When you imagine a city, what do you see? I see
the predominance of cracked grey concrete and black pitch, litter strewn amongst alleys and
drains, monuments to man’s hubris scraping the skies, patches of foliage struggling to survive,
hoards of metal rushing up and down weary roads, telephone and power lines obscuring the sky, and
an ever present haze of exhaust in the atmosphere, and in the faces of each passerby. What sounds
fill your ears? I hear the constant rumble of idle engines, the nyoom of rushing traffic and
blaring horns, the clamour of construction, the hiss of busses and trucks, sirens
wailing to get past the gridlock, the flapping and cooing of abandoned generations
of pigeons, and the footsteps of those that scatter their foraging. What do you smell? I
smell the sickly scent of gas, oil, and urine, the fumes of tailpipes, the rot of garbage
and waste, and the sizzle of street foods.
I walk along uneven sidewalks, I
deny contact with well-worn railings, and use my elbow to press crosswalk buttons.
Sometimes I’m jostled by a slow-moving crowd, other times I’m jaywalking through standstill
traffic. I find it easy to find my bearings but difficult to not feel small. Not feel consumed
by the overbearing heat, the overpowering miasma, and the overwhelming sense of metropolitan
decay. At night, you can’t even see the stars.
Cities may simply be defined as permanent human
settlements of clear boundaries and notable size. You may find kinder iterations in some
corners of the globe, where walkability and superblocks reign supreme, but you will
also find more grotesque manifestations in the form of expanding slums and carcentric
sprawl. Cities are a concept in constant flux, shaped by millennia of human habitation,
but it feels as though a very specific form is taking hold worldwide. If one were to
take a reading of current common sentiment, one may find The City defined as hell,
something anti-human and corrosive to our imaginations of spatial possibilities by
sheer force of its pervasive unimaginativeness. It is dull and life corrupting. Over the
horizon, some cities may be nice to visit, but not necessarily nice to live in. Others are
neither. Few are both. Yet nearly all feel nakedly built on the foundation and desires of private
capital, not the best interest of the people.
So on weekends and holidays, many people seek
physical and psychological reprieve from the hell of the City, which can take the form of escape
and visitation with the paradise of Nature. They are well-understood opposites. You can
choose urban or you can choose rural—you can’t choose both. In this narrow vision, there is no
best of both worlds, and in some manifestations, the suburbs may be considered the worst of both
worlds. But I won’t retread that desire path. The topic of the suburbs and other aspects of city
planning have been covered quite well by the likes of Eco Gecko, Not Just Bikes, and Alan Fisher.
If the rise of urban planning YouTube and corecore tiktoks are anything to go by, people yearn for
more from The City. After all, The City is here to stay. But The City as it exists right now in
much of the world leaves so much to be desired. My question is, recognising the radical
potential of the right to the city, how can we approach city planning through
urban struggle in a cooperative, co-creative, ecological, and egalitarian
fashion? In other words, how can we build a solarpunk city?
SOLARPUNK CITIES: A HOW-TO GUIDE
Before we can delve into the principles
and practical components of solarpunk city development, we must first grasp how cities
came to be and how they’re evolving in our modern context, post-industrial revolution.
Early cities developed naturally out of the growing population of agricultural societies,
typically along floodplains and river valleys. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow
confronted the assumption that early cities necessarily corresponded with the rise of
states. Our social organisation is often seen as determined by scale—egalitarianism in the small
scale and hierarchy in the large scale. After all, we interact with our friends, family, and
neighbourhood very differently than we do nations and metropolises, because we evolved
to navigate society on a small scale. Or so it’s said. Ancient and modern, cities
are exemplary of large-scale societies.
But such societies may not be as foreign to
our evolution as we may initially assume. As it turns out, a lot of people don’t like their
families that much. Modern hunter gatherers, ranging from the Hadza in Tanzania to the
Australian Martu, have been found to reside in groups that contain less than 10% of their
own biological kin. The moieties of Aboriginal Australia and clan systems of Native America also
created bonds of kinship between non-biological kin, even if they had never met before. There’s
also some indication that this may have been the case for our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors
as well. It does not contradict our evolution to align ourselves with strangers and work
together to create cooperative social systems. Foragers may exist in small groups, but it seems
they’ve always existed in larger societies.
