vehicles. There is also the important role of maintaining the hygienic/sterile status of many products, food in particular.
While many promising packaging alternatives are emerging, the superior way of dealing with these issues is ‘structural’ — in other words, changing how and where we market and access goods. Key to this will be the obsolescence of distant mass production by local on-demand or ‘direct’ production. This improves things in several ways. First, it is much more efficient to ship materials and parts than finished goods because those pack more densely, simply, and tightly and, by their nature, facilitate standardized reusable packaging where they need it. You’re not only creating waste through elaborate packaging but also in terms of energy — and thus carbon overhead — squandered on unused volume. The fact of this has been well proven over the long history of ‘flat-pak’ product design. Next, if goods are made nearby they only need protection in the transport from local production point to the consumer’s home and, again, need not ‘sell’ themselves through that packaging allowing it to be lighter, standardized, free from toxic inks, colorings, and clear plastic inserts, and potentially more easily recyclable or reusable. Finally, it is fundamentally more energy efficient for goods to be brought to the consumer than for them to wander around gathering them. (though on-demand delivery for fast-foods is the terribly wasteful exception) The reason for this is the redundancy of transportation created when many people are simultaneously and randomly traveling around shopping. Collective delivery means fewer vehicles whose routes can be optimised for efficiency. The modern convention of shopping in numerous dispersed stores MUST be stopped or radically changed in the future. Thankfully, already traditional retail is in a global death-spiral.
The closer the consumer lives to the point of product access the less inconvenient it is to rely on reusable containers they own themselves. This is the concept behind ‘refilling shops’ which specialize in bulk goods customers bring their own containers to carry. A large variety of goods are suited to this approach and retail ventures are emerging to explore it, though it is a big cultural shift. Ideally, it needs the help of reusable container design which can standardize volumes/weights and forms (some skeuomorphic in nature) for certain classes of products to aid the retailer and convenience of customers. Little of that is actually being done today despite the obvious trend. The design community remains oblivious.
What all this suggests about packaging in our imagined Solarpunk future is that there will be much less and much simpler forms of it, a greater reliance on reusable packaging as well as alternative/recyclable materials (glass in particular), and ultimately big changes in the nature of our access to goods. There will be increasing reliance on digital and virtual display methods, online marketing, and the use of models and samples to sell goods. There will be less ‘impulse buying’, which is wasteful to begin with. Most shops can be expected to become relics of the past where there is no value added through social interaction.
In the early Solarpunk era we can expect to see most experimentation through alternative methods of distribution in the retail setting. While the long-term trend points to an ultimate obsolescence of shops, they may see brief local resurgence in seemingly old-fashioned forms as a means of returning goods access to within walking distance. There will be a return to the town square and ‘main street’ of the past. It is also in this form that many entrepreneurs will introduce local production technology. Many products will be made in-store or in walk-in accessible workshops and will rely on samples and show models. Cars, appliances, phones and furniture may quite soon become commonly assembled at dealerships much as personal computers often were. This trend will culminate in the increasing convergence of this production in common facilities as, particularly in times of crisis, communities become reliant on multi-functional community workshops. Automated community warehouse facilities will later emerge subsuming the role of companies like Amazon by providing multipurpose storage space much the same way data centers provide data services. There will also be an emergence of goods sharing facilities. ‘Freestores’, tool and appliance lending libraries, and the like often aided by the convenience of these local automated warehouse centers.
By the middle Solarpunk era there may be enough of an automated local goods transport infrastructure (PPT — Personal Packet Transit) that the vast majority of products can be ordered online and shipped to the home even if made relatively nearby. The larger/longer trend of retail obsolescence will reassert itself, though local, less specialized, ‘convenience stores’ and retail with service/social components (barber shops, cafes/restaurants/communal kitchens/langars, bookstores, hobby stores) will likely persist in proximity to social centers for the sake of walk-in convenience. New ‘product galleries’ may also appear here (for independent designers) to market new goods through showcase samples. Remaining shops may likely become based on unattended ‘honor store’ models or use robotic kiosks, if general use of currency isn’t completely obsolesced by then. Greatly generalized local production facilities will be common in most communities, but many households also will cultivate their own in-home production, particularly to facilitate customization or independent product development as a profession. Corporations — should they persist — will largely abandon manufacturing and retail to focus on design/development, but in constant competition with open source development from around the globe.
By the late Solarpunk era, Integral Basic Income (IBI) based on predictive analysis of demand becomes the norm, money a fading memory, and most production, storage, and distribution completely automated and embedded into the infrastructure of the built habitat as a municipal utility. Many smaller goods will be home-fabricated for convenience. With the advent of robust nanotechnology, many goods may become ‘self-fabricating’ — grown like plants — wherever one has the space to put it and is willing to wait. A great deal of home furnishing may become integrated and formed like this as the superstructure of the built habitat becomes subsumed by a nanotech infrastructure.
Energy: As the key factor in defining the footprint of civilization and the context of the logistics it functions under, energy systems will greatly influence the appearance of the habitat in terms of both their physical presence and the constraints the forms of energy place on the organization of the habitat. As we’ve previously noted, a renewable energy world is a predominantly electric powered one and because of the constraints of electric power distribution we anticipate a shrinking of the footprint of the built habitat to something in many ways similar to that of the Age of Steam, more urban as a physically denser power grid is more efficient in many ways as is tracked transportation that can employ energy directly from a grid without the contrivance of batteries. Additionally, we anticipate development of a more resilient ‘bidirectional’ power network integrating many alternating points of power generation, storage, and consumption, as opposed to the energy grids of the past where power was mass produced in a distant plant location and sent one-way out through the municipal grid. With the resilient grid, every home and building is now a potential power producer.
But, due to the long and deliberate suppression by the fossil fuel industry, renewable energy remains quite underdeveloped today despite rapid advance in recent years. As we enter the Post-Industrial transition, the renewables technology is not entirely in place or especially refined, certain technology remains largely unexplored, technologies like photovoltaics remain heavily dependent upon old-fashioned giant-scale mass production, and thus the early Solarpunk era faces some challenges in this development as old infrastructures collapse and supply chains for high-tech goods are disrupted. Let us consider how this may play out with the different types of renewable energy systems across the three phases of Solarpunk history.
Photovoltaics are the most recognizable form of solar energy today and appear in a great variety of forms from small cells integrated into many appliances to vast arrays of rigid and flexible panels, mounted on roofs or in large rural installations, and sometimes integrated into the windows of buildings. But they are also the most complex to manufacture due to the need for sophisticated materials processing and their expense has long been a factor in delaying their adoption. As we’ve noted, they are the least well adapted to independent/local production. It is actually possible to make your own PV cells based on organic dyes deriving, oddly enough, from a variety of berry juices. But the performance for this remains too poor for more than very small devices and educational uses. And so this form of solar energy would, during the early Solarpunk era, likely be subject to much disruption in supply. (likewise, other electronics relying on sophisticated semiconductors) There is much effort in advancing organic PVs because of their potential economy, ability to use plastic substrates, and avoidance of rare materials, but it’s slow-going. Breakthroughs are on the horizon, but in a near-term crisis situation new PV hardware is likely to become scarce, large remote PV installations scavenged for local use, with other energy systems preferred for Outquisition/Urban Nomad interventions in outlier communities because of easier local production.
By the middle era PVs would be back to their full production, but based on local means employing digital production methods. Their physical presence would be great everywhere and one would expect a return to large solar farms on the urban periphery, often of a hybrid nature with raised translucent panel arrays sheltering crops or grazing under them and support structures serving double-duty for wind turbines. In the late era dedicated PV technology may be surpassed by integrated hybrid technology aided by nanotechnology as well as the use of other renewables technologies. Dedicated solar panels may be a thing of the past as every exposed built surface not covered by plant life may potentially have PV functionality built into it. We may also move such systems into space, with the vast rural solar panel arrays of the past replaced by ‘rectenna’ arrays receiving that energy from space-based solar arrays as microwave beams.
Solar Thermal systems rely on the collection of solar energy as heat that can be stored and used in a variety of ways, usually involving the heating of some working fluid ranging from simple water to molten salts and metals and in a few cases materials heated to plasma states at extreme temperatures. The most commonly seen domestic forms are the solar heater panels and vacuum tubes often used to heat water for pools and home heating. Slightly less common is ‘passive solar’ architecture relying on extensive window areas with careful insolation alignment for solar heating — more common in rural homes that can be freely positioned to this ideal alignment. But for large scale power they are most commonly used to drive ‘Rankine Cycle’ systems where the solar heat drives a fluid cycle turning a turbogenerator to produce electricity. Such systems were demonstrated even in the 19th century. There are many variations on this. Large arrays of mirror ‘troughs’ with heat collector pipes running along them, vast arrays of mirrors concentrating light on a tower (the highest energy concentrators), salt ponds that trap and concentrate heat, and Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, which taps the temperature difference between deep and surface seawater to drive low-pressure Rankine systems. More compact systems employ parabolic collectors which can be used for small turbogenerators, small ‘Sterling Cycle’ engines, or to heat water to steam for industrial processing or simple cooking. Some are small and free-standing units using uniform or cellular dish collectors — portable reflecting cookers are common — but these systems are often integrated into the design of buildings, as with some solar laboratories and communal solar kitchens like that famously built in Auroville India.
A lesser known form of solar thermal system are stack-effect turbines which combine elements of solar thermal energy collection with wind turbine technology, allowing for more consistent power generation. They function by creating a thermally driven updraft in a chimney hosting ducted fan turbines. These systems are today being integrated into greenhouses serving as a heat collector where they can serve additional duty as urban farms.
Solar thermal systems have the advantage of being readily designed and manufactured with modest production means and have long been the subject of DIY solar energy experimentation. Thus in the early Solarpunk era we would expect much reliance on this type of solar energy system. Mobile solar community kitchens or ‘langars’ (the communal kitchens of the Sikh community) may become iconic of the Outquisition/Urban Nomad movement. But the different systems don’t scale freely, the primary power systems limited to very large scales. They also have severe limitations in the site situations that can host them and the climate zones they can be most effectively used in. As supplemental systems, small scale systems work most anywhere, but as primary energy systems they are most practical in lower latitude locations with high insolation, and so large installations are more commonly seen in desert or tropical areas. Likewise, OTEC systems are usually employed in tropical waters and, ideally, along the Equator.
By the mid Solarpunk era, we could expect the smaller, independent, supplemental uses of solar thermal technology to be largely obsolesced by reliable municipal-scale power. OTEC expansion in particular may prove crucial as a part of hydrogen-based shipping infrastructure. By the late Solarpunk era it may be largely obsolete except in terms of OTEC-based marine settlements and passive solar architectural elements in the design of urban superstructures.
Sunlight is, of course, also directly used as a source of light but, until recently, this has been reliant on architectural design and the careful placement of windows and skylights. In recent years the technology of fiber optics has been applied to the manipulation and conveyance of light in ways similar to electricity, allowing for the creation of natural light collectors or ‘heliostats’ in panel-like forms that can direct their light by cable to locations impractical for the placement of windows. A small but slowly growing number of companies currently produce such fiber optic heliostat systems that communicate light by cable anywhere within a building, including to a variety of individual light emitters that can be switched on and off just like electric light. These systems are also indifferent to moisture and are often used for outdoor and underwater lighting. The potential for this particularly in urban farming/gardening is great and the systems can be integrated with high efficiency electric ‘light pumps’ to provide light at night while reducing the amount of electric wiring typically needed for lighting. Wiring failures are a major source of building fires and the need for special training in electrical system assembly a barrier to owner-builder construction. Fiber optic systems reduce this problem, its cabling only conveying light from outdoor heliostats and centralized indoor ‘light pumps’. This is one technology where we can suggest that advance is likely all across the three phases of Solarpunk history owing to the simplicity of the technology and the advent of 3D printing capability for optics.
