Solarpunk I suspect is more important that we know, because I think rich subcultures are the seeds of massive growth.
It's just some funny drawings and internet fanfic twigging our sense of novelty on HN now, but when you see it as representing the desires and longings of young people for wilderness, and also know people who left cities in the last 10y, they were the thin edge of the wedge, where post-pandemic, younger people are leaving cities to get on the real estate ladder, with remote work and amazon-style supply chains, and they are family-inclined. It incorporates passive and renewable energy techs, argritech, biotech, cannabis-driven value added production, organic and small scale food production, brewing and distilling, civic minded prepping, local vs. global, etc.
I'm interested in when solarpunk blips on the radar because to me it is an aesthetic that represents new growth.
I'm working w/ like-minded people from reddit/HN to build intentional communities (commune, essentially).
Start w/ small community, build a glamping sustainable living space...
Tent living but not complete roughing it, communal shower, restrooms, kitchen, gardens, laundry, and worker spaces...then little living areas will be setup by families with gates so children don't run off, or get lost.
Ideally in warmer climes as tents/yurts I think would be hard to keep warm in winter than cool in summer...
The idea being that the commune could pool resources and grow/expand and work towards fixing earth by making it fashionable to live in such communities...
This comment moved me more than anything I've read on HN in years.
The neo-utopian evolution of "dropping off the grid" into "mesh networked sustainable resilient community" is a vision and ethos I can get behind. There has been a lot of loose talk in my circles about Foundation-like ideas for surviving the coming dark years, which I think of as "cultural VPN"... this is a very compelling way to articulate some of those and inspire with it.
Going to think about this in the mountains for a few weeks...
I'm all for dropping off the grid in a sustainable way.
I'm not sure that tree-shaped houses covered in glass are a good way to achieve that. In the future we're facing most of these buildings look like they'll be solar ovens in the summer and painfully cold in the winter.
First of all, where is the 'punk' aspect? There needs to be an aspect of dystopia to use that word.
This sort of organic-growth-everywhere aesthetic is not new, it has been in utopian urban visions for the last 20 or 30 years. Personally I think it started with SimCity 2000 arcologies, but I am probably wrong.
> There needs to be an aspect of dystopia to use that word.
Hard disagree. I think "punk" has always been about an ethos that individuals are empowered to make change from the bottom up. The punk aesthetic stands between dystopian and utopian. The former says those in power have made everything horrible and there's nothing you can do about it. The latter says those in power make everything amazing so there's nothing you need to do. Punk says those in power made everything horrible but you can make things amazing.
> There needs to be an aspect of dystopia to use that word
I disagree, "punk" is not about dystopia, it's about rebelling against the status-quo. Solarpunk, at its core, is about rejecting our current way of life. That's where the punk comes from.
But that rebellion is from a stimulus of some kind. It's a subculture in rebellion from disenfranchisement, war, fascism, or what-have-you. There is anger and lots of other negative emotions.
This vision is too bland and perfect to be 'punk'. 'Avant garde' is a better term, since that is used to describe things 'rebelling' against the current aesthetic. 'Solavant Garde' doesn't have the same ring to it though.
The "what-have-you" in this case is the stronghold that capitalism and tragedy-of-the-commons has on urban society and our way of life. Of course, capitalism could produce such neigborhoods, at least on a small scale, simply because affluent folks will pay for it. But the ethos of solarpunk is to create these environments by taking matters into our own hands. Perhaps a decent analogy from the punk world is magazines versus fanzines.
I don't know, that argument isn't super compelling. It kind of reminds me of that one marketer at SXSW a while back that wanted the whole conference hall to have "idea sex" as some weird way of framing brainstorming or innovating.
Like if yall want to have your utopic fantasies then cool, but if you want to use the punk name there needs to be some raw grit
Besides... light has no meaning without dark to contrast it
Your idea of what is punk sounds like the mass-marketing by malcolm mclaren. Consider a band like the Buzzcocks, all around friendly looking blokes but they pressed up their own 7" singles, that is the true spirit of punk.