As Graeber and Wengrow unpack over the course of
chapter 8, despite initial archaeological evidence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Central America
and elsewhere indicating the correspondence of cities and states, we’ve found that in some
regions, cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces and
concentrations of wealth that would indicate stratification. In others, centralised power seems
to appear and then disappear. Urban life does not, necessarily, require any specific form
of political organisation. While having so many people living in one place may vastly
increase the range of social possibilities, in no sense does it absolutely predetermine which of
those possibilities will ultimately be realised.
However, what has been realised in urban life
today bears the markers of a mass society, a society in which bureaucracy and impersonal
institutions have replaced genuine social bonds, leading to social alienation. In 1800, only about
2% of the world’s population lived in urban areas, but that number has grown to modern estimates
of over 50%. In 1950, only 86 cities around the world had populations of one million people or
more. Today, that number of cities has passed the threshold of 600. According to American
urban theorist Mike Davis, this marks the rise, not of urban Edens, but of a Planet of Slums.
Not inevitable, but created by specific colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal policies that
have pushed people into such circumstances and enforced racial and socioeconomic inequality.
Many of the Cities developed post-Industrial Revolution seem to demonstrate the
narrow-minded management aims of the capitalist factory par excellence:
goods and people being semi-efficiently transported along the easily legible lines
of the grid; natural streams, waterways, and forested undulations of the landscape
obliterated in favour of canals and roadways; historical and marginalised communities carelessly
uprooted or split by the latest highway expansion; common spaces reduced to nodal points of traffic;
and all as the commodity reigns supreme. These Cities consume both people and place. Hundreds
of millions of acres of land have been buried under concrete and steel to feed the ever-growing
sprawl, and as American social ecologist Murray Bookchin noted, “to feed the immense populations
that are absorbed by the cities, agriculture too must be industrialised, [which is] achieved by
spraying crops with harmful chemicals, saturating the soil with inorganic fertilisers, compacting it
with huge harvesting equipment, and levelling the terrain in the countryside.” All of this feeds
into one of our greatest ecological crises.
As cities have expanded, they’ve joined with
other cities, creating an ever growing expanse of megapolis, best seen in the urban
behemoths of the Tokaido Corridor in Japan and the Boston-Washington Corridor of the
US. The burden that this way of building cities under this socioeconomic system has placed on
the natural environment is equally staggering: with such exhausting urban food and
energy demands, noise, air, light, and water pollution disrupt weather patterns and
poison the biosphere. However, it should be noted that size is not necessarily the determining
factor here. Smaller urban areas can create as much or even more problems for the environment
compared to larger urban areas. Much of what determines the extent of the environmental impact
of an urban population is the hows of living. How people get around, how people consume and deal
with their waste, how people build their homes, etc etc etc. A large city with mixed use zoning
and a robust and effective public transit system will likely have a lower environmental impact
than a smaller city that is entirely reliant on cars to get from zone to zone. Regrettably, one
of the base assumptions of this socioeconomic system is that there can be no limit to growth,
economic or urban. As climate breakdown continues, we must confront this assumption if we are to
take a different approach to city planning.
But what precisely is city planning? In essence,
city planning is a process focused on the development and design of land use, water use,
and infrastructure, particularly transportation, communications, and distribution networks.
Ideally, city planning should effectively answer questions about how people will live,
work, and play in a given area, accounting for their transportation, utilities, health, and more.
However, despite the lofty humanitarian goals of many city planning projects, which to be fair
has had some successes, the field is also rife with failures, largely due to the precedence of
capitalist interests and the exclusion of those most impacted by city planning decisions—the
residents themselves—from the process.