Synthetic photosynthesis is another emergent solar technology which may prove very significant to a Solarpunk future. It is generally considered as a means to the more efficient solar-powered production of hydrogen, synthetic fuels, and may possibly be employed for carbon sequester. Systems are physically similar to photovoltaic cells and panels but based on membranes that are supplied by small tubing with feedstocks of water or other chemicals and output their products similarly. Some designs employ cells intended to mimic the appearance of plant leaves. This technology is more likely to make an appearance in large scales in the mid and late Solarpunk eras, where nanotechnology starts to come into its own.
Wind turbines are the second-most iconic form of renewable energy and are already fairly well refined. They are also fairly scalable and are likely to be incorporated into the future habitat in many ways, though in practice they too increase in efficiency with scale and most refined municipal power systems will rely primarily on turbines of large scale situated in ideal wind corridors. In the early Solarpunk era we would expect their extensive use at intermediate scales because of the portability of such systems, their potential for small-scale low-tech production and makeshift design based on up-cycled materials and hardware, and their option to be readily retrofit to many buildings and structures thanks to a vast assortment of shapes and configurations. Even relatively low-performing ‘savonius’ type turbines have practical potential in some situations. And the quite ancient use of the turbine as a direct source of mechanical power still has many useful possibilities even in a mostly electric powered world. The integration of wind turbines into architecture — as with solar — could be considered itself a key feature of the Solarpunk aesthetic and we would anticipate that, by the middle Solarpunk era, every possible approach to this might be explored in the urban habitat. However, by the late Solarpunk era we may actually see this technology go into decline as improved efficiencies of other technologies and the introduction of new sources of energy eventually supersede it.
Hydropower has long been a close associate of wind power, sharing as they do the basis in fluid physics, and there has often been crossfertalization between their development. Hydropower was the initial basis of large scale industrial mechanization. In modern times the whole environmental impact of dam construction has become apparent and their use has gone into some decline, despite grandiose state projects of the developing world. In the future we are likely to see this technology expand in the form of stream/river turbines with less impact than dams, similar tidal turbines and ducted tidal systems, revival of ram pump technology, various wave motion systems, and the advent of magnetohydrodynamic power systems aided by the advent of high-temperature superconductors. And there is, again, potential for novel integration in things like sewer/water pipe turbines. However, the technology will generally be more limited by geography than wind power systems and in the early Solarpunk era the devastation of coastal areas caused by climate change induced storms and sea level rise may be a detriment to its deployment. Similar to wind, we would expect most of its use to emerge in the middle era while declining in the late era, with the exception of large, solid-state, magnetohydrodynamic ocean current hoops made possible by the new materials realized through nanotechnology.
Biofuels and closely related synthetic fuels are likely to be predominantly a feature of the early Solarpunk era obsolesced in later eras, this because, as previously noted, they can only ever be carbon-neutral while the general imperative is to achieve a carbon-negative civilization. In the early era, their potential to aid energy independence and resilience of communities, particularly in farming areas, supersedes this limitation. Farming wastes and human waste will be the primary feedstocks for this production, followed by more dedicated use of algaeculture and mariculture, with their distinctive structures in the form of tubing arrays, growing ‘races’, and floating frames. In later eras only the algaeculture and mariculture may persist, chiefly as a new food and industrial products source. Marine settlements may rely extensively on the farming of algae for the production of their own architecture, using concrete-like materials deriving from the microscopic skeletons of diatoms.
Geothermal energy is a very great yet underdeveloped renewable source of energy, limited as it long has been by rare locations with near-surface volcanism that are, of course, inherently hazardous. Like solar thermal systems, it is primarily utilized through Rankin cycle systems using some high temperature working fluid to drive a turbine. Other methods, however, remain less explored such as elaborate thermocouple systems, infrared photovoltaic arrays, and magnetohydrodynamic fluid dynamos. The chief complication for these systems is the need for deep earth drilling to reach strata with the constant high temperatures needed, which is further complicated by the frequent disruption of such boreholes by volcanic activity. But in recent years improvements in drilling technology and lower pressure turbines exploiting lower temperature ratios have opened the possibility of much more widespread use of the technology — albeit limited to very large scale projects. Consequently, these large minimum scales preclude much development of this technology in the early Solarpunk era unless in select areas with access to hot springs. More development is likely in the middle era while, by the late Solarpunk era, the advent of robust nanotechnology offers the prospect of self-constructing structures that may see every city extending its own plant-like root systems into the Earth to exploit subterranean resources and energy.
Nuclear energy has long been anathema to environmentalists, for many good reasons. But the potential abundance of clean electric energy on offer has always been extremely compelling, if only its systems, fuel sourcing, and by-products were not so extremely dangerous for such extreme periods of time and so easily converted to weapons of mass destruction. But much of this problem relates to the reliance on the uranium fuel cycle adopted in the Post-War period largely for the purpose of creating an infrastructure for weapons under the guise of ‘peaceful commercial development’. The lie of Atoms for Peace… But in recent years there has been a revelation of the suppressed history of molten salt reactor development based on abundant thorium that was originally developed in parallel to the uranium based technology and which offered to greatly reduce the hazards associated with this source of energy — only to be abandoned specifically because it was useless for weapons creation. Along with this has emerged a tantalizing prospect for the realization of nuclear fusion systems which, likewise, much reduce the hazards associated with this source of energy. It is thus very likely that nuclear power will continue to be a prospect in our imagined ‘green’ future. Aside from possible smaller sizes (some anticipating molten salt reactors small enough to be containerized) and a lack of large pressure containment vessels, such systems would probably be visually similar to today’s nuclear plants, relying on Rankine cycle systems for their actual power output and thus employing the various cooling towers common to these. The novel technology would be on their insides.
However, in the early Solarpunk era such technology is not likely to see much advance because of its continued reliance on systems of very large scale, complexity, and cost beyond the reach of the small community. In fact, at present nuclear energy is in decline everywhere and, with the likely turmoil we anticipate in the Post-Industrial transition, the development of these new types of systems may be suspended for some time. Thus the realization of such technology might only be a prospect for the late Solarpunk era, with a strong possibility that it may prove completely unnecessary by then by virtue of the advances in renewable energy. We know that underdeveloped technology like OTEC alone could support a civilization ten times the size of our own currently. A civilization that can achieve some degree of sustainability may never need to go to the extreme of building their own mini-suns except, perhaps, for use in space.
Energy storage is a critical element of a renewable energy infrastructure, and some approaches to this may have a significant visible presence in the future built habitat. We are most familiar today with chemical batteries, but these remain problematic due to the relatively rare materials they still require and the impactive mining processes needed to extract them. Much effort is finally being put into their improvement today and we can expect these limitations to be whittled-down over time in incremental improvements. But bear in mind that, just as with photovoltaics, we have that potential for disruption of research and production in the early Solarpunk era, which will call for alternatives more accessible to local production. Thus some very interesting alternatives may come forward in that time, even with certain caveats to their efficiency and demand-response times.
Those based on simple mechanisms have the most potential in this context and one we’ve previously noted was pneumatic power storage. Long used as the basis of power for a variety of tools, this technology has potential at small and large scales, but less so at intermediate scales due to the need for very high pressures and advanced materials and fabrication methods for the tanks containing it. Small scale systems typically rely on direct use of the stored air pressure to drive small machines using turbines or other motors, this being more efficient at that scale than trying to convert that potential energy to another form. Large scale systems, intended for municipal power systems, use larger pressure-driven turbogenerators to produce electricity and large subterranean chambers — natural caves or disused mines — as their storage tanks. Thus they are very limited in location. Pneumatic automobiles have actually been developed, but being intermediate scale systems, tended to be hampered by the engineering of the lightweight super-pressure tanks they needed to contain enough pressure to give them useful operating ranges. But one can imagine stationary systems, based on heavier but simpler tanks, being a possibility in some applications.
Gravity has been used as a means of energy storage going back into antiquity and offers prospects for very low-tech systems supporting municipal scale power storage, though not especially useful at smaller scale. Two forms already in use today are water storage systems and gravity trains. Water storage systems use elevated pools or dams to store energy as water pumped from lower ground and then extracted when drained using hydroturbines. Some of these systems can use seawater. Gravity trains use electric powered locomotives with regenerative braking, towing a series of weighted cars up an incline to store energy then releasing it by passively rolling downhill. Again, the viability of these approaches depends on the local geography. More freely located and smaller scale systems have been based on simple towers in which weights are winched up to store power and allowed to drop to release it. But these tend to be limited by the practical size of their weights, cable strengths, and the heights of their towers.
Flywheels are another promising mechanical energy storage method that has even been touted for domestic energy use with home solar systems. However, as simple as they seem, their potential for electric energy depends on being able to spin at extreme velocities with very low friction. So, again, they have tended to be hampered by their necessarily advanced engineering, fabrication, and materials. No domestic-scale systems seem to have managed to make it to market. But they have seen use in less challenging lower-velocity forms as short term energy storage in applications like busses and trolleys, spacecraft, and uninterruptible power supplies in computer centers.
Packaging electric energy in chemical forms is another option with the key benefit of allowing storage for very long periods. The most well known method for this is, of course, the production of hydrogen gas, usually by various forms of hydrolysis, which has long been explored as an alternative fuel and anticipated as the basis of a general distributed renewable energy infrastructure able to get the energy gathered in places like the tropics or places suited to geothermal energy back to existing communities. There has been much effort in the development of hydrogen powered automobiles with this in mind, but so far the technology has proved difficult to implement at small scales. It’s really only useful at the densities of cryogenic liquid hydrogen, which is inherently hazardous and difficult to handle and store. It is very likely we will see a hydrogen infrastructure emerge, but probably not at small scale, which is why many engineers remain skeptical of the prospect for hydrogen cars and planes. However, there are some possible alternatives suited to small scale systems, albeit with a compromise in efficiency. One of these is the use of hydrides in safer, less volatile, forms.
Hydrides, which release hydrogen gas in the presence of water, were long researched as fuels, but proved far too volatile to be safe. However, certain hydride mixtures such as liquid borohydride are more safely less volatile unless in the presence of a metal catalyst. Thus it becomes possible to use small amounts of these metals to limit the reaction rate. However, these are complex chemicals to recycle. More common hydrides — sodium hydride sourced from lye — are easier to produce and recycle but are highly volatile. To make it safer, a concept was devised to encapsulate this material in recyclable thermoplastic pellets which could be mechanically cracked open individually in a water storage tank, thus limiting its reactions to small volumes at a time. This makes the material safer to handle than most any other fuel known, but one must both recycle the resulting lye and the plastic to reuse it. This comes at significant efficiency cost. But it is relatively clean and very safe and so may have many portable energy applications.
Another chemical storage method is the use of ‘redox’ solutions which store energy as an electrical potential between paired chemicals released by their isolated reaction through a fuel cell system. These are often referred to as ‘flow batteries’. This concept was long hoped to become an alternative to fossil fuels but was long stymied by the complexity and toxicity of the chemicals, their recycling, and the cross-contamination common to fuel cells. But in recent years a viable form was discovered in the form of a solution of the rare element vanadium in a solution of sulphuric acid. This proved to be able to store positive and negative potential in the same solution with cross-contamination only modestly diminishing the efficiency. And the recycling of the chemical can be done within the same fuel cells simply by applying electricity. Indeed, with multiple cells, it becomes possible to charge and discharge these solutions. Thus this technology has, in recent years, proven useful as an alternative for data center power backup and municipal scale power storage, since the scale of power contained is limited only by the volume of tank storage. But given the use of that sulphuric acid solution, everything the chemical is in contact with must be made on non-reactive materials such as glass and ceramic. This makes it unlikely to ever see domestic small scale uses, though operating small vehicles with it has been demonstrated.