This is the first time I hear the term "solarpunk". So this seems to encompass visions of an optimistic future when exploitation of nature, pollution, climate change etc. And strikingly, looking up the definition made me feel an almost juvenile excitement about an idea again which I haven't experienced in a long time. That made me realize that most contemporary visions of the near(er) future seem so bleak and dreadful in comparison. But, if we paint our future as this thoroughly unattractive place, then what motivation remains to make progress?
I always consider myself a techno-optimist for this reason and wish there were more folks who look at the possibilities of tech that way. I’m very happy to see this new solarpunk idea that has aspects of techno-optimism taking ‘root’
I have the same reaction to VR, what is the optimistic non-dystopian view? I am generally curious because near complete human absorption in technology is what I see and it's hard for me to picture that in a positive light.
For me, VR has been a means to stay in touch with distant friends and family. It's not too different from traditional computer games + voice chat, but the extra level of immersion does increase the sense of connection. The lack of distraction in VR from e.g. smartphones, tabbed windows, or nearby things in the physical world all helps foster an increased level of engagement with other people/players in VR.
VR has given me a new sense of imagination and creativity, similar to what some might experience with 3D printing.
Being able to perceive a digital space in three dimensions is a significantly different human-computer interface than a 2D screen. It feels like so much more is possible once you break into the extra dimension.
From the outside, VR definitely has a dystopian look to it. But from the inside, it can give a sense of "creativity unlocked" once you start thinking about how to build immersive experiences. This liberating mindset, in some ways, is the opposite of what it appears to be on the outside.
I guess for me the dystopian slant gets a bit steeper in the context of global warming and consumerism and the sort of head in the sand mentality that VR seems to project.
Looks to me like leprechaun-land. How cynical I have become.
I agree with the sentiment though, just wonder if it would benefit from someone positing a middle-ground that would show a transitional approach. Perhaps some of the larger buildings (I'm thinking of the one with the fountain spilling down it) represent that.
Visionaries often focus on the end goals, not the path. This might be the easy way to excite people, I guess. Talking about a path there sounds too much like actually having to put in effort.
I think I also have become quite cynical. Being confronted with these ideas made me aware of that in a startling way.
because of the moderate climate, california has a lot of flat roofs. i've long wondered why apartment builders here didn't just plop (and planners allowed) a single family home right on top with enough dirt to grow a lawn and a few plants (with parking put underground). it's the best of both worlds--apartments and single family homes (albeit above ground level) can co-exist everywhere. that'd be one such middle ground.
I removed a comment of mine saying Schuiten was a famous belgian comics drawer ("dessinateur de bande dessinee") and his style was kinda unique (and I love that style)... I removed it because I was thinking of Francois Schuiten, not Luc Schuiten.
After some research it turns out apparently these two are brothers!
Most of the things in this article are deliberately avoided in cities these days. Sufficient seating, public transport, and walkable streets make things easier for poor/homeless/other untouchables, and making their lives worse is prioritized above making the space better.
If we can fix that, we'd be well on our way to realizing better living spaces like the artist (among many others, myself included) dreams of.
I think why solarpunk seems to come into vogue is that it is often displaying so much more livable and humane cities than we have right now. The same goes for its ornamental design that contrasts so much with the clinically sterile look of products and designs nowadays - especially the ones that are coming out of the Silicon Valley at the moment (UIs with grey-on-white designs and no embellishments, the look of voice assistent devices, speakers, watches, SpaceX' flight suits/launch towers, Cybertruck,...).
PS: The spelling is actually "Zeitgeist" if you ever need to search for that (even though I would assume that search engines would deal with the typos just fine).
Connecting solarpunk to art nouveau is pretty insightful. I think any new movement like this pulls from some historical reference to frame the idea.