There have been many iconic city planning visions
over the years; some controversially realised, such as Brasilia, and others left to the realm
of imagination. One of the most influential of these utopian visions spawned its own 20th century
urban planning movement: the garden city movement. The English Georgist and city planner Ebenezer
Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow, published in 1902, painted an idealised city that married
town and country, creating a union to “spring a new life.” He sought to combine the benefits of
town’s opportunity, amusement, and good wages with the country’s beauty, fresh air, and low
rents. Though strongly influenced by the works and ideas of American socialist Edward Bellamy
and Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Howard wasn’t particularly conce rned with the social,
economic, or political causes of urban misery. His urban vision was mainly focused on how the design
and structure of the city itself could alleviate urban poverty, overcrowding, poor ventilation,
pollution, disease, and separation from nature.
The focus of the garden city design was a compact
urban entity of about thirty thousand people engaged in manufacturing, commerce, and services,
surrounded by a green belt to limit urban sprawl and provide open land for recreational and
agricultural purposes. All the land in the city was meant to be held in trust and leased to
occupants on a rental basis. However, despite the aims to preserve natural beauty and potential
to stimulate greater human contiguity, Howard’s vision lacks a sufficient confrontation with the
structure of capitalism. Rather than advocating for self-management and a change in how we relate
to the means of production, garden cities simply ignore the battlegrounds of class that engender
our urban environments. Garden cities also lack the vision of face-to-face democracy seen in
the Greek polis, nor do they possess any of the other radical mechanisms of political
involvment seen in the Paris Commune. What Howard misses is that cities under capitalism are
spaces of vast income inequality, time disparity, and alienated labour. Though a necessary
component in promoting community, changing the design and layout of the city alone will not
change that reality. In the end, the garden city vision leaves us with a bitter taste of compromise
with certain aspects of capitalism and the state, much like the ideology of Georgism as a whole.
As Bookchin writes in The Limits of the City,
“[Howard’s garden city does] not encompass the
full range and possibilities of human experience. Neighbourliness is mistaken for organic social
intercourse and mutual aid; well-manicured parks for the harmonisation of humanity with nature;
the proximity of work places for the development of a new meaning for work and its integration with
play; an eclectic mix of ranch-houses, slab-like apartment buildings, and bachelor-type flats for
spontaneous architectural variety; shopping-mart plazas and a vast expanse of lawn for the agora;
lecture halls for cultural centres; hobby classes for vocational variety; benevolent trusts or
municipal councils for self-administration.
Indeed, the appearance of community serves
the ideological function of concealing the incompleteness of an intimate and shared
social life. Key elements of the self are formed outside the parameters of the design —
by forces that stem from economic competition, class antagonisms, social hierarchy, domination,
and economic exploitation. Although people are brought together to enjoy certain conveniences
and pleasantries, they remain as truncated and culturally impoverished as they were in the
metropolis, with the difference that the stark reality of urban decay in the big cities removes
any veil of appearances from the incompleteness and contradictions of social life.”
The problem with city planning that we must confront is that city planning alone
is not enough. In fact, it can reinforce the very mindsets and systems we seek to abolish.
Historically, city planning arose in part as a response to capitalists’ utter inability
to not generate unsanitary, inefficient, and uninhabitable cities in their pursuit of profit.
However, city planning has still been largely limited by the destructive social conditions to
which it was a response. The utopian visions once presented by city planners have been muted by a
lack of political will to see them implemented and a “pragmatic” mentality of capitalist society
which “deals with the facts of life” within the parameters established by said capitalism. Cities
will continue to reflect this society until this society is fundamentally changed. Only egalitarian
relations can produce egalitarian space. Until city planning embraces a radical critique
of hierarchical social relations, it will forever remain a servant of those relations
that continue to produce our urban crisis.
One form this radical critique may take can
be found in French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 book Le Droit à la Ville. In
other words, the right to the city. Recognising the “generalised misery of everydayness” in a city
run by bureaucrats and bourgeoise, escaped only by the consumption of commodities, the right to the
city is a call to action to reclaim the city as a co-created space for a transformed, renewed,
and self-managed urban life. Complemented by the right to difference and the right to information,
the right to the city should modify, concretise, and make more practical the rights of the citizen
as an urban dweller and user of multiple services, who should have access to the city in
common and without stratification. Quote:
“...the right to urban life, to a renewed
centrality, to places of meetings and exchanges, to a rhythm of life that allows the full and
entire use of these moments and places.”