Using electricity to produce synthetic fuels that could be used in internal combustion engines has long been a focus of research from the earliest times of the chemical industry. The techniques remain, however, complex and involve many hazardous chemicals, thus never realizing a cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels as long as they were much cheaper to produce and your source of energy was fossil fuel of some form to begin with. However, this is still a future possibility and it has been suggested in the past that the combination of nuclear energy and synthetic fuels would be the eventual alternative to fossil fuel. The downside is that, like biofuels, these still produce CO/CO2 when used along with other kinds of pollution. So while a possibility, it would not be as preferable in general use unless that pollution could be better contained. Given the compulsion to seek a carbon-civilization, these may only see specialized use.
In the more distant future we have the prospects of alternative forms of hydrogen such as metallic hydrogen offering the prospect of much higher energy densities than any other form of it, but needing exotic production methods unknown today. Likewise, there are speculative ‘nuclear isomer’ batteries — sometimes appearing in science fiction literature — which offer a hundred times the density of chemical batteries and nuclear-like energy output in very controlled, and thus presumably safer, forms. Such technology would offer the prospect of machines and vehicles whose entire lifetime energy needs — enough for centuries — would be installed when they are created. If possible at all, such things would only be a prospect for the late Solarpunk era.
Modular Building Systems: This topic deserves some detail of its own because it represents a key characteristic of Solarpunk/Post-Industrial culture and its approach to the habitat. We have already noted previously that modular building systems would be much more common in Solarpunk design, but what sort of systems are we talking about and where are they most likely to be used?
Modular assembly is common in industry and has roots in its earliest days, but generally in the context of individual designs and applications, easing the production of complex devices or structures by allowing them to be broken into smaller step-elements. Taylorization. In the late 19th century (though elements of it can be seen in quite ancient architecture) we began seeing it used in construction, facilitating the precision factory pre-fabrication of building elements that could be assembled by simple means on-site so as to speed the process of building and produce higher-performance structures. In the mid 20th century we began to see the emergence of general purpose modular building systems inspired by ‘design science’ and intended to support many different uses. And here is where the interest in them from corporate industry began to wane as they proved fundamentally subversive to their agenda of accelerating obsolescence and maximizing consumer dependence. Modular systems remove the skill and technical knowledge required for creating things — ingressing it within the topology of components which become commodified — and this kind of empowerment of the end-user/consumer was a threat to consumerism. They also give things much longer use-life by facilitating the reuse of their components.
Long advocated by designer-futurists like Buckminster Fuller, many such systems have been devised but few have approached any sort of ubiquity in use, with two notable exceptions; the sub-component architecture of the IBM PC that facilitated the computer industry’s ‘industrial ecology’ and the aluminum T-slot profiles originally devised by the ITEM company which likewise facilitated an ‘industrial ecology’ in industrial automation, overcoming its earlier adoption barriers.
For the Post-Industrial/Solarpunk culture, multi-purpose modular building systems support the ideal of maximizing reuse to extend the life of goods as long as possible. But it’s also key to empowering the ‘prosumer’ (producer-consumer) by overcoming barriers of skill in creating things for themselves and improving the flexibility of local production. With one set of commodity components many different things can be made from, complexity and scale of local production to provide them is much reduced. Some designers refer to this as the Min-A-Max principle; maximum diversity of uses from the minimum diversity of components. In the early and middle Solarpunk eras, where resilience imperatives dominate, this will be a very important capability and so we can anticipate that many neglected or forgotten building systems of the 20th century will be rediscovered and put to new use.
In the early Solarpunk era, where there will be much emphasis on repurposing the detritus of the Industrial Age, modular systems will derive from common or found materials and repurposed industrial products and be used mostly for structures of modest scale. So we can anticipate much use of things like the Grid Beam system, pipe-fitting systems like the well known Kee Klamp, scaffolding systems, industrial and commercial shelving systems, angle-iron, T-slot framing, theatrical truss systems, trade-show framing systems, light geodesic dome systems, and shipping containers — whole and in the collapsable box frames used for industrial and relief shelters. There will be new — but still relatively low-tech — systems as well based on things like bolted-together welded box frames in steel profiles and laminate lumber. (such as demonstrated with Marco Casagrande’s Paracity building system)
By the Mid Solarpunk era, modular systems become much more refined with accumulating use experience and the revival of systems lost to industry/corporate hegemonies in the 20th century. The architectural scale space frame building systems of the 20th century — long limited in application by their short-sighted corporate developers — will see more widespread and owner-builder level use. Much architecture will be designed as ‘functionally generic’ superstructures in anticipation of perpetual adaptive reuse, accommodating outfit by modular plug-in retrofit using prefabricated parts and ‘furnitecture’ elements. Modular ‘platforms’ similar to that of the PC but for electric and robotic vehicles will also be common, allowing easy end-user repair and reconfiguration. Many vehicles will commonly be assembled-on-demand at dealerships or, increasingly, in the general community workshops.
The late Solarpunk era sees modularity reduced to the scale of the molecule through the advent of nanotechnology and its means for near-total recyclability. Thus the emphasis on component reusability and end-user ease-of-assembly will be less important. Production and recycling capability will be ubiquitous in a built habitat where organismic buildings and large artifacts are self-growing, self-repairing, and self-adapting. There is a possibility for common artifacts to be based on smart materials that can self-recycle and remake themselves under computer guidance — what this author likes to refer to as ‘nanofoam’.
Domestic Goods: As we noted, a great deal of the artifacts in our habitat must be redesigned and reinvented to suit the obsolescence of plastics and polymers we grew so reliant on in the 20th century. But this comes with a lot of near-term trade-offs as the reasons they were often adopted in these roles was because of superior performance or economy. They also facilitated adoption of microwave cooking. Of course, they were also often adopted in the pursuit of the now seemingly deranged practices of ‘planned obsolescence’ and its overlooked partner the ‘sliding scale of economy’ — the practice of deliberately bad-design for short-lived products for the sake of reinforcing the perceived value of higher-priced goods without regard to the waste created. How many variations on most product designs do we really need? Do you really express yourself through a choice of mass-produced junk? So there is likely a lot of looking back at earlier materials and re-evaluating their real virtues and shortcomings.
We can thus anticipate that a lot of domestic goods will go back to the use of glass and ceramics, wood, fiberboard, fabric, and metals with minimal finishing or use of anodizing, baked enamel, or other kinds of coating to avoid the use of polymer paints and laminated plastic surfaces. Many old fabrication techniques have been lost with time and will need rediscovery. And there will be adaptations to facilitate independent, smaller-scale, lower-tech, lower-skill, digital/robotic, and thus more local production. With electronics and electrical devices we would anticipate the re-appearance of aluminum — already happening in high-end products — as well as wood and cloth. This will bring with it the return of design approaches based on simpler forms of ‘box’ or ‘tube’ enclosures relying on screw assembly and the use of standardized forms with variable face-plates. Designs like the legendary Tivoli Model One radio designed by Henry Kloss, the cloth-covered fiberboard boxes of early radios, ‘roadcase/flightcase’ construction, or the extruded enclosure profiles like those of old modems. (recently re-emerging in ‘NUC’ — next unit of computing — type computers) Such adaptation may, early-on, come with a necessary increase in mass and bulkiness for some goods and some complication in meeting contemporary safety standards.
There is already a ‘plywood chic’ emergent in furniture design (inspired by CNC fabrication) and a rediscovery of interior finishing materials like fabric and cork. There is also likely to be a re-emergence of crafts such as re-upholstery, with new furniture deliberately designed to facilitate it by using resilient core structures in wood, steel, and possibly heavy recycled polyethylene plastic. The quirky, marbled, sometimes gnarled, appearance of recycled plastics that was considered too ugly for mainstream products will become an attraction. Suited to low-tech local industry, it may feature as a replacement for wood in many kinds of heavier furnishings made with bolted construction and modular elements, pulling it out of the waste stream while making it repeatedly reusable until it can finally be obsolesced for-good.
With these materials changes would also come an emphasis on design-to-last, design-for-repair, design-for-reuse, and design-for-recycling, particularly in the early Solapunk era as an act of ‘design activism’ against the old throw-away culture.
The middle Solarpunk era would see many substitute materials in their refined forms and robotic production well adapted to them. The culture will have worked-out many of the kinks in the earlier approaches to these materials and standardized on many forms. There would be a much smaller spectrum of variant product designs thanks to the elimination of the sliding scale of economy racket. Many designs would anticipate and facilitate end-user customization, made increasingly easy with digital production.
The late Solarpunk era would see the introduction of nanotechnology into mainstream goods design with the emergence of a number of ‘diamondoid’ materials possible only by this technology. (in the earlier eras, where it exists it would tend to be constrained to uses in subcomponents and very high-performance applications as the means to nano-fabrication may long be limited in physical scale) There would be a general emphasis on using the built habitat and its artifacts as a means to carbon sequester. And so these materials would begin supplanting earlier alternatives even through their extreme performance might be unnecessary for most applications. Many artifacts of this late period may exhibit organismic and parametric design characteristics owing to the ‘grown’ nature of their fabrication which may borrow heavily from the architectures and processes of biology. Owing to their total recyclability, there will be a certain return to the ‘blobject’ approach to design of the late 20th century (rounded-edged, permanently sealed, non-repairable designs characteristic of mass production using plastic) They will often be more delicate-looking owing to the extreme strength of their materials and far more solid state, hermetically sealed, eliminating internal voids. Furniture and appliances will increasingly be formed-into architecture after the fashion of free-form organic design as the grown structures will not only retain a capability for their self-repair but also the on-demand creation of furnishing and appliance features.
[an evolution of nanotech production]
Clothing: One of the first industries to adopt global outsourcing in earnest, the garment industry has been hiding many of the dirty details of its production for a long time and represents a particular challenge to the transition to robotic production and more sustainable materials. It may be a persistent hold-out for Industrial Age paradigms. However, it also represents a relatively low-tech spectrum of technique with global ubiquity, albeit labor-intensive. Trends are already well established in the re-adoption of more natural and traditional materials, but the processing for even these remains resource-intensive and some synthetics may persist because of potential use of plant cellulose and recycled PET bottle feedstocks.
Early Solarpunk era clothing will be largely characterized by the growing scarcity of some materials, wider use of hemp and bamboo materials, and the deliberate abandonment of polluting synthetic dyes and polymer materials with a return to the use of embroidery, aplique, batik and block printing, or woven patterns for decoration. Much production may necessarily return to home and community workshops specialized to the craft. Generally, everyday clothing may — for a time — be simpler, less diverse, and less colorful than today with more reliance on plant-based dyes. A new functionalism in clothing design may emerge as society becomes more concerned with durability, ease of production, and comfort than style. With temperatures increasing in many formerly temperate zone areas, functional fashions from Oceania, the Middle-East, and India may spread to the northern hemisphere. Many of today’s white-collar work-day fashions may be deliberately abandoned in protest against the older ‘corporate culture’ they symbolize. In times of crisis, repurposed and recycled materials may be used for makeshift clothing, often similar to that depicted in post-apocalyptic themed media. There may even be a neo-primitivist trend as an expression of a desired ‘return to nature’ in many communities, though much of that fashion may not be particularly practical.