Having visited Barcelona and seeing Gaudi's influence on the architecture there, I understand how a few notable buildings could actually influence the peoples' mindsets.
There has been a ton of advancement in ecological solutions and biomimicry, but tying those changes to design that mirrors nature in an art nouveau way could translate the underlying complexity to something our lizard brains will understand at a glance - it is a powerful abstraction that ties together our innate desire for a safe corner of nature and our social desire for something new and cool.
I find solarpunk really interesting. On one hand, it's the most "fresh" aesthetic of futurism we've seen since cyberpunk. On the other hand, most of this architecture isn't environmentally sustainable at all -- the massive amounts of water and energy it takes to keep trees alive on a rooftop is antithetical to an "eco city".
The artists appear to be inspired by fad concept renderings for sky-garden towers that were never built:
Replace trees with vines and place them mostly on the south side of the buildings and it may be viable. The trick would be engineering a renewable substrate for the vines to grow on.
Solarpunk is a continuation and rediscovery of the Techno hippie movement that began in the Bay Area in the late 70's and early 80's. Apple Computer was part of it (while IBM was not.) This era is described fairly accurately in Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" (a reference to the Richard Brautigan poem) and John Markoff's excellent "What The Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" Highly recommend them, even if Curtis does go a little off the deep end at times.
“What the Dormouse Said” is very enlightening, I had never heard of psychedelics’ influence on the professionals of the day, I think it’s about time I read it again.
Ken Kesey was responsible for starting a lot of it after he took LSD and part of CIA experiments at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital and started doing "acid tests" with music by what became the Grateful Dead. There's are some good documentaries on YouTube about this.
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
It would be interesting to see a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis of the energy savings from solar heating indoors vs the impact of mining, transporting, and converting the sand into glass (taking into account the environmental impact of deplete certain areas of too much sand).
There's currently a huge push online to make Solarpunk a thing, as a kind of an optimistic counterpart to Cyberpunk, but I'm skeptical about whether it can attain the same level of cultural traction as the other big *punks.
Cyberpunk and steampunk both fetishize aesthetics from the past - 80's corporate Japan and the Victorian Britain, respectively, - there's a sort of nostalgic longing that keeps them culturally relevant. Solarpunk tries to fetishize sustainability in a similar way, but I'm not sure if there's enough foundation there to build onto.
I guess the first step then is to build a wider foundation for sustainability! I feel like building closed loop systems well is extremely rewarding(think aquaponics) but it is also hard to scale...and in a world where everything seemingly gets pushed to be scaled, adoption is more in a hobby form.
Cyberpunk is an explicitly dystopian genre setting so I'm not sure "nostalgic longing" is how I would characterize it so much as searching for a kind of catharsis or fictionalized escape from the things about it people feel parallel their own lives.
Neither would I. If Neuromancer wrote about 80's Japan corporate culture it is because it was written in the 80's and tried to extrapolate that to the 21st Century.
This article’s main purpose seems to be to fill the gap you observe:
“ Perhaps you might have also picked up on one of the more discreet but omnipresent characteristics of Schuiten’s work (and thus the Solarpunk aesthetic), which is his undeniable appreciation for Art Nouveau.”
>There's currently a huge push online to make Solarpunk a thing
Its proponents seem to be flogging the Green New Deal, or related policies, but is this spontaneous, done out of conviction, or is it more coordinated?
I would argue that cyberpunk is only nostalgic because not much has been done to modernize it or push the genre forward. It's simply nostalgic because it's aged... similar mid-century depictions of the future.
Given Wikipedia's definition Solarpunk fits squarely into the punk ethos:
The punk ethos is primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-fascism, anti-corporatism, a do-it-yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action and not "selling out".
Comes up on which media? Very often mainstream media like hollywood or video game industry love to coopt the aesthetic of a movement and water down its message.
People often complain that the idea of cyberpunk is being turned from a protest against a dystopian future to a bland scifi style with fog and neon lights.
