I enjoyed your presentation. I found your channel today as I was working on my farm. I just learned about solarpunk a few days ago. I believe that we have a bright future ahead. I am always an optimistic person. I do recognize the negative issues that wr as humans have and can cause. However I personally work to make it better. In my personal space as well as serving a term as council and mayor of a small town. I do believe we must be active and take action. I also believe that individuals can do more positive quickly than governments. I will take time to listen to more of your presentations. Thanks for sharing. Peace.
I don't know if those modular island aren't actually contributing to a cyberpunk future.. it's solarpunk, but only for the people who can afford to live there.
So this is basically my dream but I always felt it fit right into utopian living. I'm currently coming up with designs for a drone capable of dropping seed pods
The solarpunk water city is a cool concept, but I feel like everyone forgets even the people designing these projects is how will such a city concept hold up against a hurricane, or extreme weather? That should always be the main focus of any project, how will this hold up when shtf.
Wow, oceanian -how to 'design' a city whos' cost per sq meter is 1000 x out of reach of the average citizen. The wood and bamboo to fool you while the seawater below will require far more durable and energy intense construction. Wonder where the homelss will be sleeping in this new 'gated' community - oh yes they will be excluded naturally since these are the types of imaginary places for the super rich only. Don't see any railings anywhere, or kids...wow, if we want to make a completely un-affordable solution this is the type of crazy silly ideas we should consider. Wonder what this site would look like After Hurrican Katrina... The problem with architects, they are always empolyed by the rich, they never consider a space that is based on the average income of a person. Start over using the average income of a population, and see what you can come up with, guided by solar punk ideas, and forgettabout Cities - think of Towns and villages. The 'age' of the City is in the past now.
Idk building islands in tropics seems precarious to me, cause global warming ain't stopping. Also the failure of palm leaf islands and the world islands in UAE was quite spectacular. But I gotta hard disagree with the politics of this video, if we establish somewhat of a sustainable future but keep the systems of domination and workers exploitation intact, then as somebody once said, we end up just establishing cyberpunk with a solarpunk face. I think it is quite essential for a political overhaul to happen, a change from status quo and some degrowth and giving up of some of our modern conveniences to make a solarpunk future possible.
It's not solarpunk if it's just a fancy tech project for the rich to retreat into. It's not a solarpunk project if you don't discuss how these projects can be made accessible and aren't just some scheme by rich capitalist to profit from them. Really solarpunk isn't about doing cool tech project now as a substitute to defeating capitalism, it's about what we can do after we stop capitalism from destroying the planet, it's about the fact that humanity's future isn't all doom and there is something to fight for, but the fight aspect comes first, if you neutralize the political element it's nothing more than a pretty aesthetics to make you feel good.
Thanks for that inspiring and great video! I share a lot of your perspective on solarpunk, but I miss a little bit the "Punk" in the approach. So, to answer your question, no, it will not be (professional) architects building & planning the solarpunk world, it's more an "DIY" approach. Same with the aesthetics: Very often it's too clean, too standardized, too well-planned what is sold as "Solarpunk" to be "Punk" in my understanding. Punk aesthetics is much more ad-hoc and organic. Punk does not fit into a matchbox-world, even if the matchbox is hexagonal. Punk is not dead ;)
Agree, the "built environment" is part of the problem, not the solution. Consider the least modification to an environment as the ideal solution, not the max modification. The problem with traditional architecture is it's relance on big budget idealism rather than minimum impact sustainability. A solar punk environment is more like suspending small structures in a tree rather than constructing a massive concrete and steel structure with a few plants stuck here and there to make it look nice.
Yes, Solarpunk is also about building communities and diversity, which means every community will come up to their unique solutions for their (sometimes unique) problems. Solarpunk is not a rigid structure or be all end all solution, but a movement that embraces change for the better, however it may look. DIY or Die! although i think that projects built by professional Architects will be a small part of that aswell, just not the main part.
If it ain't Punk it ain't Solarpunk. I'm sorry to argue semantics but Solarpunk is part of a larger post-modern punk art movement. What you are describing is green futurism. That is also good. The Jetsons are Green Futurism. What you are enthusiastic about is the *goal* of Solarpunks. The finish line of a revolution against all those things that stop us from building the future that we want. The suffix of -Punk is there for a reason. Cyberpunk came first. Punks fought against a setting using the tools they had build community, destroy hierarchy, and accomplish their own goals with their own effort. Punk isn't about asking nicely. Punk rock isn't a somber acoustic jam at the farmer's market. Such is all punk. Steampunk, Diesel punk, and now Solarpunk came right behind it. Unfortunately people were also caught up in the aesthetics. In the contemporary space the visuals crowd out the conversation and all good art gets boiled down to the looks. What you explained about drones dropping seeds and not bombs is only half of it. They need to drop them on a GMO fertilizer sponge farm monocrop, or a golf course, or a green suburbia behind a fence. That is rebelling against a status quo that hurts us. What you so adore is the Green Futurism that happens *after* the Solarpunks have achieved their goals.