By the middle-era clothing may begin to return to its older diversity due largely to improving robotics and new sustainable materials. It may still rely on more specialized machines and production facilities than the general goods production that are more easily accommodated in robot design. Some promising methods of fully robotic clothing production are being experimented with today and may see expanded use later in the middle Solarpunk era. Laser cutting of fabric is increasingly common and methods of freezing or temporarily petrifying fabrics allow them to be more easily manipulated by robots. A so-called 3D printing technique has appeared based on what is essentially spray-flocking of reusable garment preforms. Felting is a simple alternative to weaving and may see various forms of high-tech revival. Fabric welding by various means has long been under experimentation, but has not supplanted conventional sewing methods, possibly because of technology costs. However, these may emerge compelled by the need to eliminate manual labor that can no longer be simply farmed out to poor countries as transportation costs increase and 20th century economics is disrupted.
Curiously, the advent of nanotechnology in the later era may not have as much or as rapid impact on garment design as it will likely have on just about everything else, even though it will certainly result in a variety of novel materials and the capability to integrate various electronics and active systems. One reason for this is that, with that kind of technology, the human body itself may become an open canvas for self-expression, as easily physically modified as a choice of clothing. Fabrics based on microlattice structures fabricated on precise preforms or even grown-on the user may appear and may have many utilitarian uses where a contiguous ‘second skin’ is desirable. (such as mechanical counter-pressure space suits, VR tactile feedback suits, and water-breathing diving gear) But, for a while, it may be more difficult to match the tactile qualities of woven materials with these more monolithic materials, flexible as they can be. Of course, certain new fashions may be devised around that second-skin nature and the ability to form-in surface features like those of various organisms, such as fur, bioluminescence, chromatophores, and so on.
Architecture and Housing: A common misconception is that sustainability in architecture is largely a matter of materials choice and the use of solar power. And though it may be a major consumer of materials and energy, in truth, how people live and how architecture facilitates that lifestyle matters much more. ‘Net impact’ is what’s really important. Fossil fuels have long enabled a pathological way of life, squandering valuable land and facilitating the habitation of places where people probably should not live. Our approaches to housing worked hand-in-hand with this, encouraging consumerist lifestyles and dependency on cars. We literally brought the car right into our houses! We crafted the whole modern built habitat more to suit the needs of the automobile and market than our own. This is fundamentally unsustainable. The Solarpunk future will see architecture become a crucial tool in the cultivation of both a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle but also a more humane, social, one.
As we already noted, this is likely to be a more urban way of life by default with emphasis on factoring out the compulsion to use the automobile to meet one’s daily needs. Cities are the most sustainable way for people to live. Potentially, the lowest in net-impact. But they have rarely been well designed or managed habitats, subject to the whims of property speculation and politics, and thus were demonized by earlier environmentalists because of those dysfunctions. And they too succumbed to the cult of the car — ironically, adopted as a cleaner and safer alternative to horses. Our habitat should be more intentional in design, with a more democratic, organic, bottom-up participation of society in its development. It’s management should no longer be casually delegated to politicians, real estate developers, and ‘experts’ who, increasingly, do not live in the same reality as that of mainstream society. It must do-away with the pathology of real estate speculation and the gridded parceling of land. And, of course, there will be more appropriate materials and more use of plants, but that’s secondary to the way the habitat must work and whose interests it must be optimized for.
During the transitional era the means to transform the habitat will be necessarily limited by the resistance of established property owners, laws, conventions, and entrenched bureaucracies protecting them, and often local governments hopelessly corrupt or stuck in the Industrial Age past. And so much of the change will be insurgent in nature and rely heavily on the principle of adaptive reuse. Here again we meet that idea of an Outquisition or Urban Nomad movement which seeks to intervene in communities where the established system has failed its citizens and begun some kind of territorial retreat in authority and control. These interventionists would be highly skilled in approaches to adaptive reuse of existing older buildings, with this dominating the architectural aesthetic of the time. Much as obsolete urban industrial buildings saw adaptation by a generation of artists and hipsters with the ‘lofting’ movement of the past, we would expect a similar fate for today’s office buildings, corporate and light industrial ‘parks’, and retail structures — the new urban detritus. We can imagine them transformed by clever retrofit into eclectic self-contained communities akin to Hans Widmer’s Bolos. We would also expect more of the same alternative community development phenomenon we’ve seen to date, with groups of people going to edge-of-wilderness locations or otherwise abandoned/underused areas for the freedom to create ‘intentional communities’ with radically alternative architecture bureaucratically barred from use in mainstream communities. Here is where we would expect the most experimentation with new architecture, materials, and construction methods. We would also anticipate the growth in temporary or accidental settlements compelled by the forced migration of populations due to Global Warming impacts. Here a ‘nomadic’ approach to architecture would be the convention with the immediate demand for basic shelter, sometimes made with makeshift and recycled/upcycled elements like shipping containers, container shelter frames, and upcycled old vehicles, that transition over time to more permanent habitation should such ‘camps’ be allowed or compelled to remain persistent.
By the mid Solarpunk era many towns and cities will have been abandoned with the changes of the previous era and in those that remain a mix of repurposed old and new architecture would be common. Large highways are being demolished as new or revived electric rail systems take their place. Cars are falling in number and excluded from much of the now intentionally walkable habitat. Commercial and retail facilities have largely gone obsolete, their structures repurposed or razed. Residence is once again the primary purpose of the city, quality-of-life it’s primary concern. Industry and agriculture have returned to the urban habitat, but now miniaturized, through community urban farms, fabrication workshops, and warehouses managed as municipal utilities. Founded on the digital production techniques emerging at the start of the 21st century, they all increasingly employ robotics. Most goods and the most perishable of foods are commonly produced locally. There is increasing use of automated personal and packet transport with newer communities and buildings designed to accommodate automated delivery service.
Like just about everything we made in the 20th century, the design of housing was deliberately intended to maximize waste in the name of profit, supporting the racket of real estate growth through the ingression of labor costs into property values through the notion of ‘land improvement’. The delusional idea that you can in any way improve land by building things on it will likely be abandoned in the future as we come to realise land’s natural state holds the greatest potential — and thus greatest value — of all. Suburban homes were deliberately overelaborate in design and most of the cost/labor of their construction went to interior finishing work often using latantly toxic materials. Yet, ironically, the first thing most people did moving into a new home was to renovate that interior! The rate of home renovations, particularly for bathrooms and kitchens, has steadily increased well into early 21st century with little effort made to ameliorate this by reducing dependence on specialty service trades. The result; a steady stream of unrecyclable landfill waste.
Such unsustainable practices would be largely gone by the mid-Solarpunk era. Decades of cultural experience through an era of constant and rapid change will have compelled a convention of functionally generic architecture in many communities; structures designed specifically with perpetual adaptive reuse in mind, employing minimalist superstructures or modular structural systems intended to adapt to many purposes over time. The structure that cannot change with the society is doomed to demolition — a waste of valuable material. Many buildings are multi-purpose, often incorporating rooftop parks and farms. (green roofs of some sort are a general convention, along with solar and smaller scale wind systems) There is great emphasis on empowering unskilled individuals in the crafting and maintenance of their own habitat, typically through modularity, retrofit, and ‘furnitecture’; furnishings that bridge the line between furniture and architecture through the use of multifunctional volumetric forms and modular structures. (we will discuss that in more detail in a later section) Most forms of ‘destructive construction’ (ie. anything involving nails, self-embedding screws, paints, adhesives) that hamper reuse/recycling have been obsolesced.
By the late era the urban habitat has evolved into a lacey urban web across the face of a much-restored natural environment. This urban web is composed of a verdant, contiguous, flowing, parametrically designed ‘urban landscape’ superstructure complementing the adjacent natural landscape with similar forms along the path of narrow urban corridors, built — by robots — from carbon-sequestering masonry materials serving as a vast carbon sink. Most architecture is designed to merge into this superstructure, most residence arrayed like townhouses along the edges of large contour-terraces hosting farming and park space with various water features. At the human scale things are more personally and freely customized, creating an eclectic crazy-quilt of facades and ‘living wall’ garden installations. Originally designed to accommodate plug-in modular retrofit, with the new self-constructing materials assimilating the superstructure more free-form organic shapes are becoming the convention. Enclosed interior avenues, atriums, and open narrow valleys and caldera host public areas. Clusters of wind turbines sprout like copses of giant sunflowers and ribbons of PV glass canopies flow down slopes like frozen waterfalls. Pinnacle and dome forms emerge to host special-purpose public buildings such as schools, museums and galleries, public assemblies and such. The general form is low, only a handful of terrace levels, but features more, and more sharply sloped, terraces where the superstructure branches or crosses to create more lively centers of activity.
Most powered transportation has disappeared into the superstructure. Only pedestrians, human-powered, and personal electric vehicles are commonly seen on the surface, along with modest-sized service robots. Old conventions of real estate and the grid-like parceling of land have been abandoned, thus facilitating such an organic contiguous landscape. The superstructure is a commons, space freely available on a first-come-first-serve basis, built and managed with the aid of AI systems linked to millions of sensors that cultivate the superstructure like a self-learning symbiotic organism while leaving the human-scale architecture to humans themselves to outfit as they wish. In the most technically advanced areas this superstructure has literally become a synthetic organism akin to a reef, formed of self-constructing smart materials hosting colonies of nanomachines and a fluid vascular system distributing material to complement the digital nervous system.
Though most of the structure features this common parametric aesthetic, most suited to AI design, some areas are more actively managed by local community and professional groups and feature more ‘themed’ or ‘period’ architecture. These include so-called ‘secular ashrams’ that take roles such as universities, research institutes, art collectives and media studios, resorts and theme parks designed also to be the homes of those who work there.
Furnitecture: Deriving from a number of design concepts of the late 20th century, ‘furnitecture’ is a concept this author devised as specifically expressing principles of Post-Industrial culture and its perspective on the built habitat. Thus it is anticipated to become an iconic design element of the future culture. The portmanteau implies the merging of furniture and architecture in the design of multi-purpose volumetric structures that replace the functions of traditional rooms in simpler, more-or-less open-plan, settings.
This author’s interest in such designs originated with a study of low-toxic housing intended to aid sufferers of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome or ‘environmental illness’ whose needs for housing are largely ignored by the mainstream building industry, facilitating owner-builder strategies that not only produce modest-cost low-toxic shelter but shelter potentially buildable by unskilled people of possibly diminished health. One approach can be found in the use of ‘high-performance’ structures based on prefabricated or modular construction — often industrial in nature and made without the adhesives and paints so typical of conventional housing. Such structures tend to be simple shells or pavilions in form, producing open-plan spaces devoid of fixed walls which, of course, require elaborate skilled finishing. Furnitecture was devised as a means to comfortably outfit such dwellings using light free-standing elements made of non-conventional non-toxic materials. Initial inspiration was found in the work of futurist designer Ken Isaacs and his Living Structures made from simple modular frames of unfinished wood intended to maximize the utility of space by making more use of its volume. His building system Matrix evolved into today’s Grid Beam system.
This author realized that, by their owner-built, freely adapted, freely moveable nature, their ability to facilitate nomadic lifestyles, and the quick and easy adaptive-reuse of found buildings and unconventional structures, these structures embodied the essential nature of a Post-Industrial culture. They represent a culture that embraces perpetual change, mobility, self-reliance/resilience, and rapid evolution as the norm.
