Hi, I’ve been working on a few photobashes lately, of different scenes in a fictional solarpunk future. I recently started a scene of a solarpunk village. I’ve been thinking a lot about rural places lately, 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 are 40 minutes away by car (more if you’re looking for a box store), 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’ve realized that this is a bit bigger in scope than most of the things I’ve depicted before. I’m trying to show most of a community in one shot here (albeit at a distance). And there’s so much we could do differently, I don’t really want to miss any ideas/opportunities.
I know I want to include the following:
- A 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
- Maybe a bit of an inside-out appearance where they’ve cleared farmland around the town but planted lots of trees between the buildings for cooling?
But when it comes to stuff like the layout and other societal-structure stuff, I don’t really have any specifics in mind, which is why I feel like I should look for input from others rather than just drag along my own assumptions. As always I plan to emphasize reuse, so I can grab some existing bits and pieces of towns, but this’ll be in the US where even the small towns aren’t (in my experience) clumped this densely, so we have some flexibility with what the current residents have changed.
Here’s the really rough version I currently have, so you can get an idea as to the general layout I’m planning for. The big green blank space and the surrounding woods etc is where the village and fields will go.
Sorry if I’m asking around too much, I posted to /c/farming yesterday for ideas for the fields (which I’m also happy to get) but I feel like a solarpunk society should be very consensus-driven, so it makes sense for depictions of it to be as well. I’ll be doing smaller, simpler scenes for a bit after this one and should be more self-sufficient.
Look into agroforestry and forest gardens. Not well developed in non-tropical climates currently, but it’s probably the most sustainable form of agriculture in naturally forested regions. I think a solarpunk society would try to keep totally cleared fields to a minimum unless the climate naturally leads to more open vegetation.
Also maybe take a look at coppices while you’re on that track! Forestry management and harvesting trees while leaving mature trees around and letting new growth come up from stumps. If folks might be doing some clay/wattle construction it would be a potential source for sustainable housing materials.
I’ll definitely dig into this. At first glance it looks like at this distance the easiest way to represent it would be as rows of trees with crops in between, but I’ll do more research. Thanks for recommending this, I wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise!
Bikes, especially ones with longer frames to work as cargo vehicles.
Thanks! I included bikes in the first two solarpunk photobashes I did, and definitely plan to add them to future scenes (though I’m not sure they’ll show up in this one as it’s a pretty distant zoom on most of the scene). I’ll definitely include a long cargo bike next time, I love seeing all the different versions people use around here.
ebike + bike trailer or an cargo ebike could be a potent light cargo hauler. you can pedal, but I could build a bike with off the shelf parts with a horsepower a decent percentage of a small car without all the extra weight, before you add in your own pedal power too
In a world with many fewer cars, where bikes would have more room on the road, I kind of wonder if people would go further - what kind of new pedal-powered or hybrid contraptions would they build? Cargo bikes seem very effective, would there be a benefit to cargo tricycles or four wheeled cart things?
There’s a French company that plans to release an ebike with a capacitor instead of a battery, which sounds pretty cool and a bit more sustainable.
Rope-ways are a cool mode of transportation in an mountainous area like that. Could be also used to quickly cross the lake/river to reach a train station on the opposite side.
Solar PV could be floating on the lake.
I really dig these! I never really considered gondola-type cable cars for practical use outside of ski mountains, and I really like the idea! I don’t know if I can make one work in this scene but if I can’t, they’re definitely going on my list for future photobashes! Even with whatever rough maintenance roads necessary to get to the posts, these seem like a super low-impact, and probably pretty cheap, way to cross terrain.
In La Paz (Bolivia) and a few other places these ropeways work like metro stations: https://youtu.be/FAriob9Z9NI?feature=shared
Quite cheap and efficient, and no need to cut much forest either.
Okay so something that’s slowly dying in rural America is the presence of specialty stores and craftspeople. Before dollar general and Walmart killed most of it, there were separate/mom n’ pop bakeries, pharmacies, blacksmiths (we could modernize that concept with a technological repair person to fix broken or malfunctioning parts), and tractor/feed supplies. Some of these still exist in rural America obviously but they are declining. Bring back specialization and apprenticeship.
In the center of your village could be a decently sized community garden, with small greenhouses scattered throughout. It acts sort of like a central park or courtyard. Also, rooftop gardens!
Maybe some sort of outdoor community center?
100% agreed with your first paragraph - I hate box stores and how they’ve reshaped our communities and the sort of formalization of everything that came along with them - this is harder to explain, but the endlessly-duplicated franchise chains are a part of it, this sense that a business isn’t legitimate unless it’s a big brand operating out of a specially-built concrete box. A lot of businesses around here were just built in houses and vise-versa until they started stamping these things down all over the place. My town still has a bunch of local places I prioritize, and I can see a solarpunk society really emphasizing local, unique places.
I’ve done one scene of big industry (solar furnace steel recycling) but I’ve got a smaller scale one in the works - a local workshop/co-op, possibly somewhere that makes custom replacement parts in small batches to keep machines going now that some of the companies that produced them are gone. I could definitely see a return to apprenticeships and trades, especially in a post-post-apocalyptic setting like this where they’re trying to rebuild better. Next summer I’m going to try building a solar forge (I’ve got the forging tools from years back, had a super informal apprenticeship with a blacksmith when I was a kid) and we’ll see if it’s possible to make basic stuff short of forge welding using free heat.
You caught me at a good time for adding stuff to the village - it’s still pretty much a blank spot on the map. I know I want to have a food forest/park somewhat near the middle, possibly around/shading a levada carrying water to/between water wheels. I’ll have a courtyard/market somewhat near the middle, so a community garden wouldn’t be out of place (though the village will have a lot of farms around it). Any flat roofs will have some garden stuff on them, and the rest will probably have solar panels or solar water heaters.
Thanks for your input!
Love what you’re doing dude. You’ve got all kinds of cool ideas. Keep up the good work!
