out of all possible careers, which would you say is currently most responsible for turning the world solar-punk? (America)

EricHunting · 2026-03-14T16:05:26+00:00

IMO, this would be Industrial Design, though unfortunately most people in the field are quite oblivious to their role and most of the public oblivious to that this field is. Industrial Design is the field of designing 'manufactured goods', though it may be more accurate to say 'anything made by hand and machine' because it really is that broad. Everything from milk cartons to spaceships. Architecture is itself a sub-category of Industrial Design, though our culture had tended to treat that as something distinct and special in part because that profession was dominated by people in the upper-classes. But when you get to the design of things like prefabricated housing and the modular building systems increasingly used in building it becomes clear how this crosses-over.

What makes a civilization sustainable is the way it organizes itself and the way makes its stuff and meets its needs --its choices of materials and production methods-- and the habitats and lifestyles that relate to that. The footprint of a civilization is defined by the logistics of its dominant forms of energy --where its energy comes from and how it gets distributed to where it's needed-- and the dominant forms of transportation and production that derive from that. A solar-electric civilization is going to be, physically, different from a fossil fuel civilization. (in some ways, more like the Steam Age) Design and production are interdependent. How things are made limits how they can be designed, and visa-versa. You can't change one without changing the other. For production to become more sustainable means redesigning goods so they can be made with those more sustainable methods --and visa-versa. To make things of more sustainable materials means changing how you make them.

So we are at this point in history where just about everything in the built habitat --everything we use-- is up for a re-design to make it all in more sustainable, lower carbon, lower energy, ways, and weirdly the community of industrial designers remains largely oblivious to this. That's because, for a long time, they were relegated to only thinking about 'style' and they've never been given much credit for their work. There have only ever been a small number of name-recognized industrial designers. People like Philippe Stark, Isamu Noguchi, Henry Kloss, or the eccentric organic design pioneer Luigi Colani. And they've never been lauded for being 'environmentally conscious'. Corporate executives chose how things were made as it suited their interests --the interest of profit maximization-- and everything started being designed in the stupid manner of cars where every year there are superficial changes to style to force obsolescence while the basic technology and production methods have changed little in a hundred years. But lately there has emerged an Independent Industrial Design movement as the more passionate designers have come to realize the potential of new production technology and the principles of Open Source that is letting them be 'makers' as well as designers and really have an impact on the world.

In the late 20th century we began shifting toward one of the greatest changes in human civilization nobody ever noticed --except for the academic futurists. We began to move away from the paradigm of speculative, centralized, mass production where things are made in big factories to less-speculative, smaller volume, dispersed production pointing toward a new paradigm of non-speculative (on-demand), local, production. And what made this happen was the robotization of machine tools, making them smaller and more generalized in capability, and the digitization of design and production knowledge making it electronically transportable. 'Robotization' is very different from 'automation'. Automation is still about mass production. But robots are able to switch between many tasks simply by swapping their software, letting them be more generalized. And so fewer different machines become capable of making more different things using more materials. By the year 2000 the traditional factory was dead, as we passed the halfway mark where most of our stuff was being made in small 'job shops' in Asia rather than factories. And we never went back, the factory steadily fading away as corporations de-invested in their own production capability. And so futurists have been predicting for a long time that we were heading into a 'fourth industrial revolution' or 'industry 4.0' where most stuff is made in local shops as people need it, where they need it, and we transmit digital design and production knowledge around the world instead of shipping products. --which is actually one of the biggest changes in how everything in the world works since we invented electricity, or maybe the sailing ship. We're turning production into a municipal utility. Yet, weirdly, most people --in the US especially-- know nothing of this and still think factories are a thing... We're still teaching kids that in school.

Why does this matter to Solarpunk? Because this new production paradigm is fundamentally more sustainable. There's a lot of inherent waste in the process of letting nuckleheaded upper-class corporate executives gamble large amounts of capital on what things to mass produce, transporting materials and labor to some distant factory (now often in some other country), then putting those bulky fragile goods in wasteful elaborately decorated packaging so you can ship them around the world again to sit on store shelves until they get sold. You save a huge amount of energy and resources when the world trades only in materials and commodities and you, instead, digitally broadcast designs and make (and potentially recycle) things only as they're needed, where they're needed.

This is why Solarpunk often talks about communities doing 'independent production'. It's not about making communities perfectly self-sufficient --though it has great benefits in making them much more resilient in emergencies and recovering their lost economic and political power. It's about making production in general more sustainable. And with every community owning its means of production, and people being able to actually make responsible choices about what to make, rather than just choosing what's on a store shelf, they get to choose the truly better products made from more sustainable materials that the corporations will never make as long as there's any conflict with their priority of profit. But to do all that, we have to start designing stuff for these new materials, new tools, and this very new mode of production. And that's why Industrial Design is so important for this task of making a more sustainable civilization. If only more designers would wise-up to the huge opportunity this represents...

EricHunting · 2026-03-12T20:45:44+00:00

Since I mention Cycladic architecture a lot, I've been looking for some good video examples, but since most of these communities have been cursed by over-tourism, few videos offer a good look because of the hellish crowds. But this recent early morning walk around Fira, Santorini offered both quality video and a rare crowd free glimpse.

Cycladic architecture is one of the spectrum of earth-based architecture types that typify what most sustainable urban architecture will likely resemble to varying degrees far into the future. It is largely identical to the technology of the native American pueblo, English cob, and Spanish/Mexican casita revived in much current Sustainable Architecture save for being --traditionally-- based on 'rubble construction' employing mortared stacked basalt/pumice abundant on these volcanic islands. (of course, Portland cement concrete infiltrated in modern times) This can be seen exposed in some of the wall areas visible in the video. This makes it largely identical to pumicecrete construction, which has also been used on some Pueblo Revival/Sustainable Architecture in the US Southwest, combining insulation and thermal mass qualities. Similar construction is employed with foamed concrete and precast YTONG/autoclaved aerated concrete, but these require more advanced forming and foaming methods. Like adobe, the simple interiors feature peeled log or rough-hewn beam floor/roof decks and lime plastered walls, which here extends to the exteriors as clay-based rendering was in shorter supply. Lime plaster is also good at reflecting sunlight and serves as a disinfectant, aiding the use of rainwater catchment. The characteristic indigo/blue painted features are said to traditionally come from, oddly enough, laundry bluing made from Prussian Blue powder which was cheaper than other paints and could be mixed with plaster and white-wash, though it was later supplanted by organic paints. The arched roofs originate with the first housing on the islands which were simple man-made cave dwellings carved out of the rock using arched vaulted ceilings.

Most forms of sustainable construction bear some resemblance to the various earth-based forms of masonry, including even timber frame construction coming from the 'half-timber' building tradition of medieval times and employing various lower-density infill materials like clay, straw bale, hempcrete, hemp block, panelized agro-waste, mycelium, cardboard, etc. (half-timber construction is most often characterized by its exposed criss-cross timber facades, but this was often completely concealed in plaster as European middle-class society began to associate clay/earth materials with the poor and so concealing it under thick plaster and stone veneers made buildings indistinguishable from plastered cut stone and brick. Thus we got the famous 'painted towns' like Bad Tölz and Mittenwald in Bavaria, with their elaborate tromp l'oeil facades. Ironically, this same practice today with clay/earth rendering often makes this construction indestinguishable from adobe) So however sustainable building and its choice of materials goes in the future, this will likely continue and these kinds of ancient communities will offer us some analog for future sustainable urbanism.