There are several basic types of furnitecture; pods, frames and mezzanines, modular cabinet systems, modular wall/shell systems, and built-ins.
Pod furnitecture is based on small free-standing enclosures comprised of a single box-like unit, often designed to be fully closed and often featuring castors for easy mobility. The concept takes its cues from the designs of enclosed beds common to a number of ancient cultures and their modern reinvention, the ‘capsule hotel’ pods devised in Japan in the mid 20th century and reappearing in some 21st century hotels. Their original purpose was to provide more privacy in multigenerational households as well as more thermal insulation in draftier buildings. Later variations on the concept sought to extend the notion of a self-contained ‘appliance’ to the collective functions of a room.
Though multifunctional, pods usually feature a primary application such as sleeping, food preparation, bathroom, lounging, entertainment, working, indoor farming, etc. The exterior of the enclosures often feature secondary uses like shelving and cabinets. Though generally intended for use indoors in an open-plan setting, they can be weatherproofed for use in the outdoors as well where they are combined in a ‘compound home’ arrangement and can potentially support light roofing or tensile structures. They are generally never larger than a smaller-sized shipping container. In some designs pods are designed for stacking and linking as a space-filling modular system, creating elaborate complexes filling larger spaces.
Pod furnitecture would be particularly iconic of the early Solarpunk era and the Outquisition/Urban Nomad movement whose activists would use this form for easy transport and rapid deployment of their facilities using random found host structures. Likely based on the use of roadcase/flightcase construction commonly used by travelling performers and musicians, they would comprise both domestic roles and workstations for many kinds of machine tools, microfarms, deployable energy, and communications systems.
Frame and mezzanine furnitecture is based on the use of various modular open frame building systems and used to create additional levels of function/activity for more use of the volume of spaces. Open frames are combined with rigid and tensile partition panels, heavier deck and shelving panels, appliance inserts, pod-like cabin units, and retrofit fixtures. In some designs they can be the basis of yurt or tent-like shelters enclosed in weatherproof fabric shells and insulating blankets. Systems such as Grid Beam, T-slot profile extrusions, scaffolding systems, industrial shelving, modular warehouse mezzanine systems, pipe fitting systems, and space frame systems may all be used in this role. In some designs a space-filling frame is used to host pod type units within the structure, creating elaborate complexes. This form directly deriving from the early Living Structures, it is another form most representative of the early Solarpunk era with its extensive use of up-cycled and makeshift furnishings and structures.
Modular cabinet systems are a more refined form of furnitecture best suited to machine-assisted prefabrication and thus representative of the middle Solarpunk era. They derive from the Modernist full-wall modular shelving and cabinet systems developed by many furniture companies but are designed to be self-standing. They are usually intended for the inner area of a space while leaving the perimeter free, except where they may be placed along demising walls in the same fashion of conventional whole-wall cabinets/shelves.
In the early 21st century Japanese designer Shigeru Ban came to the realization that the quality of furniture construction was often much superior to that of the structure of houses and began exploring the use of reinforced prefabricated shelf/cabinet systems combined with minimalist roof/floor deck systems as a primary housing structure. He dubbed this series of designs the Furniture Houses. Influenced by this, cabinet furnitecture employs free-standing cabinet/shelf modules as partitions dividing space into functional areas. Like pod furnitecture, many of these integrate other furniture elements and appliances and can feature casters or sliding pads for rapid reconfiguration. They can be single or dual ‘sided’, which means they may have functional features on one or both sides and can be joined face-to-face to create a mobile enclosure protecting their contents for transport. Reinforced versions can function, as per the Furniture Houses, as load-bearing support for simple pavilion houses, plugged into floor/roof deck systems otherwise covered by plug-in decorative finishing panels and enclosed in non-load-bearing exterior window and weather proof wall panels.
Modular wall/shell systems derive from the carved wooden panelling systems often used in ancient masonry buildings to finish their interiors, providing sound and thermal insulation and a generally more comfortable environment than bare brick and stone. Even in their ancient forms, they were often quite modular in design and frequently repurposed like furniture for use in multiple buildings. In their modern form they are based on systems combining wall, floor, and ceiling elements which can be based on many pre-finished materials and, like the cabinet/wall system, incorporate storage, appliances, lighting, and other fixtures into the panel elements along with integrated utilities busses. They are designed for the rapid plug-in retrofit furnishing of minimalist shell structures typically based on block or formed concrete. (and, in the future, 3D printed masonry) Thus they are particularly useful in the adaptive reuse of industrial structures.
Built-in furnitecture is based on bespoke designs intended to suit very specific spaces. Though potentially prefabricated, they need not be particularly standardized as they are not intended for more than their one installation and so will tend to rely heavily on the customization possible through digital fabrication combined with handcraft. They can combine characteristics of all the other forms of furnitecture — save those enabling portability/demountability — with the intent to optimize the multi-functionality of, usually, more limited spaces. In essence, they are applying the logic of nautical and spacecraft interior design to the home to maximize the utility of minimal spaces. When this applied to fully weatherproof structures, they basically become Tiny Houses/microhouses. This approach is often used for the series production of prefabricated housing, but the limited reusability of the designs is less typical of most Post-Industrial design. However, in the late Solarpunk era we would expect to see this approach to design emerge as a convention for interior design as fabrication techniques for formed-in-place furnishings become possible — particularly with the advent of refined 3D printing and nanotechnology capable of in-situ creation and recycling of sophisticated appliances and furnishings.
Vehicles and Transportation Systems: Transportation is one area where the most novel and interesting changes are likely in the Post-Industrial future, thanks to a convergence of both new and revived technology, the new forms of energy we must adopt, and the changes in lifestyle all that compels. The transitional period of the early Solarpunk era likely presents us with much experimentation as not only new kinds of vehicles are explored, but new ways of making them with smaller scale industry as well. This would be a time of quirky, sometimes, bizarre, DIY machines. This is the ‘MacGyvering’ era.
As previously noted, in general there will be a great revival in rail transportation as the single-most energy-efficient form of electric powered transportation. But it may not take familiar forms. And in the early Solarpunk era, where economic turmoil may compel communities to become more self-sufficient while national-level infrastructures slide into a decline, there may be a necessary reliance on legacy infrastructure — even as it physically deteriorates — and thus more adaptation through individual and small group effort than complete reinvention. A concerted physical reconfiguration of the civilization’s footprint is more likely a product of the middle Solarpunk era where we expect communities to have formed new regional cooperative systems able to engage in big infrastructure development. Let’s consider how the different categories of vehicles may be changed.
Personal Transportation: Here we refer to both human powered vehicles, such as bicycles, and small low-speed powered vehicles intended for one or two passengers. This category is where we expect the most experimentation in the early Solarpunk era as the urban habitat is returned to the pedestrian and cyclist and because such vehicles are the most amenable to small scale experimentation and production. Bicycle, kick-scooter, and low-power motor scooter production — typically based on simple welded tube space frames — is something that already exists in local small scale across the globe and which has long been a focus for eco-tech inventors. Already we have seen much development in work-oriented vehicles and accessories as well as exploration of new materials such as bamboo (aiding their local production in developing countries) and plywood suited to CNC fabrication. In the immediate future we can anticipate 3D printing to emerge in this application, already being subject of some experimentation. There already exists a broad market of retrofit electric power conversion hardware for bicycles and other vehicles based on the same kind of wheels. This will expand as the technology matures and more vehicles move into the use of wheel integrated motors. With the introduction of the self-balancing Segway vehicle at the turn of the century, we have seen rapid proliferation of similar concepts, in one and two wheel forms, and this has also carried-over to some robot design. Recently, this has evolved to one and two passenger self-balancing ‘wheelchairs’ likely to spawn a new class of low-speed urban ‘microcar’ — again, a revival of concepts from the past aided by newer technology.
Motorcycles, Motortrikes, and Tuk-Tuks: Intended for higher speed travel and thus demanding higher power propulsion systems, this category of vehicles will certainly see a transition to electric power but possibly not as much experimentation in form. The exception may be the tuk-tuk which, originally intended as a multi-purpose urban vehicle, has made western inroads from its eastern origins in recent years and offers many possible utility variations. In the western world motorcycles have come to be seen as primarily ‘sport’ vehicles and development has generally been obsessed with performance, with little regard for practicality or utility in contemporary design. And thus there has been a trend of employing the most advanced forms of fabrication and powerplants in the name of performance. In the near future such vehicles will be regarded as more utilitarian and hence a trend returning to simpler, more functionalist, and economical, designs may emerge using traditional space frame fabrication and modular power systems suited to local production and repair. We see hints of this in the field of Motortrike enthusiasts where a cottage industry developed in the fabrication of rather large space frame based vehicle chassis designed to host repurposed automobile engines. Though not well known, that hobby industry may have ramifications for not only future motorcycles, but automobiles as well as it demonstrates a practical capability for such vehicles to be locally manufactured at cottage industry scales.
Automobiles: The design and manufacture of the conventional automobile represents the epitome of Industrial Age sensibility — and damn-near everything wrong with it from the perspective of the contemporary and future situation. No other human creation has so greatly, or rapidly, altered the footprint of civilization, impacting both society and the natural environment. No other artifact so fully illustrates how we turned down the path to self-destruction across the 20th century. Consequently, it is one artifact who’s likely future design may most reflect the critical changes in the emerging Post-Industrial culture.
As previously noted we anticipate a general decline in automobile use across the Solarpunk future with a return to urban living and the re-integration of electric public transit. Roads themselves are a critical impact on the environment and we must return as much landscape to nature as we can. But we have so deeply structured dependence on this means of transportation into the civilization that its outright obsolescence is unlikely and even curbing the growth in its use will be a challenge for the Post-Industrial culture. In the near-term, a more immediate transformation of the automobile is necessary as the habitat around them will be too difficult to rapidly transform and transportation patterns slow to evolve. So what might we expect for the ‘saner’ automobile of the near-future?
The transition to electric power is the most obvious anticipated change, and currently underway despite a century of resistance, but what’s often overlooked is the way this technology may change the way cars are designed and built, which may be far more important than just the change to a new energy source. Electric power systems have the potential to ‘commodify’ in the way components in personal computers have, doing to transportation what the IBM PC did to computing.
The conventional contemporary car is based on a kind of fabrication known as ‘welded pressed steel unibody construction’ which — as futuristic as the term sounds — is, in truth, a technology well over a century old that has changed little in all that time for several reasons; sheet steel is a cheap commodity, it allows endless superficial variation without real improvement creating the illusion of ‘newness’, deliberately produces short-lived products that visually accumulate wear and minor damage without too much impact on safety, and it limits the production of those products to machines of ridiculously huge scale and capital investment. This is what makes conventional automobiles the ideal ‘consumerist’ product. And we know this is not the best way to build cars for the simple reason that, when performance and safety really matter, we don’t build cars this way. It is often said that the safest vehicles in the world are modern racing cars, which gave up this method of construction long ago in favor of space frames based on tubular alloys. These not only perform better, they can be fabricated, repaired, and endlessly modified in the smaller scale workshop facilities of typical racing teams. Similarly, few military vehicles employ conventional automobile chassis. Heavier ones employ the ‘carriage frame’ chassis of earlier vehicles and still typical of large trucks or, if lighter, space frames much like the racing vehicles and the ‘sand rails’ devised by off-road racing enthusiasts. Again, they have an advantage in performance and ease of repair and modification critical to the battlefield. By comparison, the conventional car is just another throw-away consumer product like the soda cans its fabrication is related to.
