Enter The Solarpunks
A Brighter and Greener Future
Once there were parking lots
Now it’s a peaceful oasis
This was a Pizza Hut
Now it’s all covered with daisies
- Nothing But Flowers by The Talking Heads
Crumbling buildings. Dry dead wastelands. Dark dirty crowded cities. We’ve been inundated with these dystopian images in fiction. Blade Runner, Silo, Fallout, 12 Monkeys, Snow Crash, Children of Men, Akira, Terminator, Judge Dredd, Robocop, Altered Carbon. The list goes on and on.
“It’s easier for us to [say] we just need to start over. We just need to reset, have an apocalypse. And *then*, we can .. fix everything. Just throw the whole Earth out, start over on Mars or something.” — Keisha Howard
But people are finally tired of depressing post-apocalyptic or dystopian depictions of the future. This can be evidenced by how fresh the game Mirror’s Edge looks even now, and it came out in 2008:
Just like the bright cityscapes of Mirror’s edge felt fresh and interesting when the majority of popular games seemed to depict cities in dark, dirty, dystopian ways, solarpunk is a response to the proliferation of depressing depictions of the future.
Solarpunk is an artistic and intellectual counter-culture movement with an optimistic vision of a future where technology, humans, and nature coexist harmoniously. The movement includes aspects of New Urbanism, sustainability, independence, and decentralization. It imagines a world built to be beautiful, comfortable, and engaging. Where communities are resilient and self-sufficient. Where people are happy and empowered.
And nature is everywhere. In the countryside and in the cities. Some depictions look like cyberpunk Kowloon-like cities but bright and filled with plants. Others look garden cities with trees in the skyscrapers and airships in the sky. Yet others look like country living with advanced sustainable technology only a short hop from downtown.
High-rise buildings, green pastoral nature, gardens, and farms coexist alongside canal waterways that inspire exploration, inviting people to relax and stay a while. Modern trams or flying cars take people around a city filled with multi-level public spaces containing shops and cafes that make for energetic human scenes full of the buzz of life. The verdant plant life not only looks nice but also improves air and water quality and softens noise pollution. The serene urban vistas relax and energize the human spirit. City green spaces are attractive places that foster positive social behavior and community comradery. Urban gardens provide food for the body as well as food for the soul.
While technology is a key piece of solarpunk, it also embraces low-tech ways of life as well like gardening, permaculture, regenerative design, artisanal craftsmanship, and sharing economies like library economies. Integrating the urban with the natural is intrinsic to solarpunk, like the following semi-solarpunk images depict.
Solarpunk art has aspects of Bohemian style, Art Nouveau, Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics, Art Deco, and modern futuristic architecture. Elements are often clearly pulled from Japanese gardens, African traditions, countryside pastoral scenes, and Studio Ghibli movies like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
A number of works of fiction are pointed to as examples of the solarpunk aesthetic. Examples include written stories like in the series known as The Monk and the Robot or in collections like Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation and Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World, movies like Zootopia, WALL-E, and Treasure Planet, and even computer games like Terra Nil and Solarpunk. Many inspirational works were created long before the term solarpunk was coined, like Ursula K. Le Guin’s books The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home or Norman Spinrad’s Songs from the Stars. The Dispossessed, for example, explores the life of a physicist living in a resource-scarce socialist-anarchic world where life is pastoral and the primary modes of transportation are dirigibles and trains.
An unlikely inspiration for solarpunk happened as a Chobani commercial, called Dear Alice (video below). It shows Alice, who lives on a farm just outside a large green solarpunk city, flagged with floating lighter-than-air wind generators and punctuated by solar collecting roofs.
The vision is a world where economic progress, urbanization, and environmental sustainability are symbiotic instead of at odds. A world filled with beautiful, functional, and environmentally friendly devices, structures, and landscapes.
But why cities tho? Why not a technological nature-filled suburb or rural area? Well, cities are where people are for a reason. We benefit from being around others. There are more people to meet, more to trade with, more to exchange ideas with. Smaller niche interests can thrive when enough people are around. People come together in cities to weave a tapestry of creativity and innovation that transcends the individuals that make it up.
And perhaps surprisingly, cities are already more sustainable than the countryside. Cities use less energy and create less pollution per capita than the countryside because people don’t need to travel as far and live in more compact residences that can take advantage of economies of scale. People still often think of cities as expensive, crowded places blighted by trash and poverty. Solarpunk challenges that assumption, envisioning pleasant clean harmonious cities. And perhaps there are ways of solving the problem of city poverty.