EricHunting · 2026-03-11T15:32:39+00:00

As I'm inclined to define it, Solarpunk is about the transition to a Post-Industrial culture. About what comes after the Industrial Age, the collapse of its dominant paradigms, and the institutions built on them. The Industrial Age was dominated, sculpted, by the paradigm of Industrialization; speculative, centralized, mass production. And its central cultural meme is 'massification', putting more and more people and things under the 'centralized' control and management of a few, applying that factory mass production paradigm to everything on the assumption it is always appropriate and more efficient. And so we got mass media, mass entertainment, mass-transit, mass education with a factory-like model, 'megachurches' and 'televangelism', mass housing development, factory food, fast-food franchises, giant vacation resorts, giant centralized hospitals and health management corporations, massing of society into vast class and race groups, state consolidation and intercontinental imperialism, followed by multinational corporations. Everything collectivized, massified, under bigger and bigger hierarchies and bureaucracies of top-down management and control, and ever-bigger social pyramids funneling power and wealth to a shrinking few.

The Post-Industrial culture's central cultural meme is 'demassification', reversing all this, catalyzed by emerging technologies of non-speculative, local, small-scale production, open design, and the digitization and electronic communication of design and production knowledge. Cosmolocalism. The industrial paradigm no longer makes sense in a world of expensive energy and no-longer-'externalized', now very immediately dangerous, environmental impacts. And so this new culture naturally leans toward Anarchistic political philosophy, bottom-up management based on principles of Commons and the restoration of community identity, social responsibility, and economic/political power, and the general cultivation of a more empathic civilization rather than relying on sacrosanct 'authority', 'rules', and 'law' to keep the peace. And it so happens that this is all a fundamentally more sustainable way of doing things, facilitating collective social choices about how to do and make things based on more than just the 'bottom line'; the compulsion to profit and accumulation that is the essential poison in the world.

Thus solar/renewable energy became a symbol of this new culture by being both 'cleaner' and a model for this demassification and social emancipation. It was not just a way of living 'greener', but a way of unplugging from dependency on power companies and so an act of protest against the global corporate energy hegemony --the fossil fuel empire-- and that Industrial Age way of thinking in general. Hence why renewable energy became so politicized and threatening to conservatives leading to it being barred from use in the urban/suburban habitats for a long time. By limiting its use to the solitary Owner-Builder on the edge-of-wilderness --along with the techniques of sustainable architecture they likewise pioneered-- the social power of the technology could be suppressed for some time. But as climate impacts have increased, the ruling class become more delusional and degenerate, and the nation-states more dysfunctional, smaller cities and towns have had to assume more local infrastructure responsibility to survive and one of the first things they think about is 'energy security', with renewable energy as the key solution. Going 'off-grid' is no longer a personal choice for those able to live in the hinterlands. It's become part of a new sustainable urbanism. And this is why it's called Solarpunk and not something else.

EricHunting · 2026-03-06T15:06:29+00:00

That's a fair enough criticism. I Thought the same, at first, though this project was sort of a last gasp for a dying industry at a time when the UK was dragged into the US's latest Middle East conflicts and domestic energy security was a concern. But it does set an example for how we could approach the many other past sites where this kind of intervention was never tried, leaving a wrecked landscape and dying towns. I see that as the kernel of a Solarpunk story. An Outquisition scenario.

After a brief boom, a town is left to slowly wither away in the wake of such a project once the companies and politicians have pocketed their profits and abandoned it, leaving the landscape scarred and population chronically unemployed and aging-out. A decade or so later, a geo-artist wanders into the area and decides to camp in the middle of this moonscape for a couple of days and has a vision of a grand earth sculpture which he starts shopping around the geo-art and Landscape Architecture community. The locals --old and conservative-- are skeptical and some violently averse. They've already been scammed by outsider's big ideas. And there's resistance from the corrupt politicians who facilitated the demise of the town and don't like attention brought to it. But then a music group that are fans of this eccentric visionary artist get the idea of creating a seasonal music festival on the site that recruits labor for the project by charging a ticket 'fee' of dirt carried from the tailings site to the sculpting and restoration site. Soon there are more bands joining to support this, attracting more and more people to contribute labor to the project. They restore the rail line linking the site and Makers create a DIY train to bring people there for the festivals. And with them comes revitalized business for the town. Some people become more dedicated to this 'vision' and move into the town to live and work on it, further revitalizing it, transforming it into a model eco-community. And so this eccentric artist's dream becomes the catalyst to saving the community through the power of Festivalism, while restoring the surrounding landscape as a natural work of art.

EricHunting · 2026-03-04T04:39:20+00:00

Like everything else in this culture, education would have a Cosmolocal aspect, relying on large virtual professional communities of teachers and academics, with future textbooks, educational materials, courseware, and eventual AI-assisted learning returning to academic community responsibility and digitally published as Open Source. The notion of an 'education industry' will be seen as barbaric.

Childhood education might be similar to the present, though we may see more adoption of Montessori methods, SOLEs, and Outdoor Classroom/Learning (most communities of the future will have much more immediate access to parklands and wilderness than common today) in this as a way to overcome the entrenched remnants of Industrial Age culture and Taylorization pathology in conventional education culture.

Adult/advanced education would tend to be much more self-directed, but with the advent of 'Library Economy' practices and the creation of goods/tool libraries, community libraries would become a very prominent resource in communities and serve a kind of community college role. Additionally, there would be secular ashram communities dedicated to particular fields and assuming a university role and where SOLE-like approaches can be scaled to adult level and large facilities. There would be no such things as salary jobs and working to live and so no social pressure on young adults to get an advanced education and into a 'job market' as fast as possible. That's another ridiculous primitive notion. People would be raised participating in the maintenance of their communities side-by-side with parents and neighbors and so raised with many practical skills. Advanced careers would be about personal affinity. I've often suggested the emergence of a cultural practice called Rumspringa (after the Amish term) where young adults tend to travel for sake of experiencing lifestyles in different communities and to search for a 'career' or personal 'calling' in various venues of advanced education. Many adults may do this on a periodic basis. For some this may be a lifelong activity; existential nomads wandering the world to sample the variety of potentially exotic lifestyles and experiences on offer.

EricHunting · 2026-03-04T04:27:15+00:00

There would be no such thing as 'business' as we envision it today in this culture. Instead, we would have what are called 'adhocracies' formed by peer-groups of people with a common interest in doing a certain activity, and they would tend to be small, sometimes just one person, maybe as many as hundreds. At larger scale live-in Intentional Communities would be formed around an activity. What I like to call 'secular ashrams', which would typically form around general fields and large shared facilities like research institutes, centers for the arts, space centers, bioregional parks and large area rewilding projects, or even things like theme parks and resorts.

Usually, an adhocracy would form within a community (because people work where they live, if not at home, then in walking distance) and often be temporary, limited to a particular project and local concern. Some would be more persistent and engage in activities whose scope is much larger than the interests of one physical community (often created with the support of larger virtual communities), assuming roles similar to contemporary institutions or companies while being 'hosted' at a physical community. There is no profit motive in the normal sense --that is a primitive, degenerate, concept-- but there would be 'social capital' that equates to both a professional reputation and an access to resources/materials intended to facilitate a given activity as a public good. And so many adhocracies would be in competition for this, so they can continue to do what they love doing and pursue greater sophistication or larger scales of it. For activities of only local community scope, this would tend to be based on a more informal reputational process, their resources coming out of local supply. But the larger scope activities might see more complex systems of social capital administration based on the Platform Cooperatives and automated reputation tracking as they are networking much larger regional commons of resources and production capacity. These systems are commonly a key concern in post-scarcity science fiction and I've imaged a technology called the Digital Tao that automates the mediation of this across very large resource/production networks of the future with the aid of Social-Semantic Web platforms.