But cars have not always been like this. In their history are a few interesting diversions from the conventional that hinted at the possibility of a very different path to a very different sort of industry. Three vehicles particularly notable in this respect were the Czechoslovakian Velorex Oskar, the British Lotus Seven, and the classic American ‘hot rod’. Their designs offer us some interesting hints as to the possible nature of a Post-Industrial automobile.
Velorex was among a long list of companies producing microcars during the early and mid 20th century. Like many countries of the post-war era, Czechoslovakia struggled to match the industrial capabilities of larger wealthier nations and explored the approach of using much smaller, lighter, vehicles than the convention as a way to get the society mobile despite limited production means and poor public buying power. Starting out as a bicycle shop owned by the Stránský brothers, they began with a design dubbed the Oskar modeled on the British Morgan three wheel cars of the early 20th century but adapted to their limited means of production by use of a welded tubular steel space frame chassis that could be manufactured much like their bicycle frames. Powered by a retrofit motorcycle engine and using motorcycle wheels, this skeleton was then covered in a weatherproof vinyl-leather-fabric body shell made in a series of panels attached by bolts. Consider that; a functional automobile built with the technology of bicycles! Unlikely as it may seem, this extremely minimalistic and relatively slow two-seater vehicle proved successful, with demand exceeding production for much of its 20 year lifetime. The total number of cars produced was tiny compared to production by large companies, only around 15,000 made in total across four model runs, but they proved extremely resilient and perpetually repairable with many of these vehicles still in operation to the present day. A revival of the vehicle as a modern sports car was attempted at the start of the 21st century and there was some brief interest in a variant for the Indian market.
Most famous for its appearance in the opening to the Prisoner TV series, the Lotus Seven sports car was yet another space frame based vehicle which appeared a few years later than the first Oskar. The use of such a chassis structure was in part inspired by its adoption in racing vehicles, but also as a very practical solution to the problem of shipping vehicles internationally. As we noted previously, it’s terribly inefficient to ship large complex products whole and we anticipate this will become largely obsolete in the future as the carbon overhead of the practice becomes apparent. But that’s not a new revelation. In the past — before the advent of containerized shipping — many companies struggled with this problem. It’s tough to protect large, heavy, or fragile products from damage in long-distance shipping. Clocks, radios, TVs, and early automobiles often separated the production of more sophisticated core components from the enclosures or bodies that could be made locally with less skill. The Lotus company took the unusual approach of designing its early cars as kits of parts that could be produced with smaller facilities and would be assembled at dealerships in order to exploit a legal loophole circumventing onerous sales taxes — something that inspired a trend in kit cars during the mid-century persisting into the 1970s. They also proved more easily shipped by diverse means, facilitating international sales. Those dealerships would often allow customers to observe and even participate in their cars’ assembly and soon enthusiasts were taking to assembling the whole thing themselves as home, knowing they could always call on the dealership for help. Far from a mainstream vehicle, the Seven persisted in four model variations for some 15 years before Lotus abandoned the concept, automobiles starting to become too physically complex as an increasing volume of electronics was introduced. However, some dealerships banded together in a bid to continue production. This resulted in the Caterham company which continues to produce this very unique vehicle in an expanded model line to the present day, still allowing customers to buy them either assembled-to-order or as kits for their own home assembly.
Meanwhile, in the US there emerged a post-war boom in car ownership that extended to the young, with driving becoming something of a right of passage for young middle-class youngsters similar to gun use in previous generations. But cars were still very expensive and it was more common that the young would receive their parents’ hand-me-down vehicles than obtain new ones. Persistent American gender stereotypes created an expectation that all males should understand how all machines work — the automobile in particular. And many new ‘high schools’ and ‘vocational schools’ featured courses in automobile maintenance. It was once a convention in the culture to learn through doing and so many youth of mid-century took to the modification of these second-hand cars as their learning tool, in some cases taking to the complete construction of radically novel vehicles made by repurposing the parts of old vehicles and, of course, optimized for both speed and novel, some could say ‘aggressive’ anti-conventional appearance. Thus Hot Rods were born.
But this hobby relied on the reuse of earlier, more durable, and simpler vehicle chassis and engines that started to become scarce over time as car companies began to increasingly embrace the pathological doctrine of planned obsolescence, increasing public concern for vehicle safety saw more legal restriction imposed on car modifications, and cars became increasingly elaborate and reliant on exclusive car dealership tools and knowledge. (by the end of the century some car companies actually began toying with welding the engine compartment closed altogether…) Some vehicles persisted in this repurposing for a long time — such as the venerable VW Beetle which saw the emergence of owner-built ‘dune buggies’ spawning an American kit car phenomenon based on repurpose of its chassis and engine and the use of fanciful fiberglass body shells. But eventually even this supply of chassis ran out as VW slowly abandoned the vehicle. Thus there emerged two novel vehicle concepts spawning their own overlapping cottage industries; dune buggies evolved into ‘sand rail’ off-road vehicles and hot-rods evolved into ‘motor trikes’ putting full-size car engines on open three wheel frames — both of these based on the use of space frame chassis that could be produced independently in small facilities. These persist to the present day as an often overlooked independent car industry.
What lessons can we take from these vehicles about the likely forms of automobiles in the future? In the early Solarpunk era we anticipate a similar logistical situation in the need to be able to make much more resilient, adaptive, and recyclable cars by more modest scale industry. By virtue of its size, the car is a challenging artifact for economical localized production. But these vehicles demonstrate that there are, in fact, effective ways for doing this. Space frame construction is not only superior in performance, hence its use in high-performance vehicles, but suited to smaller production facilities and tools. And with the recent advent of alloy 3D printing we have a way to automate the on-demand fabrication of these structures with production systems even smaller in scale than these early forms required.
Electric propulsion offers us further radical simplification of the car, reducing parts count while also eliminating the mass and mechanical drive trains and reducing complexity through modularity. In recent years the public has started to become aware of the lifetime operating costs savings already apparent in current electric cars not even deliberately optimized for this. Already existing in some electric vehicle designs, soon we will see more use of combined wheel/motor/suspension units and drive-by-wire control systems which will effectively reduce the vehicle to an enclosure for passengers that we simply retrofit propulsion to. In effect, the car’s chassis will become a ‘passive backplane’ we plug the rest into like the parts of an industrial computer. There is potential for establishing cross-industry standards that compartmentalize engineering into the topology of modular elements, eliminating skill in assembly, and reducing those parts to commodities produced by many companies that compete within the domain of components and collaborate across common platforms — just as with the ubiquitous PC platform. It was this ability for the computer to be divided into a series of modular elements with standardized interfaces that allowed for the establishment of a global ‘industrial ecology’ of alternately cooperating and competing component developers, accelerating its progress to a pace beyond that of any other device in the past. This is what made this single-most sophisticated device humans have ever devised into something cheap, ubiquitous, and which a child can be taught to assemble in an hour. Imagine if cars were like that!
Right now there is much emphasis on self-driving technology, almost to the point where it’s becoming another ‘red herring’ distracting the public from more important design issues. But with the climate-driven economic turmoils we anticipate in the near future of the early Solarpunk era, this may take a back-seat to the imperative for accelerating the transition to electric vehicle use with local production independence, use of smaller and easier to maintain vehicles, and thus a greater focus on utilitarian design. While dying Industrial Age companies continue to compulsively resist change, pursuing their automotive equivalent of haute couture, we can anticipate that local entrepreneurs and local-resilience activists will see the potential in open vehicle platforms that can, relying on local production and global community development (cosmo-localization), deliver the essential, no frills, functionality needed of electric vehicles at modest cost. Early forms of these vehicles may appear clunky, quirky. They may experiment with things like that fabric body cover of the Oskar, the use of wood and bamboo, and delightfully gnarly 3D printed recycled plastic. Some variants may have characteristics of off-road vehicles, anticipating the problem of deteriorating road infrastructures or being intended for farms. Already there is a growing problem with proprietary electronics in corporate farm equipment among the traditionally more self-reliant farm community — an opportunity for open source designs that could see these cheap, utilitarian, vehicles originate in the farm setting.
The car with a space frame chassis and modular electric drive would be a ‘lifetime car’ where every element can be potentially repaired, replaced, upgraded, customized, salvaged, refurbished, repurposed, and ultimately recycled. As long as the essential form of the vehicle remains functional, it can be maintained forever. That should be a very scary prospect for the old auto industry…
By the middle Solarpunk era many of the structural changes in the habitat may be in force and many roads and towns obsolesced, slowly returning to nature. There will be more use — and more kinds — of public transportation, less need to travel to meet one’s daily needs, and less compulsion for individual car ownership. Interest in self-driving robotic urban vehicles may return as a form of public transit as well as delivery but we may also see a new class of such vehicles as the basis of a variety of robots, larger than today’s typical robots but a little smaller than typical utility vehicles. Today we tend to think of self-driving cars as conventional cars we add this self-driving feature to. But they are, essentially, robots and in the future — after some experience with truly modular vehicles — we may come to think of them more as multipurpose robot platforms with passenger conveyance just one of many applications. And so we may see the ‘people’s car’ of the earlier era evolve into such a standard robot mobility platform with quick-swap plug-ins for a large assortment of roles from taxis and package transport, to emergency response, to self-mobile vending kiosks, to self-mobile hotel cabins, to garden/park maintenance, infrastructure repair, and architectural construction.
The late Solarpunk era would see most transportation disappear from the surface of the earth with the emergence of the new parametric urban landscapes. Such integrated public transit would offer more-or-less door-to-door access and independent car use would be mostly gone, mostly automated, and mostly relegated to internal/subterranean networks where they share space with taxis and many kinds of robots. With advanced excavation automation, anything that can be put underground would be for nature’s sake, much of the restored environment concealing vast subterranean complexes invisibly supporting it. Telepresence may come to compete with physical transportation as increasingly sophisticated robots for the purpose become available. Rare off-road travel may turn to legged robotic vehicles with increasing biomimicry and small electric drone-like aircraft designed to minimize impact on the restored wilderness. Robot-assisted construction would facilitate extensive and convenient walking/biking trails and the increasingly ubiquitous underground infrastructure, used to monitor and help restore/maintain that wilderness, may also provide easy visitor access to remote locations. As large and dense as the new urban environments of the future may be, most people would be within minutes of wilderness.
Rail Systems: As previously noted, we expect a general increase in public transportation as rail systems are the single-most efficient form of electric powered transportation. A most of this will eventually go underground. But much of this vital infrastructure of the past has been neglected across the latter half of the 20th century and in the early Solarpunk era there will be limited means to large scale infrastructure redevelopment. Europe and parts of Asia are in the helpful position of having neglected these far less than other parts of the world, which will greatly facilitate their transition to a more sustainable urban lifestyle. Many regions never had viable mass transit to begin with, their communities having developed in the automobile era. Thus, again, we can expect an era with a lot of interesting experimentation.
Legacy rail systems may become highly prized in some areas as they are less costly to restore and maintain than highways, even if their conventional large vehicles will be hard to support by localized industry. Thus we can anticipate the emergence of novel light rail vehicles based, again, on that space frame chassis construction that is more immediately accessible to grass-roots inventors and local industry.
An interesting source of inspiration for how legacy rail might be repurposed in the early Solarpunk era is the ad hoc railways of Batambang Cambodia known as the ‘bamboo train’. Left in poverty after the wars of the mid 20th century, long abandoned railway lines built during French colonization were ingeniously put to use by locals creating simple platform vehicles with bamboo and box steel frames powered by crude but modular engines — originally developed by a UN farming program. Though far from safe, these vehicles have proved a vital means of supporting the rural settlements along the rail line. In recent years this unusual transportation system has become a tourist attraction in itself. One can easily imagine a similar situation in the future where once abandoned legacy rail systems in towns and cities are repurposed through local ingenuity.
