I’m planning out a photobash (hopefully part of a set) showcasing options and possibilities for a more solarpunk world. My goal for these is for them to be a more practical and actionable view of a solarpunk society, more than just green skyscrapers or super scifi-looking places. I’m mostly setting these in a post-crumbles setting, with a focus on rebuilding in a more thoughtful and inclusive way. I want to try to illustrate solarpunk concepts and themes directly.
I’ve done a co-op salvaging technology for reuse, and a high speed railway, and I’d like to take a shot at showing the places where people live next - just a street at a time, so not every scene will check every box, but I’d very much like to source ideas to include while I’m still planning layouts.
I’ve got a few different elements I’d like to include already (again maybe not all in one scene):
- More colorful buildings, emphasizing buildings as a canvas for art from graffiti to commissioned murals
- Lots and lots of trees. I like the idea of a street/path layout that provides each building with some kind of vehicle access (for firetrucks and ambulances and handicapped people, along with day-to-day things like moving trucks, large items deliveries, construction vehicles) while converting many roads to forested bike and pedestrian paths. At the very least, more tree-lined streets
- Streetcars/streetcar cables overhead (emphasizing public transit)
- options for a Third Place, where people can be outside home or work without having to be customers or tresspassers (I really don’t have any of these yet)
- Alternate uses of existing structures and resources; I want to avoid the feeling of a scratch-built or utopian future. I’m currently working on a parking garage converted to living space with colorful facades between the concrete, and a farm, park, or forest (I haven’t decided yet) on the roof
- The tech salvage co-op from last time delivering a laptop or running wires, building a meshnet
- Green energy, solar and wind in realistic locations (so not much wind in the cityscapes, I suspect) especially in a setting where infrastructure has been neglected and rebuilt
- Alternatives to corporations, and an emphasis on society being run by and for regular people
- Alternatives to cars; bicycles, rickshaws (pedal-powered and electric),
- Fruit trees, public gardens
If you have any additional elements, ideas for scenes/combos of elements, or specific ways you think things should be shown, and especially practical considerations, please let me know. It’s a lot easier to work those in while I’m planning rather than trying to work on it once layers are all tangled and perspectived.
It’s been awhile since I did proper full colors and textures photobashes, and I’m still working on the more loose/casual style, but I’m getting a bit better as I go, I’m happy to take ideas.
Also, I’d also like to do some more non-city scenes, rewilding, smaller communities linked by public transit, but don’t have any specifics yet.
I’ll have to think about this - I like the idea of showing technology helping to fulfill solarpunk goals, and I’d love to find a way to make any new tech look repairable by design. At the same time, I want to avoid making scenes that look utopian or like some new technology will solve everything because I think there’s already a lot of art tagged solarpunk that does that.
If you have any scenes or details in mind, let me know!
Do you have examples of such art? All I see tagged “solarpunk” depicts sunny walkable cities invaded by plants, and that’s all.
Isn’t solarpunk a type of utopia typically?
These all came up on artstation or google tagged as solarpunk. They’re by no means the width and breadth of similar stuff, and I want to emphasize that I’m not saying they’re bad, just that I want to represent something else. I want to show good places that come after bad times, and I want them to feel obtainable.
![](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/210bc3ed-f591-4a75-9917-ad1620e12b24.webp
As for utopia, I think it depends on what solarpunk stuff you consume. I’ve read a lot more short stories than I have other solarpunk media, and I’d say that at least at Rekoning Press and Little Blue Marble it’s much more concerned with what society looks like during and after climate disasters, and trying to find hope and options, ways through bad times. I wouldn’t say that I’m trying to depict something utopian, so much as looking for examples of other ways we could do things to mitigate the damage, or different, better ways to rebuild. Hope for the future when things look bad.
I think for visual art, the most common scenes and probably what people think of if they think ‘solarpunk’ probably looks like above, but I don’t know that for sure. That’s kind of why I want to make these.
Where is the existing building mass in those pictures? It’s all weird glass pods. I don’t want to live in a glass pod. Did we just blow up all the old brick warehouses, Victorians, old farmhouses that got engulfed by the city, etc etc?
I want to see my little old house from the 1930s that’s been energy retrofitted, with solar panels and a solar water heater and barrels under the gutters, with apple trees and chickens in the backyard and some bicycles in front.
Exactly - these aren’t obtainable, there’s no roadmap to turn existing cities into this and most people living in them probably wouldn’t want to anyways. They don’t show the character and history and patcheork-ness that makes cities beautiful, they look more like corporate resorts. They’re very nice to look at but they don’t inspire me to change anything because it’s too far a jump from what we have.
I’ll add mixed residential spaces, and retrofitted houses, to the list!