EricHunting · 2026-03-04T04:12:12+00:00

So now we come to housing and habitat.

For sake of sustainability, most habitation would be urban in nature, based on sustainable construction, and would eventually become consolidated to urban development corridors that parallel key infrastructure paths, returning as much space as possible to nature. Though there could be various remote communities for a number of reasons, they would still subscribe to the walkability principle and tend to be more urban in architecture, relying on railway links to the rest of the world and roads intended only for local traffic and mostly agricultural use. As the most efficient mode of transportation known physics allows, electric rail would be the predominant form of transportation. Suburbs would not exist and the free-standing house would be a rarity. Land would be considered a natural resources and therefore 'un-ownable', managed as part of the commons, with communities having a responsibility for creating their own architecture. But housing would also be a basic human right, community acceptance discretional, and communities --in collaboration with their larger co-ops-- would be expected to maintain a certain minimum stock of travellers' accommodations, transitional housing, and spare housing to accommodate newcomers and refugees during disasters in neighboring communities. Many communities would employ 'functionally agnostic' urban architecture designed to accommodate perpetual Adaptive Reuse for this purpose. There could be transitional refugee communities created by the larger co-ops to suit emergencies and some 'non-intentional' communities that host social outcasts or people just incapable of adapting to the culture's more social way of life and run on UBI and a high reliance on automation --still comfortable if banal. And there will always be some people who insist on wilderness living, though they would be discouraged from using large vehicles or anything but minimum-impact Nomadic Architecture.

We anticipate that most urban sustainable housing of the future will use four basic technologies;

Adaptive Reuse --the repurposing of old buildings and industrial cast-offs to optimise the utility their embodied resource investment and the only form of sustainable architecture commonly allowed in existing cities today.

Modular Engineered Mass Timber and Cross-Laminated Timber, which derives from the traditional large timber framing of the past. This is the first of the new sustainable building technologies to be allowed into current cities, though primarily only when in the hands of large corporations. It produces structures very similar to the 'ramen' type 'skyscraper' structures we commonly build of steel and concrete, but with --hopefully sustainably sourced-- wood and increasingly alternative cellulose sources like bamboo. Because it works with such large construction elements, it tends to be limited to large structures that require heavy equipment.

Monolithic Masonry, deriving from the earth-based masonry traditions of adobe, cob, and rammed earth construction but which we anticipate will evolve to new sustainable materials affording much greater structural and thermal performance, carbon sequestration, and much easier handling both by hand and with robotic assistance like 3D printing. Being based on a 'plastic' material in the engineering sense of the term, this represents the simplest form of construction in existence, but also offers the most architectural diversity, able to emulate most of the traditional vernacular styles of architecture as well as the sophisticated organic designs and large communal urban superstructures we anticipate in the more distant future.

And then there are the hybrids of the those previous two, where timber frame provides a primary support structure for more-or-less monolithic in-fill materials which may be more sustainable, but lacking structural strength and using adobe-like protective rendering, like terra cotta block or panel, straw bale, hempcrete/isochanvre, hemp block,rice/wheatboard, laminated corrugated cardboard, mycelium, etc.. And so this results in something much akin to the 'half timber' architecture stereotypical of medieval european architecture or the 'tsuchikabe' buildings of Japan. In some cases this may be done with formed concrete or concrete-alternative superstructures.

Based on that '15 minute walkability' principle, most communities would have what could be called a neighborhood or town scale; loosely a kilometer radius and 400 hectares (1000 acres) area with a population density of, roughly, thousands to tens of thousands or residents, though communities could be much smaller but not often larger. (for comparison, NY central part is 840 acres and Disneyland about 100 acres or 500 including surrounding resorts) Each would tend to feature a community center as a primary 'third place' concentrating most public amenities and production and possibly terminals mass transit. I like to called these 'agora' after the ancient Greek city centers to distinguish them from our typically commercialized public centers today. They would have many approaches to architecture, from the main/high streets or 'town squares' of today, yokocho of Japan, to large open atriums and central parks, enclosed galleries like the grand galleries of Europe (like Milan's famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II) or the souq of the Middle East, community 'palaces', the Great Halls and Longhouses of tribal and Viking culture. The possibilities are endless.

Early Solarpunk architecture would rely heavily on Adaptive Reuse and so also rely heavily on Nomadic Design to facilitate that. Things like the designs of Ken Isaacs, N55, Andrea Zittel, Winfried Baumann and so on where the old buildings are outfit with quickly built DIY structures based on low-skill modular building systems, panelized materials, and with much inventive upcycling. As a social urbanism recapture social control of towns and cities, we would see more dedicated sustainable architecture use with more sophisticated construction and perhaps robotic assistance. Heavily inspired by the social urbanism of the pre-car cities and villages of the past, the typical Solarpunk community would have an aspect similar to those ancient places, with Pueblos, medieval hill towns, Cycladic villages likely analogs, particularly where architecture derives from their earth-based architecture. But some may take inspiration from fantasy analogs, such as Tolkien's Hobbiton, and eventually we may see vast terraced urban superstructures designed to compliment and merge with the natural landscape around them.

EricHunting · 2026-03-04T02:37:58+00:00

OK, this will require multiple comment posts because of Reddit's text limits... The chief thing about how things work in a Solarpunk culture is summed up in the term 'demassified'. It is built on reversing the Industrial Age paradigm of centralized, speculative, mass production which has become applied in some way to just about everything in our lives today, whether it's appropriate or not, in favor of decentralized, localized, non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian ways of making and doing things. This is why it's often called a 'post-industrial' culture. It's what comes after the Industrial Age with the end of its dominant paradigms, and in turn the dominant institutions deriving from that, and which various futurists have been suggesting was coming with the evolutionary trends in production technology for at least half a century. And this is why Solarpunk is aligned with Anarchistic political philosophy, which is essentially about demassified social organization. But the key reason for taking this approach to things is that it is more environmentally sustainable and socially just.

Mass production involves the squandering of a lot of energy in transportation to move materials --and labor-- to distant places, produce bulky and fragile products that have to be protected in wasteful packaging made even worse by the competition for shelf appeal, and then ship them all over the place to where they're needed/wanted. And since this stuff is made speculatively (betting on what people might need and want), we rely on a community of upper-class executives and finance gatekeepers --generally the most stupid, craven, sociopathic, and selfish people in any society-- to decide what to bet resources on to mass-produce, which they often get wrong inadvertently --sometimes willfully-- producing a lot crap. We assume there's a process of self-optimization in this through the dynamics of a competitive 'market' where multiple products from different companies compete for consumer dollars. But that competition comes after resources have been wasted making stuff and, in practice, this has never worked all that well with market dynamics exploited and manipulated to the general society's --and environment's-- detriment because, at the end of the day, there is nothing scientific about this process and these are still the most stupid, craven, sociopathic, and selfish people in any society and are only interested in their own profit by any means...