Often legacy rail lines are stripped of their rails and wooden ties leaving only a bare strip resisting plant regrowth. These are sometimes repurposed for other utilities which also create their own clear land vias criss-crossing the landscape. Even without the rails, these are useful long-distance transportation vias, sometimes converted into bicycle paths and walking trails by more thoughtful urban planners. A number of small scale light rail systems could be devised for these as well. Monorails in various forms suit this well. One that frequently intrigues this author are the banana monorail systems developed for agricultural use. These are based on suspended wires from which simple structures are hung on small bogeys and towed by an engine unit. Though limited in speed, they have very low construction cost and have sometimes been adapted to passenger travel. Their potential space applications are also intriguing as they prefabricated and could be built using modular self-standing rail supports. Roller coaster systems using supported beam tracks have also been repurposed as personal rapid transit systems with a low construction cost and safe use in proximity to houses and buildings. Cable cars are another technology with lower construction costs and easy retrofit into existing environments. They too have been explored as alternative public transit.
In the later Solarpunk eras we would expect restored community cooperation to facilitate larger shared infrastructure projects and more robust, higher speed, longer distance systems. Many earlier experimental concepts will become more refined, others go obsolete. We can also anticipate multimodal integration. Local automated taxis or parcel delivery vehicles supporting lower speed local transit could be designed to ride in or with the higher speed/longer distance systems for trips to neighboring communities. However, long duration travel would favor faster and more specialized vehicles, particularly to offer a higher degree of passenger comfort. Some concepts have suggested the design of long distance rail ‘coach’ vehicles like self-contained personal hotel cabins with options for in-transit goods delivery by parallel docking vehicles. With such mixed uses, we can anticipate that future rail systems may favor discrete self-propelled vehicles that can be designed for different roles, rather than the long trains of the past. Whether concepts akin to today’s much-touted but elaborate Hyperloop prove feasible is unclear, but certainly the performance of high speed rail systems is likely with systems that can use any part of a conformal tunnel inner surface to provide guide and propulsion.
By the late era we anticipate most surface transportation being either integrated into the interiors of urban landscape superstructures or put underground, aided by the economy of robotic and later nanotechnology based automated excavation. A truly global high-speed rail system may emerge to compensate for lost intercontinental transit, perhaps linking the continents through a hub around the now ice-free arctic circle. With the advent of nanotech-based production methods comes an option to distribute molecularly-packaged materials in mixed liquid suspension rather than packaging it in containers. Thus it’s possible much cargo transportation across the globe may be obsolesced by networks of fluid pipelines.
Boats and Ships: As previously noted, we expect a revival of ocean passenger travel as aircraft face such great challenges in eliminating their reliance on fossil fuel energy. But large ships face big challenges in adapting to renewable energy as well, since that industry likewise long neglected the environmental issues it was facing. It is most likely that large cargo ships may remain similar in design to those of the present while adapting to the use of hydrogen with the adoption of electric drive systems powered by turbogenerators or fuel cells. They may also see increased use of retrofit supplemental wind and solar power hardware with newer designs optimizing their use.
However, passenger vessels face significant changes as the storage of large volumes of cryogenic hydrogen fuel may be considered too hazardous for passenger travel. The role of passenger travel is also likely to change, with a shift away from vacation cruising to the earlier role of true transit as increasing numbers of people seek alternatives to air travel. Wind power will be favored, but traditional sailing technology leaves much to be desired. Thus this author anticipates the emergence of a new class of ‘packet sailing ships’ based on the combination of solar power and rigid wing-sail systems that eliminate the large amount of labor and skill traditional sail required and can achieve much larger sail sizes. These may first appear at modest scales, originating with luxury yachts intended for celebrities whose air travel has drawn increasingly public criticism of late, and so to facilitate a faster and more comfortable ride at these scales than was possible with ships of the past novel small-water-area hull designs are likely to be employed. Thus we imagine various solar-wing-sail catamarans and trimarans with submerged or blade-like pontoon structures. As this transportation increases in volume and moves to the mainstream public, larger and more utilitarian designs may emerge.
But much of this development may be delayed until the middle Solarpunk era as ships of large scale demand large capital investments and, if Global Warming impacts cause significant economic and political disruption, this kind of development may not be possible for small cities and communities to manage, particularly in the midst of crisis. Much like the revived rail infrastructures, this may have to wait for the new regional cooperative organizations that can muster the needed resources. There could be a phase of generally disrupted intercontinental transit, which may never return to traffic volumes of the past as the culture structures-in a reduced need for it.
However, we can anticipate that maker-activists will most certainly experiment with the smaller scales of these new kinds of marine vehicles even if they cannot manage to develop ones able to fully meet the demand of mainstream travel. We see hints of this in the current ‘fair trade’ shipping phenomenon where social entrepreneurs have restored — sometimes with the aid of crowdfunding — remaining sailing ships from the early 20th century to serve the exploited coastal communities of eastern South America and western Africa. Some plan the creation of new higher tech packet sailing vessels much as this author has described. And we may see in this early generation of new sailing vessels many of the characteristics seen in the early generation of independently developed electric cars, aesthetically distinguishing them from the similar but extravagant vessels devised by yacht manufacturers; a high reliance on modularity, utilitarian design, space frame construction, 3D printing, and unconventional materials.
By the late Solarpunk era robotic or self-construction with advanced materials may see much marine and air travel supplanted by high speed rail systems able to maintain themselves and span oceans with little difficulty.
Aircraft: The most difficult transportation systems to adapt to renewable energy are aircraft because of the criticality of power-to-mass ratios in their function. While many projects exist today to develop electric and alternative fuel aircraft, results may be poor for a long time to come. It’s just that difficult to convert renewable energy into a portable form with the density of energy common to fossil fuels, thus presenting severe trade-offs in payload fraction. Consequently, for a long time there will be attempts to provide aircraft with exceptions in this necessary transition. The carbon overhead for military aircraft will be ignored by politicians for as long as the public allows. There will be transitions to biofuels or synthetic fuels that may be deemed ‘carbon neutral’. There will be various gimmicks attempting to ‘offset’ their huge carbon overhead. But, eventually, air travel will have to adapt or die like everything else and, though they may never completely go obsolete, it seems quite likely that there will ultimately be a decline for long range conventional commercial aircraft use. This presents a big lifestyle change for a cosmopolitan middle-class that grew very accustomed to casual air travel across the latter-half of the 20th century.
But there is likely to be much experimentation leading to interesting alternatives and, much as with marine transport, revivals of old technology. One that already makes frequent appearances in Solarpunk themed art is the airship — almost as common as in Steampunk art! This is a likely eventuality for two important reasons. The first, obviously, is that airships can actually provide an option on intercontinental travel relying entirely on solar energy. The flexible photovoltaic, battery, and motor technology for this exists today — indeed, has for some time. Without having to spend energy on lift, a practical power-to-mass ratio is a little more accessible for renewable power. This is why airships preceded fixed wing aircraft even when relying on the crude performance of early internal combustion engines too heavy and inefficient to function with early winged aircraft. And while they cannot match the airspeeds of fixed wing aircraft — which is often pointed to as a reason for their obsolescence — they can more than double the speed of powered marine vessels, which a lot of former intercontinental air transit is fated to soon be relegated to.
But perhaps the more important reason airships may return is that they have far lower operational economies of scale than any other aircraft with intercontinental capability. Not only is the conventional aircraft faced with the problems of a necessary obsolescence of fossil fuel, it is faced with the collapse of a world economy keyed to it, with the new economics that may emerge in the wake of that unable to support the operational economies of scale large airliners and their airports demand. In the early Solarpunk era, making and maintaining things like giant airliners may become an outright impossibility. Many airports will be compelled to close. New kinds of aircraft will have to come down in economy of scale to exist at all in a context of more independent communities. It takes the market created by a regional population of many millions to justify the existence of an international airport. Airships may be just modest enough in their economy of scale for cities to create and manage them independently.
But airships do have their issues. Helium is often suggested to be in short supply and may not be sustainable long-term, this because it’s extraction is a by-product of natural gas extraction. Hydrogen is the obvious alternative but long feared because of its association with historic airship disasters of the past. In truth, the use of hydrogen lift gas, which is not at the sort of density of liquid hydrogen, proved generally safe over the long history of airships. The rate of airship accidents overall, for all causes, was lower than for fixed wing aircraft which we generally regard as far safer than driving — and this despite quite crude materials engineering and fabrication technology compared to the present. What really spelled the historic demise of the airship was not a few dramatic accidents, which conventional aircraft have far surpassed in scale and frequency, but rather its characterization as a terror weapon followed by its becoming impractical for military use once fixed wing aircraft became practical. In general, few kinds of aircraft technology have persisted without a complementary military role — that’s the mentality of the industry. But the cultural perception of airships may remain difficult to overcome without a long period of more recent experience. That may fate it to experimental use and reluctant investment for a long time.
With the advent of nanotechnology and the super-strong materials it may afford, there is a possibility of realizing the dream of ‘vacuum lift’ based on ultralight rigid composite structures. But that is most likely a prospect of the late Solarpunk era, by which time a global high speed rail system may become the conventional means of global travel.
Another possible revival is the ekranoplane or ‘wing-in-ground effect’ vehicle which has long persisted in rogue entrepreneurial and experimental development. Though limited to skimming across the sea at low altitude (thus requiring ship-like avoidance of severe weather) and requiring calm water surfaces for take-off, ekranoplanes can be designed to extremely large scales and the efficiency of surface-effect flight affords superior fuel efficiencies while allowing comparable airspeeds to airliners. If operating aircraft on liquid hydrogen fuel ever proves commercially viable, it may do so with the ekranoplane. But, again, the complexity and hazard of handling cryogenic liquid hydrogen may preclude such aircraft from ever being used for mainstream passenger travel. Like the airship, it’s apparent impracticality as a weapon has also doomed it for mainstream aircraft industry acceptance. Still, necessity will likely continue to compel experimentation with this.
One new area in aircraft technology likely to be explored in the future is hybrid sailplane aircraft based on combining the characteristics of high altitude gliders with solar-hybrid electric power employing integral photovoltaic arrays, regenerative electric motors, supercapacitor power storage, backed up by methanol fueled microturbines. Such aircraft would use brief periods of powered flight to achieve high altitudes allowing gliding travel for long distances. With the additional aid of advanced real-time weather sensing and the use of AI to optimize flight profiles to intercept thermal updrafts, these might be capable of even intercontinental travel with some compromise in travel times and some necessary uncertainty in flight performance and range. Probably limited in maximum vehicle scale, it could prove to be the future of small scale civil aviation.
Computers and Communications: Visibly, computer and communications hardware will likely be subject to the same design trends obsolescing plastics and encouraging repairability and recyclability seen with domestic goods. The exception may be with mobile devices which, being on a trend toward optimum thinness (likely reaching its limits somewhere under 5mm) and completely solid-state composition, are less likely to tolerate the physical ‘bulking up’ other goods would see in the near-term. This points out the problem that, in general, digital systems will resist the trend to independent and more sustainable production likely with everything else because they demand the most sophisticated methods of fabrication in use today. In the early Solarpunk era this may result in shortages of the more advanced forms of this hardware, such as smartphones, large displays and microprocessors, as companies die-out and communities struggle somewhat to take-up the slack with alternative production and open source designs. Without lower-tech open-source alternatives, communications may suffer some backsliding in some places.