Some talk about solarpunk as a genre of “speculative fiction”, a poorly-named term that does not mean fiction that speculates about the future but instead means fiction that intentionally ignores realism. Solarpunk fiction is not speculative fiction because it doesn’t ignore realism and in fact while the genre doesn’t necessarily reject fanciful imaginings, realism is a critical piece of solarpunk that sets it apart from other aesthetics.
Like steampunk it has aspects of traditionalism. The term solarpunk was indeed coined in a blog post written in 2008 called From Steampunk to Solarpunk. But solarpunk’s vision of the future is generally rooted more rooted in realistic technology, and looks to the past primarily to incorporate pleasing aspects of culture, architecture, and nature. What sets solarpunk apart is that it’s a depiction of an achievable and desirable future.
While cyberpunk is a warning about where we might be going in the future, and steampunk, dieselpunk, and atompunk are merely fun artistic aesthetics, solarpunk is intended to be a vision of the future we would want to and be able to move towards. Solarpunk is more than a story, it’s a goal.
Where’s the “punk” in Solarpunk?
Solarpunk’s optimistic world of cities vibrant with trees and flowers supported by technology in harmony with nature and humanity sound pretty nice. But what’s so punk about that?
The punk aspect of solarpunk is evident in its yearning for radical change in how we build our cities and structure our lives. Its a rejection of the status quo that aims to change our trajectory to a brighter, more natural, and happier future. Its also a rejection of postmodern doomerism, apathy, and hopelessness.
While it calls for a radical change in design, it can be done in an incremental, protopian fashion. In contrast to utopian fantasies that imagine a perfect and unblemished future, a protopia is a merely better future that retains and acknowledges the imperfectness of the present that we are forced to carry forward with us into the future.
For example, solarpunk encourages the creative reuse of existing infrastructure like in the following conceptual transformation of these corporate office blocks. This way of thinking reimagines current sterile car-centric developments as potential places for future solarpunk greenery. The former offices are now connected by elevated walkways and cycle paths and generate their own renewable electricity with car parking repurposed as gardens.
Solarpunk also embraces the open-source movement, decentralization, and a do-it-yourself mentality contrary to the consumerist throw-away culture that pervades today’s culture. The narrative is that dignity, prosperity, and a high quality of life for all can be achieved by enabling individuals and communities to take control of their own energy production, food production, built environment, and other essential and social needs.
Solarpunk is hope as a form of rebellion.
Solarpunk technology
The bright green technology imagined in our solarpunk future focuses on the sustainable, environmentally friendly, and natural.
Vertical farms, lab grown meat, laser weeders, robot pickers, and mushroom leather are all ways people are currently rethinking the creation of traditional plant and animal products.
Mass timber, expandable modular buildings, 3D printed buildings, and ancient roman self-healing concrete are poised to revolutionize construction.
High-altitude wind energy generation, tidal and wave power, small modular nuclear reactors, high voltage DC, solid state batteries, and hydrogen powered arc furnaces could bring abundant clean energy everywhere, even for applications that require scorching hot furnaces like steel and concrete production.
Personal Rapid Transit, transport airships, and space hooks could revolutionize the way we travel, ship things, and even get to space in ways that are far cleaner and cheaper.
Wolf Hilbertz had a plan for creating an artificial island on the Saya del Malha bank out of biorock, which uses electricity to anneal sea minerals into a concrete-like substance onto a metal structure similar to how coral builds its hard structures. Hilbertz called this kind of construction “cybertecture”, since it automates the building process by using both artificial and biological mechanisms. He envisioned an incredible oceanic city that would definitely fit under the solarpunk umbrella.
Solarpunk today
Solarpunk pieces have already been implemented in various places around the world, mostly at smaller scales. We have yet to see a whole solarpunk town or city, but as futuristic as it seems, the solarpunk revolution has already begun.
While difficult, experimentation is possible. Where there is a will there’s a way. Case in point is the Brooklyn Microgrid, where locally connected electric generation and storage transmits and transacts electricity locally. The Beacon Food Forest in Seattle combines permaculture, regenerative agriculture, urban farming, environmental education, and agroforestry into a unique urban farm. The Toronto Islands are a coveted car-free islands just south of the mainland part of Toronto. Highline Park is a great example of reusing old infrastructure to make more natural and human-friendly spaces. An example of an excellent bike-only path in Athens is displayed above, but The Netherlands is known to be the best country to bike, having an extensive country-wide network of high quality bike paths. Cuitiba, Brazil, and Copenhagen are also well known to be some of the best cities for commuting by bike and transit.