The right to the city, according to Brazilian
academic Marcelo Lopes de Souza, is the right to full and equal enjoyment of the resources
and services concentrated in cities, something that would only be fully possible in another,
non-capitalist society. However, this alternative cannot be birthed from state power. As Lefebvre
notes, “The incompatibility between the state and the urban is radical in nature. The state
can only prevent the urban from taking shape.” According to British Marxist geographer David
Harvey, the right to the city is “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves.” The
right to the city is the right of the oppressed to take power and open new and better ways
of urban living, untethered by the state.
As radical as these conceptions of the right
to the city may be, that hasn’t prevented the slogan from being co-opted by certain NGOs,
international bodies, and municipal authorities with entirely different ideological orientations
and agendas, even going as far as to attempt to rewrite the history of the movement. These
assimilationists routinely ignore the class struggle baked into Lefebvre’s conception of
the right to the city in favour of an approach that integrates the term into bog standard policy
with weak gestures against particular aspects of neoliberalism. Their deradicalised version of
the right to the city is, according to Souza, “the right to a better, more ‘human’ life in the
context of the capitalist city, the capitalist society and on the basis of a ‘reformed’
and ‘improved’ representative ‘democracy.’”
The right to the city has gained ground in various
environmental and urbanist movements, but attempts to exercise it in practice through the existing
channels of municipal power have had limited success, which begs the question of if it is
possible to maintain the structure of the status quo while ostensibly upholding the right to the
city. The answer should be obvious. The right to the city is a rallying cry of revolution, not
reform. One clear exercise of this understanding can be seen in the resistance groups in France
that stake claim on the spaces that the government and private sector seek to use for their own
interests. The ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes is the most notable example, where ecologists
and activists claimed the proposed site of a new airport in 2009 as a Zone d’Autonomie et de
Defense (Zone of Defence and Autonomy), creating a self-organised area based on autonomy
from capitalism, radical ecology, and degrowth, leading to the cancellation of
the project by the French government in 2018.
The realities of urban life, the possibilities
and limitations of city planning, and the rallying cry of the right to the city should
all inform our approach to a solarpunk future.
Skit:
“Welcome to the Lúcio Costa School of Urban Planning, where you
can learn how to design the perfect city. Drawing from the excellent city layouts of Jakarta, Sao
Paulo, Brasilia, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Dubai, our courses have been tailored to give you the
best urban design education possible. Learn how to create the perfect highway to cut right through
a Black community and how to push the poor people to the outskirts of the city they work in
but can’t afford to live in. And of course, what city would be complete without an unreliable
public transit system? Our courses include:
The Land We’re On, where you can learn
to disregard the natural environment and its original inhabitants; Designing
Sustainable Cities, where you’ll learn how to grow trees on a concrete skyscraper; Urban
Consulting Practice, where we’ll show you how to kiss the feet of corporate lobbyists; And of
course, Urban Planning and Politics, where we’ll follow the James C Scott guide to historically
successful social engineering, including: the administrative ordering of nature and society by
the state; a “high-modernist ideology” that places confidence in the ability of science to improve
every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale
interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.
Come access our world-class facilities, including the first ever pedestrian-hostile
university campus and the latest version of base game, unmodded Cities Skylines available in our
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In order to approach any radical transformation
of the city, we must have a good grasp of our principles. In summary: I believe a successful
solarpunk city requires ecological integration, decolonial ethos, organic design,
and participatory planning.
By ecological integration, I’m referring to
the conscious cultivation of a relationship with the land, through the practice of deep
listening, with our senses wide open to the natural world. I’m talking about getting to know
the trees that line your commute. I mean paying attention to the native and invasive flora and
fauna that surround you. It’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking that ecology exists outside
of the city, but understanding urban ecology is vital in our struggle to protect the land and
waterways of our environment. The city is also a habitat, constantly struggling towards greater
biodiversity. It is part of various watersheds and it hosts a variety of communities, human
and otherwise. The health of these communities is inextricably interlinked. Our urban space has
vast ecological potential to contribute positively instead of negatively to the biosphere.
