Hi, recently I’ve been making these pictures/photobashes of different places in a solarpunk world, trying to demonstrate technologies or other possibilities, or values like reuse that I consider to be solarpunk. I’m working on some cityscapes but I’ve been thinking a lot about rural places since that’s where I’m from, and how they might change with some of the societal crumbles and contractions I feel like are impending. In my grandparents’ time, the region where I grew up was lots of small villages, usually bunched up around water and local industry, with farms spread out beyond that. With cars, people have spread out in these sprawling bedroom communities that are becoming ever more dense with people. Gas and groceries were 40 minutes away by car, and I feel like most people I knew drove an hour each way for work.

I wanted to do a scene sort of showing how things might change in rural areas if cars became impractical (due to shortages etc) and how things could be rebuilt better. I have a sense of what I want to include:

  • Dense village surrounded by farms and forest, an abandoned mcmansion or large house far enough out to be impractical
  • High speed rail access to the village
  • Solar panels
  • Waterwheels
  • Farms
  • Algae farming

For the farms, I could drop in bits and pieces of photos of farmland and make it work, I worked on a farm for a few years and feel comfortable enough for that. But I suspect folks who know more about farming, and especially folks who are into solarpunk visions of the future, might have stronger opinions on how it should be done, so I figure now is a good time to ask. What would you like to see? What should be done differently than we do now? Anything from layouts to the size of fields, to specific crops would be useful.

Edit: this’ll be in North America, by the way. (Probably northern US States though I haven’t picked one) The surrounding trees, general style of mountain, and the buildings will be based on that assumption anyways.

edit 2: here’s the current rough draft to give you an iea of the space I’m planning around

Thanks!

  • JacobCoffinWritesOP
    1·
    9 months ago

    That’s a really cool way to do things! The pollarded trees are very distinctive and should show up well even at a distance. and I like how self-contained this layout seems to be. I’ll have to build the fields out of individual bits and pieces since I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to find aerial photos of a suitable field at the right angle, but it’ll give me a chance to make sure I have the details right.

    I’ve started reading up on agroforestry and on Nitrogen-fixing Trees (the far-superior NFTs) and definitely plan to try and make this work. Do you have any recommendations on field size, layout (it sounds like alley-cropping is probably the most common fit in use in the US, but I’m happy to explore other options - some places seem to do straight rows, some do squiggly, irregular ones and I’m not sure why yet. I’m not sure yet what makes the best sense and what will be the most clear visually at this distance) or crops? It’s tough because I want to make sure it’s somewhat realistic for agroforestry but I also want to make sure I’m providing enough food and variety for the village to be somewhat self-sufficient, though there’s a train and this is all going to be pretty tiny anyways so I suppose it’s not a huge deal. I’m also looking at including some kind of algae farming and greenhouses, if there’s any way that could be copacetic with agroforestry I’d be happy to mix them up.

    At the moment, my plans go about this far:

    I figure the village will probably have some fruit trees inside it, along with taller trees for shade. I might move the river south to show they’re in a pretty dry spot. I can adjust the topology pretty easily but I’d like to have at least some of the chinese-style greenhouses provoq mentioned set on (or into, for bonus temperature regulation) a hill. Outside of that, I can do whatever makes sense. lots of squiggly rows of trees and crops or tiny herd animals between them? straight rows? I’m not sure how organized the fields should look but my instinct is to make some obvious property boundaries and make it look like several different farms occupying the land. not sure how solarpunk that is

    Thanks again for the suggestions!