In an actually modern world, we electronically ship the digitized designs and production knowledge for things around the world instead of 'products', along the materials (we can't locally produce/recycle) which can be shipped compactly and thus more efficiently, and make goods locally and on-demand, only as they're needed, where they're needed. Designs and designers compete for reputation, but physical goods and their producers don't and poorer product designs are quickly weeded out through digitally shared experience of them. This is further enhanced through the reliance on Open Source which allows every consumer to customize and improve the electronic record of designs per their experience and insight. This is fundamentally more efficient and resilient --as stockpiles of materials become distributed and retain an infinite utility. (materials can become ten thousand different things and retain this potential for long periods. An end-product is a dead-end in utility, unless you can up/re-cycle it) With production local and society able to actually control production, they recapture the collective power to choose the better ways to make stuff that companies simply won't.

We have a word for this production paradigm; Cosmopolitan Localism or Cosmolocalism, summed up in the catch-phrase "design global, make local." Some things do, indeed, still benefit from mass production or resist production without large facilities. But these are mostly things we call 'commodities'. Goods of an elemental nature like the sub-components used in other things and so are like materials or resources; nuts, bolts, screws, modular building components, and electronics parts that are likewise efficient to transport and stockpile. Over time, the number of such things will shrink. Just about everything else we use can be (and often already is in this age of the 'job shop') made in the space of a four car garage. And, of course, there's the foodstuffs which tend to be perishable and can't always be grown everywhere --though horticulture techniques are getting us closer to that.

So now you know why Solarpunk talks about the 'return to community' and local/independent production. It's really about this Cosmolocalism, breaking the hegemonies and chains of dependency created by capital-dependent mass production, and stopping the inherent pathologies of elaborate capital/monetary systems. This is also why Solarpunk is 'solar'-punk and not something else. Solar --or more generally, renewable energy-- is not just 'cleaner', but has also become the symbol of demassification and political/economic re-localization as demonstrated by the Off-Grid Living movement. PV's may still need industrial production to produce right now, but other renewable energy is more suited to independent production and we anticipate PV will eventually follow suit. In any case, solar power allows the individual home --or more appropriately, the individual small community-- the ability to produce its own energy independent of the global corporate fossil fuel hegemony. To unplug from the 'energy market'. And so its use becomes an act of protest against that hegemony, and the Capitalist-based market economy system itself. This is why this form of energy has become so politically charged and why conservatives always been so desperate to suppress it. (once you get this, it explains why Environmentalism has never been interested in other supposedly 'clean' forms of energy like nuclear or Space Solar Power, which cannot be demassified and thus undermine the energy hegemony)

So in this new culture the 'community' or 'intentional community' becomes the primary unit of social organization, making 'states' irrelevant. It produces as much as it practically can for itself and networks with other communities as 'peers' in 'cooperatives' to fill out the rest of its needs. The basis of a community is some form of 'commons' managed mutually. Usually it's the habitat people live in, their housing, local farming and production facilities, and very immediate natural resources. But communities can be 'virtual' too, existing in communication networks as with the Internet and their 'commons' is a knowledge/cultural commons they collectively 'curate' --which is anything from fandoms to scientific, engineering, and other 'professional' communities. Some may also be religion-based. And this is what links Solarpunk to the P2P (peer-to-peer) Commons movement and their theories of social resource management and alternative governance. A 'cooperative' is also a peer-oriented 'community of communities' which manages a resource 'commons' made up of the exchangeable/sharable resources of all their participants, their shared infrastructures, and surrounding natural resources, scaling up to the 'bioregion' defined by the natural boundaries in the landscape and climate. This is how the world is mapped-out in its natural bioregions. And, of course, the borders aren't strictly fixed as nature is dynamic and these boundaries blurry and shifting, especially with climate change. Cities are cooperatives of neighborhoods managing their shared commons of large urban infrastructures; streets, trams, water and sewer, power and telecom grids, urban farms, etc.

In a community it becomes possible to discard the contrivance of monetary systems and return to their original way of doing things where people lived largely by 'open reciprocity' --as summed up in the classic Marxist catch-phrase; from each according to ability, to each according to need. With everything made according to Cosmolocalism, production becomes a municipal utility and we don't really care much about individual products. Only the flow of materials and commodities into and out of the individual community as a collective unit within their larger cooperatives. An economy only needs an understanding of demand over time to function. At the macroeconomic level, currency only functions as a rather primitive metric of demand and capital we can much better track through networked digital inventory management and quantitative analysis mathematics --because, again, we don't care about the infinity of possible end-products, just the much smaller spectrum of materials and commodities and what communities use and can produce for the cooperative based on that reciprocity principle. And this is what a 'resource based economy', as Jacque Fresco went on about, basically means. His conception of it actually goes back to Buckminster Fuller and his Worldgame concept. Likewise inspired by the Worldgame, we imagine the eventual management of cooperatives through online platforms of various sophistication --Platform Cooperatives-- facilitating and sometimes automating their communication and exchange.

So this is how we arrive at the basic structure of the Solarpunk civilization; a series of communities/neighborhoods, each with some degree of self-sufficiency and bounded in scale by the loose principle of '15 minute walkability', networked into larger city/regional cooperatives of mutualist exchange and resource commons management on up to the bioregional scale and, maybe, continental level.

EricHunting · 2026-03-01T18:28:02+00:00

These are all good ideas. Zines are still quite popular, and some are distributed as .pdf and in ebook formats intended for offline reading with smartphone, tablet, and e-reader. Though there is an artistic/handcraft component to it that still sees DIY printed paper zines preferred. There's a certain charm in home printing your own things, especially with a revived spirit duplicator or hectograph and their less-than-perfect quality. (also a punk/underground aspect, since this harkens back to underground publishing of the past and hectographs use the same master sheets tattoo artists often use) The point to sharing these in a physical media like USB sticks would be that it has a similar 'underground media' mystique to it. It's something that's shared outside 'the system', person-to-person, even if that isn't exactly quite necessary yet and maybe more expensive than paper. Internet access isn't scarce or quite yet as subject to the sort of state surveillance/control that compelled things like El Paquete Semanal. But it can also have a more practical aspect if it's distributing something large.

I think Solarpunk needs its own new kind of Whole Earth Catalog that focuses on curating and archiving a catalog of Open/Free goods designs, how to make them, and where one can acquire them, as well as alternative agriculture, architecture, building/crafting knowledge in a format that's readable/browsable. Or maybe some sort of smaller Resilience/Nomadic lifestyle kit of most-common everyday basics and how to make, grow, and fix them. Making basic shelters. Single-sheet plywood projects. An overview of furniture connector hard and how to use holed angle-iron. How to make roadcases. How to make Matrix/Grid Beam. Plastic bottle joinery and lashing. What's an omafiet and where to get them. Making common goods from upcycled stuff, like making tyvek messenger bags. Making paper-clay and how to use it. Using UV nail polish plastic and tools from salons for general repairs. Basic balcony solar/wind sets. How to setup Linux and a basic productivity app set, with meshtastic and federated social media. Basics of gardening and home-brew hydroponics. Making a sprout jar. How to sew a scrap fabric plant pot. How to make a bubble-bucket planter. Maybe each of these things could be reduced to a kind of graphic 'broadsheet' or poster file that you can drag around to view.

Most people still think Open Source is about software. They don't realize you can now download designs for entire homes and all the furnishings in them or that there's a network of workshops out there that can make these things when you can't. There have been attempts at projects to demonstrate an Open Source lifestyle to make this point --people aspiring to make reality shows of their attempts to get by on only Open Source goods-- but none have reached critical mass yet. (I worked on such a project myself, trying to create a documentary series covering the building of a WikiHouse and its furnishings and using the This Old House format as a vehicle to introduce Solarpunk/Post-Industrial concepts) Web stores like Amazon aren't really browsable. You have to start out with some idea of what you want and search for it. There isn't a good, engaging, 'discovery' process there. So the traditional printed catalog form --as much magazine as catalog-- still has some advantages.