A solarpunk city should encapsulate third nature: the reintegration of first and second
nature. In the field of social ecology, first nature refers to the nature that is carried
out through evolutionary processes. It simply is. Second nature is society, built off of ideas
and turning ideas into reality. Second nature is mutable because it is informed by the way that
we reason about the world and the choices that we make about how to construct it. Hierarchical
society is only one form that our second nature can take. Through the proper integration of
the ecology and human society, we can actualise revolutionary new human possibilities, in both
our social organisation and in our city design.
Some folks have already begun exploring
those possibilities. The Transition Town movement is a movement of communities coming
together to reimagine and rebuild our world, one neighbourhood at a time. Since 2005, across 48
countries, thousands of community-led Transition groups have been working for a low-carbon,
socially just future with resilient communities, using participatory methods to imagine
the changes we need, setting up renewable energy projects, re-localising food
systems, repairing and reskilling, and creating community and green spaces in towns,
villages, cities, universities, and schools.
Our urban transformations must be based in
a decolonial ethos. I’m not just referring to symbolic decolonisation, where we confront
and take control of the visible and symbolic aspects of colonial domination represented
in our street names, squares, rivers, and forests. I’m also referring to active
effort to combat the systemic inequalities that have been reinforced by urban layouts.
Asking questions like who profits off of the industry of the city and who suffers the
cancers of its effluent? Whose forests and communities are consistently cleared away
or gentrified for the purpose of “urban development?” Which communities have access to
green spaces and tree-lined streets? Where does the city get hottest and who lives there? How
do we change that? What forms can reparations take for those victims of economic and racial
segregation, gentrification, and displacement? By decolonisation, I mean reclaiming
the public for the public in common.
Organic City
A solarpunk city must be designed to meet the organic needs of the
people themselves as the utmost priority, above and beyond the whims of capital. As of late, this
desire has manifested in the form of the car-free city movement and the 15-minute city movement. The
car-free city movement advocates for cities that rely primarily on public transport, walking, or
cycling for transportation while either fully or partially prohibiting personal vehicles within the
city limits. The similar 15-minute city movement advocates for mixed-use development that locates
daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, health, and leisure, within
an easily reachable 15-minute walk or bike ride from any point in the city. The 15-minute city
might also involve the advocacy of remote work as a solution to many people's need to commute. Both
movements aim to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and overall
improve the quality of life for city dwellers, however, they aren't all easy to apply,
particularly to areas with an existing layout of urban sprawl. I don’t believe cars
can or should be completely eradicated from use, but I believe their uses need to be far more
niche and situational than they are now.
Human-focused city design goes beyond just
transportation. A solarpunk city will need to be designed in a way that reduces food miles through
urban farming, produces local renewable energy, manages waste sustainably, caters to all
facets of our health, cultivates social bonds, meets our aesthetic needs, and provides
essential and desired goods and services through a library economy, all in congruence with local
conditions, local cultures, and local climate. Organic design should also reflect the potential
of change; if the city is a living organism, how might it evolve in the future?
All of these solarpunk city aims should be grounded in what I consider to be an essential
principle: self-management. A solarpunk city needs to be designed from the bottom up, not the
top down, through the direct participation and control of the residents themselves. For
one, because if it isn't, it's not solarpunk. For dos, as American anthropologist James C Scott
highlighted in Seeing Like A State, centrally managed social plans continuously misfire because
they try to impose ordered and simplistic visions that fail to account for or accommodate the
complex interdependencies that make up real life. Interdependencies that are not—and
cannot—be fully understood. Scott identified that these statist
failures have four conditions in common: 1) The administrative ordering of nature and
society by the state; 2) A high modernist ideology that places confidence in the ability
of science to improve every aspect of human life; 3) A willingness to use authoritarian state
power to effect large-scale interventions; And 4) a prostrate civil society that
cannot effectively resist such plans.
As he eventually concludes, these programs
are characterised by their techne, a Greek word that he defines as expressed precisely and
comprehensively in the form of hard-and-fast rules, principles, and propositions based
on logical deduction from self-evident first principles. Techne is found most potently
in the body of work of Frederick Taylor, an American engineer who fathered “scientific
management,” an idea that would inform the organisation of the factories of both
Henry Ford and the Soviet Union.