Instead, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is an excellent example of solarpunk.
He seems to be from the same generation as Luc Schuiten from the article (both born in 44)
The main difference would be that Dean forcused more on the art, while Schuiten focused more on the architecture part, but both seem pretty close indeed, and I would not be surprised if they knew each other
Some of the structures in Singapore(Supertree Grove) feel like a step towards this! Although I don't think they are fully there, I would be absolutely thrilled to see more architecture and design like that.
The building the Supertree Grove sits on was designed by Moshe Safdie. A lot of his works feature similar green and open spaces (jewel changi airport, eling park)
Not open world but Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald had a city which could be accesed from an underwate route in order to emerge in a solarpunk styled "town.
In many contexts, solarpunk is related to anarcho-communism and gift-economies. It can be difficult to see how a solarpunk-like society could sustainably grow directly out of our current economic system.
Create communities for singles/families... master-planned cities if you will..or more loosely communes...
Homes are maybe some sort of tent/yurt on a pedestal with a bed.
The community has a campus building with restrooms, showers, kitchen, cubicles (for work from home), farm-land for planting crops, solar panels, etc..
The area would have playground equipment, exercise equipment, outdoor sports/games, a makerspace/library with tools, toys, big toys (4-wheelers, etc), that people can 'check out' and use.
I feel a lot of the problems w/ society is everyone has to own a drill, when one drill per street that anyone can access probably makes more sense, maybe 2 or 3 max... but still if we could just curb our need to "own" things.
A shared "library" of everything from toys for kids to video games for consoles, to books, to tools and 3d printers, etc...would be pretty awesome.
I think of it more in a utilitarian manner than aesthetically lots of glass/trees on skyscrapers that nobody who wants to do something in this space could ever afford to build, so it definitely remains a pipe-dream...
Fashionable glamping communities could pop up super fast and be sustainable and fun.
I think the seed for it lives in the open/free/libre source dream. If we can make it easy enough to produce what we need with open source tools then we don't need global capitalism.
In many regards we're far from that dream but having a concretisation of what the end result could look like (and/or depictions of how to get there) in the shape of Solarpunk should help.
I agree. It would be wonderful to build a world where everyone is provided a sustainable baseline of existence and opportunity with open source and free culture stuff.
The images in the article can be divided in two groups:
* ideas from new urbanism to greenify the urban core with its dense streets, to make them a nicer place, which is a good idea.
* the old modernist ideas of detached houses, now in "ecological" form, which is a total utopia, exactly as it was stated in the Athens Charter.
They also seem to look like Frank Lloyd-Wright's words that "sometime people will live in an entirely rural landscape with houses 100 meters apart from each other and greenery and trees between them" (he hated cities quite a lot) (here's one of his houses, sometimes posted with a motivator text below: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=frank+lloyd+wright+waterfall+house...)
The first part of these, is generally a good thing, but has to be done moderately. I see some images have curves and round forms, which is not a necessity, but rather an attempt to make a nicely looking bird view, which causes various inconveniences -- like park paths that are never walked by, or cut corners.
Curved grass strips are especially a problem: if people walk over them, they have to be protected by fences, or by elevating them -- in this case it 1) will require artificial watering, 2) will produce side pockets, unusable for walking (but hopefully used for benches).
Andres Duany said a lot about this in his lectures, and I can only sum it up as greenery in the city is needed, but has to be done cautiously and reassessed critically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO3CaJtSfjg
The other half of the images are mostly reshaped detached houses or modernist apartment blocks. Same Duany criticizes the detached house concept a lot -- it costs much, it makes people have tons of stuff, drive cars, live in isolated way, unlike the urban dwellers (I followed these ideas when buying apartment, and never regret -- I felt a lot better near a small city center, than before that living on the fringe.)