The Bosco Verticale in Milan is an exceptional example of a “vertical forest” with remarkable greenery that puts the surrounding buildings to shame.
There are also smaller communities and experimental developments like the town of Aroscanti, Arizona build as an arcology. Findhorn ecovillage combines sustainable design, organic farming, and renewable energy. The Danish island of Samsø generates more electricity than it consumes using only wind-generation and generates 70% of its heating from straw, wood, and solar thermal. Auroville, India is another experimental town that has solarpunk-esque goals of human unity and harmony with nature.
Rooftop farming in retrospect seems like a no brainer. I’ve often thought that rooftops are a tragically underutilized space where you could put a patio, pool, rooftop bar, market, or garden. Rooftop gardens and farms double as insulation for the building and reduce the urban heat island effect, for what would otherwise be wasted space.
Cosmovitral Botanical Gardens in Mexico is an example of reusing existing urban structures to create a thing of unique beauty. Its stained glass windows and garden lend it good solarpunk appeal.
Chongqing in China has some of the most stunning solarpunk city settings on this list, with plant-filled walkways between upper levels of buildings and towering urban infrastructure next to rural looking houses. China also has the Turenscape Qunli Stormwater Park that transformed a flood-prone area into a green space and park that doubles as management for flood waters. And the Chinese proposal for a “Forest City” in Liuzhou is an ambitious design of urban vertical forests.
Rolf Disch’s Heliotrope building has solar power, a geothermal heat exchanger, and other sustainable features. Three have been built in various places in Germany and Bavaria.
The Wuppertal Schwebebahn in Germany may be the most solarpunk transportation system in existence and its been around since 1902. Riding over roads and rivers at 37 mph, the Schwebebahn is a train suspended from below the tracks over 13 kilometer line that carries 82,000 people per day.
The ULTra personal rapid transit system (PRT) at Heathrow Airport in London is a close second. And another PRT system is in operation around Suncheon Bay in China.
Strandbeasts also get an honorable mention since they’re usually wind powered technical and artistic marvals:
Solarpunk tomorrow
A bright green future is nice to imagine and nice to strive for. But isn’t it a bit utopian? While I think the protopian strategy of making practical local progress towards a better future is often the right one, it is useful to have a goal in mind. And a solarpunk’s technological realism lends it credibility as a motivating north star, even if the images are sometimes utopian.
Much modern development proposals use the marketing trick of depicting something pristine and new, without blemishes or reminders of what was there previously (or currently). The perfection of computer models sell a polished vision of a clean (and all too often sterile) environment.
But our cities aren’t going to be perfect, and in reality the greener more human future we build will inevitably exist alongside the old current patterns. I would like to see more solarpunk add a bit of grittiness to them. Not the over-the-top dinginess of cyberpunk, but more of the worn look of the original star wars trilogy where you can see the scars of age on the old rebel ships. I want to see solarpunk cities with trees breaking through the cracks in old concrete and repurposed old buildings that aren’t quite perfect for their current use alongside the newly constructed architecture. Imposing glass and steel towers haphazardly retrofitted with external planters. Old reused products alongside shiny new technology. Guerrilla gardens planted around ugly hatches or electrical boxes. A view of the future where we can still see remnants of the past. Imagine cyberpunk, but brighter with plants growing over the once-gritty dystopia.
We should expect and hope to see, not glittering solarpunk utopias, but pockets of progress sprung from the imagination of hopeful minds striving to escape the grasping tendrils of past decay and deadlock. Most of us can’t start from scratch but must refurbish and renovate what we have. “Tomorrow’s frontier is the wreckage of the unsustainable past.”
Moar solarpunk
If you’re inspired to delve more into solarpunk, some good places to look are:
- https://solarpunk-aesthetic.tumblr.com/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/
- The Solarpunk Summit, a mashup festival of solarpunk art, technology, and entrepreneurs.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/guerillagardening/
- https://vincent.callebaut.org/category/projects/
- Hard Reset videos about “rebuilding the world from scratch”
- Videos by Andrewism, like his video on Solarpunk city planning
And while more traditionalist than solarpunk, Wrath of Gnon has good reads as well that touch on things applicable to solarpunk.
My next post will talk about solarpunk governance. Until then, remember solarpunk is not just yet another -punk aesthetic. Its a movement.