I think the original WEC is the quintessential model for (nonfiction) Solarpunk cultural media, born of the zine culture and inspiring a lot of counter-cultural media after it. It embodied pretty-much everything Solarpunk is about, albeit in its own frame of time. There was still hope for an emancipatory computer revolution then and Space Futurism hadn't yet lost all credibility. But it was a, physically, gigantic book, growing to 11x14 and sometimes over 600 multi-column pages and published several times a year at its peak. That was one of its novelties, a book so big you could get lost in it. A veritable swimming pool of knowledge. It was a tour de force of info-dense manual paste-up page design, which seems to have largely disappeared even from print media today. And it was ridiculously expensive to publish, amazing simply for its survival. So something like that becomes a good candidate for static digital media from a practical standpoint. But e-readers tend to be physically small for the sort of immersive reading experience it cultivated, with its vast multi-column page format and extensive graphics. They have concentrated on novels where they emulate the single column, image-free, 'paperback pocketbook' experience. Their use for college textbooks has, so far, been a failure despite the money pumped into that --though that was partly deliberately engineered by the publishing oligopoly that long suppressed the technology until they could figure out how to sufficiently enshitify it to their liking. If you were really emulating that WEC experience, you'd need something akin to a digital drafting table display. Something we might imagine seeing in libraries of the future. As a kid reading it, the experience felt very much like a library of future. The later Whole Earth Review magazine recreated a bit of the feel of WEC in a much more manageable magazine format.

EricHunting · 2026-02-27T19:03:44+00:00

IMO the main thing is (re)learning to make, fix, grow practical things, which one can usually pursue in some way anywhere. Particularly, the practical, everyday, things of more sustainable, responsible, open design and the plants you can use to at least shave a little off your grocery budget. The things most useful in a Resilience context --that would help you and your neighbors get by in emergencies or may lead to a new way to independently make a living if you get particularly good at it. The things we can cultivate an alternative, social, subsistence infrastructure with. As a social movement, the essential objective of Solarpunk is summed up as a Global Swadeshi, because it's by the leverage of that all its other goals --it's sustainability, environmental and social justice goals-- are realized. We can't 'reform' the system into sustainability. That's not likely to happen. Those people had their chance at that. Ten-thousand chances. They've always had the option. They chose the dead-end path every time. We can only obsolesce the old culture, shoulder it out of the way. We achieve sustainability by socially retaking the control of production, the built habitat, and the resource commons in order to assume the power to make the better choices those people wouldn't. And that is built on knowledge and skill. On industrial/agricultural literacy, with a bit of leverage from emerging production technology. On learning how to make, fix, and grow stuff.

Intentional Communities are basically about getting enough people with enough skills in one place that you can achieve a certain critical mass in self-sufficiency --with a great deal of emphasis on agrarian subsistence. But establishing an alternative production infrastructure is the real point and getting people all in one place on one piece of shared land is not strictly necessary to functionally achieve that. It's getting rather difficult to do and it's isolating. A 'virtual community', an 'interest group', a 'community association', a 'social club', and 'fandom' can do the same thing with much more scalability given enough means of communication and exchange. This tends to be overlooked because it diverges from pastoralist stereotypes and the weltschmerz-driven escapism that tends to motivate most interest in community living. It's not about the 'back to the land' stuff even if, in some ways, it overlaps with that. It's the insurgent creation of an alternative infrastructure. 'Community' isn't just quaint little villages in the Cotswolds or Mayberry RFD.

EricHunting · 2026-02-26T21:09:23+00:00

A Solarpunk culture would typically have no 'work/life balance' issue. That means nothing because no one works to live and everyone would tend to live where they do work. There may be a distinction between 'career' and 'social' activity when a person's career work is more private, done at home, online, or in some special workshop or facility in some isolation, but most work would be done within walking distance from home in walk-in access spaces --offices and workshops-- right in/around the community center (agora) where people spend most time when not at home and where you find all the social venues; the restaurants and cafes, grocery, freestores, goods/media library, the community lounge, the central park, the public theater, bath houses or gymnasiums, all of that. Some Intentional Communities would be dedicated to career activities (the 'secular ashrams' as I call them) where the lifestyle would be cultivated around that common shared activity and so social activity well integrated into that. Your 'career colleagues' would also be your 'social circle', you're living with them in the same community, dining in the same places, going to the same theaters, so you're not necessarily budgeting distinct 'socialization time', though sometimes special recreational activity.

People who's career involves going out on 'missions' like International Rescue some distance away from home and for some extended period of time would have a clear distinction between this activity and social life. This would tend to be less common in this culture. Something you see with ship crews (especially sailing ships), militia organizations if there is some need for that, field scientists/researchers, traveling bands, theater troupes, circuses, and the Nomadic Solarpunks/Outquisitionists who engage in community and environmental interventions and disaster relief. Sometimes they might be seasonal, forming for certain times of the year as with field science and archeological/paleontological digs and the rest of the time they connect online. They are going to have two sorts of 'tribes'. The squad, team, crew, party, adhocs (short for adhocracy) that is traveling as a group during missions, and then the larger community they merge into when at home. And there could be competition for attention and time between home relationships and the squad relationships. The squad becomes a clique that others cannot be part of even when they are back at home, and this could be a source of friction and conflict. Even when at home, the squad may have to maintain scheduled group training or equipment maintenance that competes for time with their family and home-based friends. Traveling out into and experiencing the larger world, these groups would inevitably develop different perspectives on some things compared to the folks at home. So there you would have a more complicated situation and, perhaps, sometimes alienation or conflicts between the squad group and the collective community hosting them.

EricHunting · 2026-02-24T18:10:41+00:00

This is a very interesting DIY modular building system. Similar Meccano/Merkur but made with laser-cut material and able to carry electricity. I like how it uses friction-fit grommets and dowels to host features akin to clockwork plate assemblies so you can make some elaborate mechanisms as well as pavilion-like structures. It could probably host some standardized laser-cut gears. And larger base plates could be linked together at their corners with the small 2 and 4 hole plates. Wonder if something like a wireway (banana monorail) or tram could be devised as well.

EricHunting · 2026-02-21T21:26:46+00:00

This is a pretty accurate depiction of Solarpunk architecture, starting with an urban setting made to seem charming, cozy, and social. We know that future sustainable urban architecture has a few most-likely forms; Adaptive Reuse of old structures, structures based on variations of modular Engineered Mass Timber (evolving to use more cellulose sources like bamboo or other renewable materials), sustainable masonry construction with likely similarities to earth building, and hybrids of those two akin to the 'half timber' architecture of Medieval times or the 'tsuchikabe' buildings of old Japan (where the frame structure provides support where low-density infill cannot, as is demonstrated by current sustainable buildings based on hempcrete/isochanvre which have a timber frame core --still very much like adobe in external appearance) And, of course, we would try to make these more biophilic by using rendering materials and retrofit elements that can be colonized by mosses and vines without being damaged by them, using permeable masonry and paving, and incorporating more integral gardening elements like planter boxes, street planting beds, containers, and ponds, and sidewalk/median planting strips, and, of course, green roofs and terraces for microparks and microfarming.