The modernist concept of apartment blocks and large green spaces between them appeared as an answer to extremely dense cities of 19th century, which were hardly livable without our modern tech (tap water, sewer, central heating, electric light and active ventilation). The most promiment responses were Garden City Movement (basically, make towns not more than 60K ppl, put them at some distance with forests and fields between, and connect with railways), and Athens Charter (build cities of large apartment blocks standing apart from each other, no closed perimeter like in traditional cities, have greenery betwee, and make city blocks large to let cars go without intersections).
The latter was widely implemented in the Socialist block from East Germany to Vladivostok, and failed in many ways.
Jan Gehl saw this development in socio-democratic Denmark and criticized for 1) places devoid of any street retail and other local business, because streets are too wide, which made people commute or drive a car to city center to get services, and 2) de-socialization. In a large apartment block it's hard to meet and get along with neighbors for many purely physical and psychological reasons.
I read their manifesto that appeared earlier, and that's fine.
The problem is with these pictures: to me they seem simply a fashionable landscape design with lots of trees, or detached houses with strange shapes. The former is just arts, and I don't see it reflecting any new thinking. The latter is new attempt at century-old failed ideas.
What would I offer instead? High-speed commute rail in Germany, Netherlands and maybe Scandinavia, made Garden City ideas actually happen. You can work in a large city, but live an a town in 30 km (20 mi), commute in 40 minutes, but near your home you have both, all the great things of a city (cafes, services, meeting friends in the main street) and of countryside (10 minutes to the city edge and hike or bike). Or you can have a business that is entirely in a small town but has easy access to large markets in big cities -- just 1 hour in train.
Bugs are not really problem if they have amble places to live and gather nutrition and so on.
We have a wild garden, and people often ask if there are not bugs everywhere, and tell us they like grass to keep the bugs away. Well quite contrary - our findings are, that in our wild garden, bugs are around the plants, in the plants, but they are not are problem in the spaces we have created for ourself at all. I think people have misunderstood why insect swarm.
I'd actually have to imagine the bug count wouldn't be that much worse than a typical city, replete with flies and mosquitoes from the abundance of humans and human food waste to feed on.
If anything the bug problem might be slightly improved since the ecology would be friendlier to things that eat bugs, such as frogs, lizards, and bats.
Of course, then you've got the problem of frogs and lizards getting into your house. And, ultimately, things that like to eat frogs and lizards, like snakes.
If you're swallowing bugs while cycling that means you're probably mouth breathing. It's pretty challenging to convert to strict nasal breathing, but it's worth it and a side benefit is bugs aren't a big deal if you're wearing something on your eyes.
In case people thought mouthbreather is just an insult, it can cause serious medical problems and even change the structure of your face. There are videos about it on the internet, with dramatic before and after photos (in both directions).
I cycle at the higher end of my aerobic threshold to get around and my bike is single speed so I have to go anaerobic on hills. Do you cycle at a more leisurely pace or do you maintain constant nose breathing even during strenuous exercise? If the latter, I would probably caution you of the health effects of that too.
I'm definitely curious if you have references to negative health effects of nasal breathing. I've seen quite a bit on the positives, even with strenuous exercise. I maintain nasal breathing when riding fast, during kettlebell workouts, and sandbag workouts.
Or it may just mean he is cycling fast. It is only when cycling st a relatively comfortable pace that you can get enough oxygen through only your nose.
It's just some funny drawings and internet fanfic twigging our sense of novelty on HN now, but when you see it as representing the desires and longings of young people for wilderness, and also know people who left cities in the last 10y, they were the thin edge of the wedge, where post-pandemic, younger people are leaving cities to get on the real estate ladder, with remote work and amazon-style supply chains, and they are family-inclined. It incorporates passive and renewable energy techs, argritech, biotech, cannabis-driven value added production, organic and small scale food production, brewing and distilling, civic minded prepping, local vs. global, etc.
I'm interested in when solarpunk blips on the radar because to me it is an aesthetic that represents new growth.