Our Solarpunk Cities

The way @talesfromtheev@sunbeam.city and @CommandoJugendstil@sunbeam.city see it, #solarpunk is an organic blend of traditional practices and high-tech put in service of social and environmental justice. Being city folks ourselves, we have mostly focused our imagination on the urban environment.

The solarpunk cities we imagine are centers of collective action, governance and sharing of resources rather than of individualistic consumption. We want to show how they can be made sustainable through improvement of existing good practices, restoration of beneficial old ones and introduction of new tech.

How to build a solarpunk city is a problem of design, so even if solarpunk is a highly aesthetic movement, according to the principles of good design, form and function should be interdependent. The functions of a solarpunk city as we see it should be:

• Exploiting the synergy of having people with different backgrounds and skills living together, fostering communication and the circulation of ideas through social spaces, cultural initiatives and an open, inclusive attitude to community life.
• Building communities to pool resources and stimulate cooperation: libraries of various kinds, circular economy, sharing economy. Since cities concentrate people, they are perfect sites to implement cooperativistic modes of production.
• Implementing granular governance (at the level of block, neighbourhood, municipium, city, etc…) and shared, inclusive decision-making.
• Making use of interstitial spaces and “non-places” to create social, cultural and environmental value, and to generate resources (power, food). Some mechanisms to achieve this could include solar posters, solar windows, urban farms on rooftops, yards, basements and tunnels, inbuilt renewables on housing and commercial spaces. Old commercial centres could be turned into community centres or incubators for small artisan workshops and local producers. Self-reliance would be implemented in food and energy production.
• Eliminating food deserts and making quality food accessible through self- and community production (see above) and fair agreements with rural areas in its vicinity. Local markets, farmer markets and bulk shops for dry goods or liquids (complete with bring your own bottle/refill schemes/bottle deposit schemes) would allow the citizens to acquire local goods without unnecessary processing or packaging.
• Rethinking the production and distribution of resources. Cities should encourage the establishment of local producers (baker, pasta maker, microbrewery) and of communal production (e.g. communities establishing a rota among neighbours to make bread/soap/beer/etc… in batches for the whole block). The latter is necessarily predicated on existence of communal facilities (e.g. ovens for bread etc…) and on a reduction of working hours, allowing leisure time for collateral activities to workers, or of a guaranteed universal basic income.
• Providing an efficient way of dealing with waste products, operating as much as possible within the model of the circular economy, for example through composting schemes, reuse of bakery waste to make beer, or through the production on demand of common objects through 3D printing using locally-processed recycled materials.
• Establishing public transport as central and accessible to everybody, regardless of physical abilities or medical conditions. We imagine cargo trams/buses for the transport of goods, car-sharing of electric cars and electric bikes, the diffusion of cargo bikes and the retrofitting of old infrastructure with renewable power sources as ways of implementing this function without the recourse to private ownership of cars. This would result also in a reduction in pollution and noise levels, with significant improvements to health outcomes.
• Providing adequate, energetically efficient homes to every citizen. This can be achieved by environmental retrofitting of old buildings. We think that cities should contain sprawl and limit land consumption by building up density (town blocks with proper services and shops, communal areas and public transport connections, not formless suburbia).
• Improving green areas in terms of extension and biodiversity. The reduced reliance on cars would allow the depaving unnecessarily paved areas, such as parking lots. River banks and urban parks and other green areas would be rewilded using native species, making sure to accommodate urban wildlife and pollinators. Trees would be used to mitigate heat island effect and improve the quality of urban soils and can be selected among productive species (walnuts, chestnuts, beeches and fruit trees) to provide an additional food source.
• Providing effective healthcare to the citizens, taking into account that many disabilities are such only because society does not accommodate certain needs. With the progress in technology, telemedicine would be used more and more, especially to monitor people with chronic conditions that might need urgent medical intervention at short notice. Alongside this, a network of medical centres spread through the neighbourhoods would provide basic and community care, while hospitals well connected with the public transport network, would provide emergency and specialist care. Solarpunk medicine should also be about prevention and vaccination, and would implement a reduction in length or abolition of patents in biomedicine, so that life-saving drugs are available at decent prices. The biotechnological revolution has made the production of therapeutic molecules affordable and feasible even by small-scale biohackers. We can imagine therefore that the production of many medicines will be done on a local scale, commensurate with the necessities of the community. Paired with a revival of herbal/traditional medicine, in the cases where this is effective, with a wide availability of mental healthcare and with a capillary diffusion of health education and income support to healthy lifestyles, these measures would result in a healthier, happier citizenship.

Solarpunk cities would be a product of the communities that live in them, rather than of top-down master plans. They would retain and adapt their historical buildings, rather than tearing everything down and building it anew. The form of the solarpunk city would follow local traditions, uses and aesthetic and the input of the stakeholder community. Solarpunk Nairobi would by necessity be different from Solarpunk Oslo, and this is a good thing. We say no to a top-down “universal” solarpunk style, because it’s an imperialist oxymoron.

Education is key to building a true solarpunk community, to political and social engagement and to making informed choices. Education should build a social consciousness, and give each citizen the ability to engage in continuous education throughout their life and to adapt to technological changes in the workplace. Solarpunk education should be free, public and inclusive, not only of different perspectives though decolonisation and intersectionality, but also of different learning styles and cognitive preferences, and should aim to develop the talents of each individual, valuing academic skills and creative or craft talents equally. Higher learning (colleges and universities) should likewise be free, or affordable and costed on the basis of family income.

Since state-funded research has been the basis of the major technological transformations from the end of WWII until today, in our Solarpunk future, academic research would be adequately funded in order to develop the technologies and protocols which would help us move away from the dependence on fossil fuels and reduce our environmental footprint. Traditional knowledge and skills, however, would be equally important. Our Solarpunk future would value both.

Finally, our Solarpunk future would run on a different economic model from the one currently in vogue. Solarpunk economics would not be concerned so much with growth as with balancing production with a series of social and environmental constraints and with redistributing wealth to create social justice. A major inspiration for us is the Doughnut Economics theory developed by Dr Kate Raworth.

In summary, the Solarpunk cities we imagine would be democratic, sustainable and resilient. The good thing is that most of what we proposed can be done tomorrow. The bad thing is that they haven't been done yet. As solarpunk creators, our aim is to make these possibilities into a common aspiration, so that they can become real.