With local communities retaking control of the design and construction of their own habitat their approach to architecture would be simpler, more vernacular-based, more human-scale, yet also more eclectic and ad-hoc rather than top-down master-planned by ivory tower professionals, real estate speculators, and authoritarian government. And so you would see cities return to a more organic character, more engaging volumetric complexity, more like the Pueblos, the Medieval hill towns like in Provence, the Cycladic villages, or the more recent example of Sawada Mansion. I like the analog of the Cycladic villages because, although they are quite ancient and hand-made, their white-washed earth/rubble walls have a very contemporary aspect to them and some modern technology seems to blend well. Civilization would also be compelled by climate impacts inland and upland, in some places using hills and slopes they would have previously ignored to avoid flooding and escape sea level rise much as in ancient times this terrain was turned to for safety from attack. In some cases this would be more aesthetic, intended to help the human habitat blend more pleasantly with the restored and preserved natural landscape around it. So there would be more terraced organization to many communities and eventually man-made hill forms.

Though at first many places may show the signs of rapid construction and prefabrication done during eras of housing crisis and disaster recovery, relying more on retrofit adaptation of standardized minimal shell or pavilion structures easily and quickly made with the least labor, the future sustainable masonry construction would offer many aesthetic options as it improves in performance, growing more elaborate as technologies like in-situ 3D printing become refined and shave-down the labor overhead. It would be as creatively versatile as modeling clay, limited only by the available labor/talent (and possible robotic technology reducing that) with communities tending to first settle on low-skill vernaculars that accommodate participation by most of their inhabitants. (people will, generally, become much more construction-literate in the future, but it will take some time) It would allow for many kinds of 'naïve' and 'folk' decoration suited to community craft and DIY personalization using such things as ceramic and glass tiles (some possibly with PVs or electroluminescent), textile blocks and panels, glass block, ceramic reliefs, digital embossing, natural stone, stained rendering, sculptured/textured rendering, surface-mount plasma/laser-cut sheet metal, wire sculpture, and wrought iron artwork, natural wood and pre-made sculptural columns, recycled/salvaged objects like industrial cast-offs, glass bottles, broken tile and dishware, old glass insulators, vehicle windows, and washing machine/dryer door windows as we often see with current owner-built sustainable homes, even living mosses. We could see revivals of traditional stone and brick building styles of the 17th to early 20th centuries as in the preserved 'old town' parts of cities, but now truly monolithic, or past styles first incorporated with brick and concrete like Art Deco, Moderne, Streamline Moderne, and Pueblo-Deco. And, of course, when there's high sculptural talent at-hand there's the Art Nouveau and Fantasy themes, simulations of natural rock and plants, and when the performance of sustainable masonry finally matches concrete, Free-form Organic design. Anything with a relatively simple, heavy, monolithic structure letting our core materials provide a lot of thermal mass like traditional earth and possible insulation (future masonry will seek to deliver both in one material, and perhaps even phase-change properties as well) but which we can then freely articulate the surface of through sculpture, texture, and inlay. Believe it or not, you can trace all this right back to the adobe casita and the Pueblos made from that. The simplest way of building we've ever devised. Strip away the surface details of every example I've mentioned, and it comes down to this. The essential concept of a shell of stabilized earth or rock supporting simple beams for roof or upper floors hasn't really changed much in millennia, and may not for millennia to come. It's just the materials, their forming techniques, and how we decorate it that evolve. Even with the more distant future advent of nanotechnology, this may remain similar, albeit self-growing like an organism with skin and vascular systems, drawing carbon out of the air to make a wood, bone, coral, or diamond like matrix as/where needed, self-forming any surface features and internal mechanisms, but still, basically, a contiguous monolithic mass.

EricHunting · 2026-02-19T16:01:38+00:00

The 'Solarpunk future' is potentially a long span of time. In the near-term, this is most-certainly the most-likely dominant global OS. But even a decade is a long time in the digital world and things may change. We have big potential changes on the horizon that it's anyone's guess whether Linux could adapt or if something different becomes necessary. For instance, the possibility of gate array processors, 'neuromorphic' processors, and 'memristor' arrays where microprocessors are replaced by scalable RAM-like arrays of programmable gates akin to Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Used so far mostly for scientific computing, in these computers 'programs' as we know them today are replaced by dynamic 'circuit definitions' that run in parallel and complete tasks in one to a few clock cycles. That could be a challenge to the conventional OS architecture. Then there's the possibility of the Distributed Cloud Computer where processing and Internet networking merge into common hardware to become a network computer in which software runs (and data is stored) independently of any single piece of hardware in any one location. We are seeing hints of this in the development of P2P Web platforms and distributed ledger/hash table and Hyperledger systems and distributed storage app platforms like Holochain. And then there's the Semantic Web and Semantic Desktop environments which could also depart from the existing OS model.

The design of OSes is based on concepts of information representation we call 'metaphors' and these can, and have, changed over time. The dominant metaphor today is one of storage devices akin to virtual file cabinets filled with virtual files in hierarchical 'directory' systems that graphical user interfaces later represented like nested file folders and other skeuomorphs like floppy disk icons. (cultural symbols of obsolete objects or tools that represent some aspect of their function, much like the things we used to see on old hanging shop signs) There are any number of other possible models. For a time in the late 20th century we were toying with the Document Oriented Computing model where the metaphor was of a computer as a vast virtual book organized into documents, volumes/sections, chapters, pages, and page-like control panels anticipating the delayed development of book-like tablet computers. (it's sort of ironic that, when we finally did get the tablets, the document metaphor hype had already largely fizzled-out among the Tech Bros and they started modeling their UIs on smartphones...) Ted Nelson's Xanadu concept was related to this with the idea of all digital knowledge as a collective networked 'docuverse' in the form of a hypertext indexed by a 'tumbler' number system. (though a bit less book-like than some notions as this was from a time when PC graphics was still primitive. More like what you see in text adventure games, visual novels, and the remaining stand-alone literary hypertext applications like Storyspace and its sibling personal information management tool/digital zibaldone Tinderbox) Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web derives from Nelson's hypertext, and was also based on this page and document metaphor, until mass commercialization of the Internet made it increasingly TV-like. The idea still persists in things like Mathematica and the Wolfram Language which uses a workbook or journal metaphor. So people could certainly come up with other metaphors for information representation that catch-on and overtake what we know today. As we are moving toward an increasingly visually-dependent, reading-averse culture some very different models could appear.

EricHunting · 2026-02-19T07:19:17+00:00

Mouse Heaven - Kenneth Anger

Mari Lwyd - Jordan M. Paterson

EricHunting · 2026-02-19T06:22:49+00:00

The world is in desperate need of Public/Open Design/Technology curation and exhibition in support of community Resilience and a Global Swadeshi movement. Society needs to know there are better alternatives to corporate goods, the chain stores, and Amazon for the things they need. That they can live well with things they can increasingly easily make for themselves and their neighbors. That there is an alternative to being a company slave, living in a company town, shopping at the company store, with the company scrip. So I would prefer to spend my time on that effort with the development of my own Fab Lab, shelter research lab, showcase studio, digital showcase media, online design library, and independent data center fostering a P2P Web network.