But what these programs to simplify and
administer human behaviour lack is metis, a Greek word for “cunning intelligence,” or more
accurately, the wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence one develops in responding
to a constantly changing natural and human environment. While techne is universalising,
metis is particular and contextual. In a word, it's street smarts. The on-the-ground
knowledge that top-down planners typically lack in determining city plans. Don't get me wrong.
That's not to dismiss the validity of techne, but techne needs to be grounded by metis:
planning needs to be participatory and grounded by the recognition of the inherent
unpredictability of complex human and natural systems, because we don't fall neatly in
line with the ideals of five year plans.
As an alternative to the conditions of
statist failure Scott outlines in his book, he provides these recommendations for
those aiming to reconfigure their society: 1) Take small steps, because we cannot know the
consequences of our interventions in advance; 2) favour reversivility, because irreversible
interventions have irreversible consequences; 3) plan on surprises, because we must be
flexible enough to accommodate the unforeseen; and 4) plan on human inventiveness, because you
never know what ideas and insights will develop in the process of implementing various projects.
A solarpunk city needs self management in all spheres of life, from the way we labour to the
way we study to the spaces we live in and leisure, with a variety of distributed
decision making forms and methods, from consensus to liquid democracy, the details
of which I’ve explored in past and future videos. From community land trusts to library economies
to popular assemblies, what matters most is that those who are affected by decisions have
a say in those decisions and that we are able to draw from a diverse pool of both metis
and techne, playing on the strengths, skills, knowledges, and experiences of the people.
There is a variety of avenues of urban struggle open to us. In this regard, the anarchic tradition
is rich with potential inspirations, from the squatting movements in Britain, Spain, and
Brazil to the urban commoning efforts in Greece.
In 1976, British anarchist Colin Ward
published Housing: An Anarchist Approach, in which he described the efforts of
the Ex-Servicemen’s Secret Committee, whose vigilantes worked at night to break
into unoccupied homes and install the homeless families and belongings of former servicemen
who were being neglected by the government. As the movement’s secretary is quoted saying:
“I have told them, ‘If you see a house, take it and let the law do its damnedest.’ We have
started a movement which we hope and pray will spread over the length and breadth of the land.”
They understood that in the face of such neglect, they would only gain housing as a result of their
own militant action, and eventually the Brighton Corporation conceded and promised to officially
requisition houses for its homeless population. Ward’s final message was simple and direct:
“Act on your own—no reliance on the politicians, especially those who try to cash in on your
success. Stick together, and work on as big a scale as possible. Don't give up, and don't give
a damn for the authorities. If the Vigilantes have these three prerequisites for successful action:
independence, solidarity and determination, we can be sure that their movement will spread
over the length and breadth of the land.”
Through the practices of occupation and
squatting, there also exist vibrant urban struggles for housing in Spain and Brazil,
arising among individuals and housing movements in response to the capitalist dynamics that
have produced empty homes and homeless people.
The urban struggle in Greece has arisen
in response to the austerity measures wielded against the working classes in the
cities-built-overnight in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The process of enclosure, unregulated by
planning law stipulations for public space, eroded traditional communities, commodified
housing, and promoted a sense of urban isolation. Many Greek cities still lack such facilities
today, leading to a bubbling frustration that has at times erupted in a reappropriation
of public space by horizontal collectives.
After the police murder of 15-year-old
Alexandros Grigoropoulos in December 2008, a wave of protests, demonstrations, and
occupations of urban space led by students, immigants, and the disenfranchised urban youth
would highlight the alienation, exploitation, and exclusion built into Athens and work to
actively transform the city through decentralised acts of re-appropriation of urban space, including
public building occupations, barricades, marches, spontaneous artistic events, and disruptions of
traffic and commerce. Not limited by a struggle for reforms, the protestors sought to actively
project their collective aspirations onto the urban landscape of Exarcheia, giving birth to
self-managed squats, common parks, social centres, and thousands of organisations, art collectives,
and grassroots unions that would teach a generation about direct action and solidarity.