Some interesting alternative designs may result from this situation. Long neglected in contemporary computing, audio computing environments may be explored to provide an alternative to reliance on scarcer displays. Displays are already the most expensive and power-hungry components of mobile devices and, with the advent of speech recognition and synthesis, voice-controlled smartphones and computers could offer much of their functionality with the advantage of much reduced size and power consumption. A trade-off, certainly, but the primary applications of all computers remain variations on word processing. If you can manage that in sound, you’ve got most of what you need. Similarly, gesture sensing techniques, subvocal speech detection, and chord keypads offer alternatives to the complex hardware of conventional keypads. It’s an interesting situation where advancing machine intelligence is enabling physically simpler kinds of user interfacing. Thus one might see voice assistant devices picking up more of the functionality of the general purpose personal computer, thin pen-like or wearable screenless smartphones, and iPod-like mobile computers you operate with earphones and sign language. Perhaps there may be some return to CRT-like devices as well, but they too were very power-hungry and very dependent on large scale highly-specialized industry and so alternatives based on other methods of raster-scanning images might emerge, such as laser rear-projection displays.
However, the biggest changes in computing across the Solarpunk future may not be visible. Rather, it would be an adoption of a ‘resilience doctrine’ in systems design much akin to the global resilience movement in communities, compelled by the brittleness of our corporate-built digital infrastructure made apparent through the experience of increasingly common weather disasters, government digital suppression of activism, and corporate abuse through hegemonies created by centralized, siloed, systems architectures. The early Solarpunk era may be a period where Internet connectivity cannot be taken for granted and so we will see expanded use of ‘meshnet’ and ‘outernet’ technologies, peer-to-peer systems architectures, and asynchronous communications systems able to cope with intermittent connectivity while protecting user’s rights to privacy and control of their own digital assets. Already we are seeing the emergence of ‘disaster proof’ alternative operating systems intended to be less dependent on Internet connectivity and more hardware-agnostic. This may not see much visible reflection in product designs, but may produce significant changes in patterns of use.
In the late Solarpunk era we may see the most visible differences in computing and communications hardware design as much of it becomes more embedded in the infrastructure of the built habitat and clinical nanotechnology affords the convenient use of devices embedded in the human body. Futurists have long predicted that computers would ‘disappear’ into the infrastructure with a general user reliance on lean mobile devices. Though design trends still point to this, the possibility seems to have been delayed by corporate compulsion toward capture and control of the public information commons and the securing of market share through the manipulation of consumer behavior. The walls and fences may finally be broken down in this more utopian period of the Solarpunk future and thus an era of true Ubiquitous Computing may be realized.
Though the notion often seems dystopian to us today (familiar, as we are, with the compulsive perversion of media and communications by the corporate culture), the convenience of doing away with any physical contraptions for personal communications and computing may be attractive for many leading to increased use of bodily-implanted PAD (personal access device) systems affording tacit conversational computing, AR user interfacing, and deeply immersive VR. This may enable new nomadic lifestyles where people can wander freely, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs, their most important possessions digital in nature and hosted on an indestructible distributed cloud storage environment with roots in the blockchain technology of cryptocurrencies. This author imagines such capability encouraging further use of human augmentation to allow comfortable, casual, nomadic living in even the harshest wilderness environments — perhaps even on the open sea. The ultimate in lean lifestyles!
Robots: Lacking in the cross-industry platforms and architectures that facilitated the emergence of an ‘industrial ecology’ in computers and electronics in the late 20th century, robotics has long remained behind the curve of other technical advancement and a viable ‘general purpose’ robot platform has remained elusive. Most important impacts have been in the transition to robotic industry led by the introduction of digital fabrication and the demand for increasing automation in materials handling and package delivery.
The early Solarpunk era may see little change in this situation and the imminent economic disruptions will not be helpful to robotics development. Communities will be much more concerned about the transition to renewables — and in some cases survival — than when robots will finally turn up in their homes. However, they will increasingly enter communities through the side-door of local production and the automation of labor intensive aspects of recycling and agriculture.
Though most of this will involve specialized systems largely out of sight, there is one application area compelled by environmental concerns that may see early expanded use of multipurpose designs; telepresence robots as an alternative to transportation and means to remote work in harsh environments. Already a number of companies have developed telepresence robots for use primarily by corporate executives and physicians. (though in some experiments they have been used as restaurant wait staff and, sadly, we have already seen attempts at ‘telexploitation’ of foriegn labor for teleoperation of delivery robots, circumventing political obstacles to cheap labor migration) Acceptance has been poor as these machines remain limited in mobility and capability, unsuited to outdoor environments, small in stature, and offer no real improvements over other forms of teleconferencing. (with emerging AR teleconferencing likely to further widen the gap) Where this may see improvement is with construction and maintenance applications. (teleoperation of excavators has already been experimented with) Long suppressed space telerobotics development may also prove crucial to this development, compelled by a likely decline in manned spaceflight.
Personal robots as a hobby and art form will most certainly persist, even though the past decade’s strategy of defining them as ‘companion robots’ proved to be something of a failure due to the poor pace of advance in mechatronics and thus their limited cost-effective capability for expression. Design trends in other electronics will be seen here, with the shift away from plastics. Companies continue to experiment with personal robots, but will likely be superceded in the application by voice assistants, enhanced by conversational ability and procedural graphics animation, offering a far less expensive means to expressive personalized companion characters.
By the mid Solarpunk era the increased capability of AI may see expanding capability for robots in the diverse ‘everyday’ environment, compensating for still limited mechatronics. More general purpose shop robots may appear as a means to integrate the sets of more specialized machine tools common to the local workshop and facilitate the robotic assembly of larger diverse artifacts. We can anticipate an increased use of architectural 3D printing as larger community building projects become possible.
Self-driving vehicles will finally become commonplace for passenger use — even as car use declines generally — and realize a new class of robots based on modular ‘roadway mobility’ platforms for which passenger conveyance is just one of their many uses depending on which application modules are attached.
The systematic restoration of wilderness environments will also be greatly assisted by robotics and we may see vast uninhabited territories left to the management of AI at remote ‘telebases’ hosting fleets of robots designed to wander the wilds and perform forestry work and science monitoring with modest human supervision.
By the late Solarpunk era we may finally overcome the limitations of mechatronics with the appearance of a diversity of self-contained free-moving robots more akin to synthetic animals in design. A robust nanotechnology will greatly blur the distinction between machine and organism. There’s no particular practical point to visually mimicking living animals, but many aspects of their forms may prove useful, particularly for robots serving in the maintenance of the restored natural environment. Legged robots — though not particularly energy efficient — have an advantage over wheels in the wilderness, both in mobility and reduction of physical impact on the environment. Lifelike androids will finally become a practical possibility and, though there has never been much of a truly practical point to them, may see extensive use as ‘avatars’ for people routinely using telepresence instead of travel — though AR/VR will remain strong competition in this application. And should a transhuman lifestyle option become a possibility, very life-like augmentations and avatars will become an important matter of personal aesthetics and fashion, now unhinged from the constraints of natural biology and resulting in an accelerating physical diversification of society.
Plants and Farming: Plants are to Solarpunk what gears are to Steampunk. Iconic and characteristic to the aesthetic, but potentially superficial. Of necessity, the Solarpunk world would be a more verdant one. Plants are a critical tool to combat Global Warming, clean-up the environment, provide more sustainable materials, and improve the liveability of the urban environment. There would be a greater cultural veneration of the craft of gardening, perhaps aided by the development of UBI and the greater personal freedom it affords. And we can expect a new veneration of them in future design as well, with revivals of Art Nouveau, Arabesque, Organic, and Taoist aesthetics.
But plants can be used stupidly and superficially too. Certainly, Solarpunk habitats are likely to feature much use of parks, green roofs, living walls, and gardening containers. There will be many novel approaches to integrating greenery with architecture. Towns and cities would feature extensive use of urban farming and many homes will employ novel indoor farming/gardening systems. But how that architecture is built, what it’s made of, and how it functions in relation to the environment is much more characteristic of the culture than mere decoration. Plants are living things and have an overhead in care. How much time and work can the society/community actively put into that? What industrial design and technological aids, like robots, life-support infrastructure, and genetic engineering, might they apply to that? What kinds of plants make the most sense in functional and decorative roles throughout the habitat? How do seasons impact the look and function of the habitat?
Like so many of the designs of the early Solarpunk era, new urban farming and gardening would rely heavily on adaptive reuse and upcycling of various cast-offs that would be especially characteristic of Urban Nomad/Outquisition intervention. Most of this would employ various forms of container gardening/farming, sub-irrigation containers, ‘living wall’ gardening based on capillary fabric/felt covers, more elaborate hydroponics based on scratch-built systems repurposing random industrial hardware and recyclable plastics. Various kinds of easily retrofit and makeshift greenhouse/solarium structures would be added to rooftops, balconies, and terraces. More intensive urban farming would rely on the adaptive reuse of whole buildings and structures, adapted using things like Kee-Klamp, industrial shelving, scaffolding with solar powered artificial light or more efficient fiber-optic lighting with rooftop heliostats. Abandoned/underused warehouses and industrial buildings, office buildings, abandoned subway tunnels and stations, parking structures, aircraft hangars, barges, shipping containers, semi-trailers, and many others could be used for such applications.
Modern office buildings are one of the few buildings adaptive by design, as they were intended for different companies to lease variable amounts of space and adapt them to their needs. They also often feature hanging wall facade systems which are mechanically attached and easily stripped and replaced as needed. Thus these buildings may become a special focus of adaptive intervention as they can most easily be stripped down to a skeleton and retrofit for alternative use. Each floor in these buildings could be adapted to different roles; residence, recreation, workshop, farming, etc. Thus we may see these buildings converted into ‘micro-arcologies’ or ‘proto-arcologies’ that host all the features of a small eco-village in one building or across a former corporate campus.
Plants would also often be used in this era as a tool of protest and activism, with ‘insurgent’ farming and gardening and the devising of various ‘seed bombs’ deployed by hand, machine, or even dropped by drones. Various insects and other organisms may also be employed this way.
By the middle era there would be much more new architecture dedicated to the role of urban farming and reconfigured urban planning would emerge with designs specifically incorporating municipal gardening and farming features. New structural systems and materials (some in development today) intended to host parasitic plant life on their surface would come into use. In this era we begin to see the creation of very large dedicated urban farming structures, new parks, large enclosed wintergardens, and an infrastructure that specifically includes systems for plant life monitoring and support with the application of horticultural robotics.
As noted before, a key feature of the later Solarpunk era would be so-called ‘urban landscape superstructures’ which would effectively turn the entire urban environment into a system of park and farm topped terraces — much like the mountain farming terraces of Asia and South America — with habitation in the edges of those terraces and transportation largely internalized. Indeed, housing and other building uses would be almost entirely hidden, visible mostly by their particular choice of facades or the use of flowing weather-sheltering PV-glass canopies. Based on technologies like architectural 3D printing and eventually ‘self-growing’ architecture employing nanotechnology, these superstructures would be built and managed by distributed AI systems that learn — through extensive ‘sensor webs’ like a kind of nervous system — and evolve the urban landscape to achieve optimal passive energy performance and a balance between human living needs and environmental sustainability. The urban plant life would also be considered an ‘inhabitant’ for these systems to care for. Thus we arrive at the ultimate integration of plant life into the urban environment, turning the urban habitat into a kind of self-aware symbiote humans themselves live symbiotically with.