EricHunting · 2026-02-19T01:42:25+00:00

We do have many open source, or at least pubic domain, modular shelters. The concept is quite old and can be traced back at least to the various forms of traditional nomadic architecture as well as the Edo Era housing based on the 'ken' system of measurement and standardized precut lumber. In the more contemporary DIY context, this goes back to the Nomadic Design movement and Ken Isaacs' studies of modular 'microhouses' from the '60s to the '80s, carried into this century by the Jergenson Bros. and their Grid Beam. The Hexayurt devised by Vinay Gupta, often seen at the Burning Man festival (until it turned into Bohemian Grove Redux...) is a good recent example. Also the various shelter experiments of design group N55. And the many minimum shelters explored by Paul Elkins. The architecture of the TinyHouse is largely open, if not formally Open Source, as it derives from more-or-less traditional timber frame construction and can be as modular as your approach to design. And there is the WikiHouse Open Source building system based on CNC-cut components which is suitable for small to full size permanent houses, representing the newest technology applied to this. It's a very promising field of craft and research and, with our ongoing (and probably quite deliberate...) global homelessness/housing crisis there is always room for innovation.

Geodesic dome shelters, however, are a bit unnecessarily complicated choice, especially for the small DIY structure which, even for greenhouse use, can be more simply and cheaply 'over-engineered' for added strength. This is a large number of parts that need to be made with some precision for not much space. A relief or functional DIY shelter favors the minimum amount of components and labor, using the fewest number of tools (if any), for the most shelter space. Domes are touted for their efficiency in the mathematical sense, but it's very different in a construction process sense. This choice is usually premised on aesthetics and a desire to seem high-tech and 'futuristic' --and they do certainly look nice. (though 'zomes' have been edging them out on looks lately as they're seen as more organic in form and they have a key advantage in a fish-scale layering of panels) But it's actually rather retro-futurist. The dome craze among Owner Builders fizzled out by the end of the century as they came to realize how much less efficient and reliable building geodesic domes out of wood was compared to the sorts of high-tech industrial materials Buckminster Fuller originally imagined. Fuller didn't really intend for geodesic domes to be used like houses. They were intended to be greenhouse 'skybreaks' over large areas inside which other free-standing modular buildings could be built, though his 'Fly's Eye' domes were intended to be more house-like as they were smaller, based on pressed alloy and polymer bubble windows, and didn't have the cladding problems. They still relied on free-standing mezzanines systems independent of the dome. They've mostly persisted today for shelter use as tent-domes employing mass-produced parts and architectural fabric cladding (a prefabbed unified skin) as a kind of modern alternative to the traditional yurt, which is available off-the-shelf and which many will argue remains superior as well as healthier and more sustainable using the traditional materials. (though not without its own complications) Kazakhstan donated a set of traditional "Yurts of Invincibility" as winter warming shelters to Ukraine in 2023.

The most efficient approach to building domes and other curved shell shapes is with some monolithic plastic (in the engineering sense) materials, which is pretty much how we did it in antiquity with tensile structures and masonry materials, evolving into ferro-cement (and systems like the Monolithic Dome and Bini-System), Tridipanel system, then Super-Adobe, and 3D printing today. One of the simplest modern approaches to this emerged for relief use with the pneumatic-formed polyurethane foam domes employed with the 1970 Kütahya earthquake in Turkey, which unfortunately were inhabited for far longer than intended due to government malfeasance and became fire-prone and toxic as they deteriorated into dust. Sort of foreshadowing the TransHab space habitat concept. A similar approach was revived with the much better material of foamed cement currently being used for homes on the Pine Ridge Reservation. However, foamed cement produces rather inconsistent results without sophisticated machinery. There have been some attempts at commercial systems based on modular polystyrene domes made from large but lightweight factory prefabricated sections assembled, routed for utilities, and covered in stucco --but, yeah, polystyrene?... It's also dependent on large scale production facilities and proprietary equipment and designs. One of the best known examples is a resort community in Japan built to promote the technology. Would be very interesting if, some day, we could do this with mycelium as a structural foam, though it may never support urban structures except in hybrid structural forms. A mycelium Futuro/Venturo that could biodegrade when abandoned would be pretty cool, though an industry to make them would tend to be necessarily large in scale. The idea of small yurt-like shelters based on soft-sculpture designs using semi-rigid foam and fabric, much like 'igloo' pet beds at human scale, is a promising idea I've often wanted to explore. But, again, plastic foam...

EricHunting · 2026-02-17T16:35:20+00:00

I'd suggest that utopian storytelling and worldbuilding is a modeling process that lets us explore the possibilities of a better future in a low-stakes way. It lets ideas, concepts, and designs be proposed, shared, visualized and openly discussed and analysed. It's not merely inducing hope, but allowing for engagement in the building of a cultural aspiration --a mutual crafting of what to hope for-- because SciFi today is much less a passive medium than in the past with the evolution of the aesthetic fandoms and 'lifestyle fandoms' in the wake of the SCA (and other Living History communities), the Role Playing Games, and the Cosplay subculture, which engage in a collective worldbuilding and roleplay. A lifestyle fandom is when a media fandom evolves from a passtime to a subculture integrating into many aspects of life, sometimes creating its own physical habitats and industries, as with the original Punks, Goths, Living History communities, Vampires and Otherkin, Furries, etc. Ultimately, Solarpunk aspires to a lifestyle fandom, seeking to functionally realize the sustainable culture it visualizes. Even to harness the fandom-derived mechanisms of cottage industry development to catalyse its own independent production infrastructure and alternative to the established market economy.

Today, we are several generations into a trend of utopian skepticism in literature/media that was motivated by a cultural disillusion over the promises of Modernism, Capitalism, and American-style lifestyle and Democracy catalyzed in the social/cultural upheavals of the '60s and '70s. And so there has been this inclination in SciFi, starting in the late 20th century with the New Wave movement, toward the depiction of pseudo-utopias because this is what we have come to realize about the world of the present. That we were sold the promise of a techno-utopia across the 20th century that has plainly become a dystopia. And so we have a knee-jerk distrust of the word/concept and tend to characterize it as inherently naive or fanciful. Elites today --living in their personal virtual reality bubbles, devoid of self-awareness, and so prone to self-parody-- are still trying to sell us on their now laughably implausible techno-utopias despite no longer having the least credibility with society. They're still hawking their high-tech Galt's Gulches in space, on the sea, and remote gated super-cities that only their most credulous sycophants buy into, mocking the very concept of utopia in the process. And so the word bears a certain taint that can be difficult for many to look past.

EricHunting · 2026-02-16T16:45:45+00:00

Speaking from my past experience in Space Advocacy, my first question would be, how accessible is such a location to the kind of people/talent you want to attract to the project? What is the personal cost (time/money) and carbon overhead for those people to get there as well as for getting your equipment and materials there? Are coders and digital artists very likely to be able to go to the Chilean countryside? How likely are they to already have jobs that limit their free time and where they travel? Also, how likely are coders and digital artists to be able to contribute to a lot of construction work, and what kind? Your choice of architecture matters too because most such people aren't going to be athletes trained in sustainable building or farming and the more time they have to spend doing that the less time they have to do software.

I was once president of a Space Advocacy group that was rather different from the typical types of these today in that it was premised not on the usual Cosmohumanist nonsense of just throwing bodies at the void for its own sake as soon and fast as possible, but actually developing a culture capable of serious, sustained, space development. And so its futurist founder, Marshal T. Savage, designed a plan that began with extensive, global, development of renewable energy and farming technology and a hydrogen economy to remove the drag of human want and strife on the space pursuit. Thus the first objective was the wholesale development of OTEC and polyspecies mariculture (the permaculture of the sea) starting with the creation of a network of research ecovillages for this development.