The Greek urban struggle is about substituting “public” space with “common space.” It’s about
creating an organic and fluid space for the natural development of community bonds. It’s about
people seeing themselves as a group, questioning current conditions, identifying their collective
and individual needs, and negotiating new forms of coexistence. Though many squats and occupations
were only temporary, such “liminal commons” would still experiment with new spatial practices
that could be applied to future struggles.
In the wake of the protests, urban farming
commons would arise in an abandoned military base in Thessaloniki and a former airport in
Elliniko. Both sites were meant to be privatised, but in both cases, instead of demanding that their
right of access to urban space was respected, citizens’ movements self-enacted this right
through commoning. Similarly, community self-defense movements would reconnect power for
families who couldn’t pay their energy bills; the potato movement would bring together the urban and
the rural, cutting out oligopolistic middle men; and a network of self-managed solidarity clinics,
workers cooperatives, and consumer cooperatives would work to strengthen community resilience
and autonomy. Unfortunately, the vision of Exarcheia has since been significantly
curtailed by various political leaders, which should remind us that such urban struggles
cannot be isolated from other, broader fights.
When you think of a solarpunk city, what do you
see? I see people free from the binds of a 9-5 and the chokehold of their commute, basking in
the variety offered by the urban atmosphere. I see wide avenues varied in their use, murals
painted over generations, windmills dotting the horizon, children playing in the street, and
rooftop gardens spilling over their sides. What sounds fill your ears? I hear the bell-ringing of
bikes, the rumble of the tram along a boulevard lined with trees rustling in the wind, the
absence of engines and horns, the chirps and songs of various birds filling the air, the hum of
collective conversation in each nook and cranny of a public square, and the sounds of laughter and
joy from a group of students studying the world around them. What do you smell? I smell the aroma
of fresh baked bread, the tickle of pollen carried by the breeze, the sizzle of various homegrown
streetfoods, the damp, earthy richness of the soil, and the fresh, salty air of a seaside city.
We don’t need to be bound by the irrational and violent impositions of the megapolis, which
plunders the human spirit and the natural world. We have the potential to consciously reconstruct
urban life in ways that foster balanced, well-rounded, and harmonious communities that
provide an open arena for our creative and social needs while correcting the rift
between humanity and nature. Powered by local energy sources and carefully tailored
to the ecosystems in which they are located, these eco-communities can bridge the divide
between urban and rural. As Bookchin wrote,
“Nature will not be reduced to a mere symbol of
the natural, a spectatorial object to be seen from a window or during a stroll, it will become an
integral part of all aspects of human experience, from work to play. Only in this Form can
the needs of nature become integrated with the needs of humanity and yield an
authentic ecological consciousness…”
Through a blend of ecological
integration, decolonial ethos, organic design, and participatory planning,
informed by a legacy of urban struggles, we can radically reclaim our right to the
city, together. All power to all the people.
Peace.
Hold on hold on, before you go! I have some big announcements to make.
Firstly, shoutout to Sean Bodley, who created this beautiful piece depicting a rather vibrant,
tropical solarpunk city. He’s also the artist behind this piece. He has all sorts of amazing
climate art, including illustrations of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and you all should
definitely support him on patreon.com/seanbodley. Thanks again for this incredible piece Sean.
Secondly, shoutout to Anna Sorokina, who produced this wonderful work depicting a quieter corner of
solarpunk utopia. She has some striking artworks on her website, which you should definitely go and
support at annasorokinaart.com. Be sure to follow her on instagram as well @annasorokinaart.
Also, shoutout to Lil Bill for narrating the skit for this episode! His channel is
also linked in the description below.
The big announcement in question is that the
Solarpunk Art Collab is back! In case you didn’t know, in 2021 I released a video featuring various
artists in my community depicting solarpunk ideas. It was such a great success, I’d like
to do it again, this time with a theme: BIOREGION. I want each visual art piece submitted
to reflect human societies in a solarpunk setting that are constrained by ecological or geographical
boundaries. A lot of solarpunk artwork features temperate environments, but I’d love to see
solarpunk pieces in more diverse settings, such as deserts, shrublands, mangroves, temperate and
tropical grasslands and forests, and much more. For more information, check out the
discord linked in the description below.