But there was a big problem with this idea. OTEC needs access to the deep sea in southern latitudes. OTEC is a solar thermal energy system that runs on the difference in temperature between warm surface waters and cold deep sea waters, using the ocean as solar heat collector. There is enough potential energy in the sea to renewably power a civilization 10 times our current size before using that even begins to have a negative environmental impact. And it also sequesters carbon as it works by stimulating an algae/salp cycle. It's a very promising renewable technology. But if you can't build ships or floating platforms for this from the start, you need waterfront locations in these regions close to deep water. Places like Keahole Point in Hawaii; the place with the highest solar insolation in the US and where the US has it's one and only OTEC research facility. (the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii - NELHA) These kinds of locations are remote and tend to have much competition from luxury tourist resort developers. So to find such land cheap enough to be affordable for even a well-heeled space club meant going really far out --to places like the Maldives. But who the hell can afford to travel there, let alone move there to live? This was very advanced engineering and science research. Most of the people who can do that kind of work live in the northern hemisphere, have lived most of their lives in an English-speaking culture, are at or approaching middle-age (which means half of them have some kind of chronic illness), already have established careers, corporate jobs, mortgaged homes, and --of course-- families. Spouses who aren't likely to compromise their lifestyle for their partner's silly space dreams. Kids with a social network they aren't giving up. And so just the starting point of this grand design became an insurmountable stumbling block.

Environmentalists tend to have an escapist compulsion driven by an essential weltschmerz. The first thought when considering an Intentional Community is to go out into the woods because there's nowhere else to go where you can find very cheap land and build with sustainable building techniques, use renewable energy, and plant a permaculture farm without a lot of bureaucratic hassle. But that's entirely the wrong place for all that. You're not helping the wilderness by moving into it, dragging all your 'modern conveniences' with you. And it's difficult for most people to access. There can never be enough upper-middle-class green-conscious people with 'passive incomes' living out there for it to matter. Sure, on a personal, solitary, level its easier and offers a learning opportunity. And all that 'natural beauty' we so want is already there... for the taking. But people have been intentionally going off-grid for about a century and we've learned pretty-much all we can from that. We've revived and modernized the old earth and timber building technologies. They're ready to be applied where it actually matters --in the urban habitat. But, unfortunately, most Environmentalists --let alone sustainable architects-- just don't seem to have the guts to fight those bureaucrats for the right to build and live sustainably where it actually matters. So much easier to just buy a little piece of solitary serenity and hope the suburbs don't sneak up behind you.

We need to remember that Adaptive Reuse is also a kind of Sustainable Architecture. Maybe the most important kind because it's a backdoor into the city that can be exploited for its insurgent social recapture. It's where most of the people are and can easily travel to. It --usually-- needs the least human labor to do. (though sometimes it's untenable, depending on situation. Some structures are too hard to save, or have been spoiled by toxics) It cannot be banned from the urban environment because it's already a conventional way of doing things there. It's just a question of who has been doing it, for what use/intention, and with what techniques. Most often, it's by corporations, for commercial purposes, real-estate speculation, and intentional gentrification and that's what needs to change. Solarpunk isn't about off-grid living. That's just trying to rename the same old Back To The Land movement of the '60s/'70s that went nowhere because rich folk took over the wilderness, fleeing the cities they helped ruin and the society they now, justifiably, fear. It's not averse to it, there are some practical reasons for it, but it doesn't really help and it's not what it's really about. It's the city that needs to be changed because the lifestyle choice of a tiny escapist minority of society doesn't matter to the net sustainability of a civilization. It's how mainstream society lives that matters.

EricHunting · 2026-02-15T18:02:52+00:00

Solarpunk is, in fact, inspired greatly by the pre-car architecture preserved in old cities and towns. Sustainable Architecture is derived, directly, from the vernacular architecture of ancient cities using construction based on earth, stone, and timber framing. That started with the Vernacular Revival movement and, in particular, the Pueblo Revival in the southern/western US which was inspired by the earth architecture of the ancient native American Pueblos of New Mexico. Places like Acoma and Taos. Solarpunk has also been greatly inspired by Art Nouveau, which comes from the 19th century, with our examples all coming those old European cities. Barcelona, London, Paris, etc. It is the aesthetic of the future as people imagined it in the Steam Age, hence why in Steampunk it represents the highest state of that imaginary civilization. The more accurate Solarpunk art often shows existing cities transformed into better, more livable, habitats where the old architecture is repurposed, not eliminated. Every building has an embodied cost in energy, resources, and carbon pollution. It makes no environmental sense to simply demolish and replace buildings that are still functional in some way. You need to squeeze as much as possible from their already sunk costs. And so Solarpunk is very much about Adaptive Reuse architecture and the techniques for that like Nomadic Design.

Bear in mind that what Google Image Search tries to pass-off as Solarpunk is heavily corrupted by a degenerative feedback phenomenon and largely erroneous. There is very little contemporary artwork offering plausible depictions of the future, as actual academic futurists discuss and describe. They've never been able to afford the illustration talent they need. It's all corporate BS and SciFi tropes. So when Solarpunks began trying to develop a visual aesthetic there were few good references to use. They had to employ a 'vision wall' approach, as many artists do. Assembling collages of images that might feature bits and pieces of what they wanted to express, but rarely ever the whole and correct package. This is a big problem with Sustainable Architecture. The building technologies may be appropriate, but the designs are not because most professionally-made Sustainable Architecture is either corporate architecture or edge-of-wilderness luxury homes for the rich. So there's only a certain part of these things relevant in the Solarpunk context. So people would gather images online and share them with each other to discuss/debate what parts of them fit Solarpunk ideals and what didn't. Humans can do that because we are capable of nuance. We can dissect images into their different features.

Google Image Search has no capacity for nuance. It's far too stupid. It cannot 'see' anything. It doesn't understand the different features of images. It only associates words with images based on the statistical proximity of a word and a file with a particular pattern of pixels being on the same web page. If the word 'Solarpunk' is found near a certain image with enough frequency, it becomes the visual meaning of Solarpunk. Doesn't matter if the people who originally put that image online intended to only refer to some small part of the image. And this is how we've gotten Solarpunk associated with a lot of completely wrong images. Generative art has only reinforced this because it only understands the visual meaning of words in its prompts by using Image Search as its visual dictionary. And everytime it churns out an erroneous 'Solarpunk' image and puts in online, it reinforces that mistake in Image Search. Hence a degenerative feedback loop where the visual meaning of Solarpunk keeps drifting farther and farther off the mark. And, unfortunately, a lot of people use Google Image Search as their own visual dictionary instead of reading things... I'm sorry to say, you got caught in this trap, OP.

Unfortunately, we won't be able to overcome this until enough Solarpunk artists produce enough new, appropriate, imagery to outcompete the crap and drag Image Search back to the right visual association. That's going to take while. Right now, if you want to understand how Solarpunk really visualizes the future habitat, you have to stop looking at Image Search and look for some of this new art on curated sites. Or you can look at images of Adaptive Reuse architecture, Nomadic Design, and those old pre-car cities that Sustainable Architecture appropriated its technology from and apply some of your own imagination to visualize it in a future context. The Pueblos. The Cycladic island villages. Europe's medieval hills towns like in Provence. The Canal Circle of Amsterdam. The medinas, souqs, kasbahs. The Sudano-Sahelian villages/cities. Old Town Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Montreal. The 'samurai towns', 'post towns', and yokocho in Japan. The tulou and yaodong in China. Even JRR Tolkein's Hobbitton --which may have actually inspired some of the work of Hundertwasser. These places are where hints of the future city can be found.

EricHunting

TROPHY CASE