Yeah that’s fair. It was a somewhat conscious choice to focus more on the technological aspect than the ideological because I didn’t want to get too political. But definitely fair comment that I failed to highlight the rebellious aspects of solarpunk.
@@ThatBIMGirl When you contrast it with Cyber,Steam or Diesel you are alienating it from it's politics. It is deliberately political. Green Futurism is it's own thing, glad you love it. Please don't conflate the journey with the destination. Punks to old for the mosh pit will thank you for it.
@@ThatBIMGirlthis response made me sigh with relief, I expected something else, you kept it real on top of making a great video essay. Love from NYC 💯👌🏾
I keep seeing comments like this. It seems like the adherents of postmodernism are trying to coopt meta modernism and solar punk and if they succeed they'll manage to make those movements fail just as much as postmodernism has. I couldn't care less what you think solar punk should be. To me and any one who's not out to play silly authoritarian political games see it as described in this video.
@@ThatBIMGirl I think in part that was the mistake, because Solarpunk IS a politcal movement, so if one truly wants to tackle the topic one needs to adress the political aspects as well as the societal, technological and aesthetical aspects.
Great video, again! I remember, back in design school the documentary: Future by Design with Jacque Fresco, where the future 'kind of ' was point at this direction. It seems now that the future is waiting for us to take the right actions as fast as we can. (we including governments, laws etc, everywere). This video for sure made this subject easy for people to understand. Thank you!
In watching several videos purporting to discuss the Solarpunk vision, I have yet to see a single one that addresses or even mentions science fiction and fantasy works of past decades that deal with, lay our or play upon the themes Solarpunk advocates and enthusiasts call new. The writing of such authors as Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. LeGuin, Ernest Callenbach and Joanna Russ wrote about and advocated for such future possibilities from the 1960s on. Sturgeon not only wrote many of the finest original series Star Trek scripts, but also invented the Prime Directive Roddenberry's series was essentially founded upon. Callenbach wrote the widely praised and influential 1975 novel Ecotopia. Joanna Russ wrote the Female Man about parallel worlds of Capitalistic versus future collective futures. LeGuin wrote The Word for the World is Forest and many other stories set in alternate futures. I find it unfortunate that no one in the so-called Solarpunk movement seems interested in or even informed about the history of great writing like this, much of which directly influenced back-to-the-Earth movements from "hippie" times to now. There are plenty of models and examples to draw upon, respond to and get inspiration from. You said you avidly researched the origins and meaning of the term Solarpunk, and I would encourage you to delve deeper into its precursors and make connections to the works of these past visionaries.
this movement started back in the 1970's with solutions using the term "appropriate technology". it went no where- i gave up 15 years ago as a Passive Solar building designer. today the ONLY way to get people to support the cleaner alternatives (which will include no technology) is to dramatically raise the cost of all types of pollution via economic taxes- starting with the cost of fossil fuels. we also need a wealth tax inorder to invest/develop the cleaner alternatives. this will be painfull but necessary. and building on the surface and under water is a bad idea- its totally dependant on "high" fossil fuel tech! water must be left alone (with a highly regulated hunting protocal) and not polluted, so the species that live there can continue to thrive and cleanse that water. we are a land based species. i also think the word "punk" is an immature/slang and has no real meaning. follow the history of environmentalism and add to its strength.
Great video. While climate/conservation is extremely important -- it may be intolerance, and hate-fueled rhetoric that dooms our world. Thank god for people like you, who have a ... contagiously positive, optimistic charisma. In fact, sometimes I watch your channel to learn about Revit/etc -- at other times, it's simply for the your contagious optimism. ...If more people were as positive as you, it would solve the only issue that is perhaps more dire than climate change.
I'm doing a fictional series that hopefully can one day fund a solarpunk "theme park" based on it. Figure get people to want to visit a place like that might make them want to live someplace similar but close to their roots.
Welcome to the movement -- check out the other Solarpunk RU-vidrs that are out there -- Solarpunk Life (me), The Solarpunk Scene (Lindsay Jane), and so on!
The only thing about solarpunk is that it doesn't describe or explain how that advanced technology achieved. If its socialist/collectivism message then they need to explain where the advanced technology is coming from? R&D from a corporation? Who's assembling the technology? People with advanced degrees from a university, paid got with alot of money?
Hi Jacqueline, I agree, solar punk is optimistic and probably unrealistic. Utopia is possible in two ways. #1. Alien invasion and takeover of the planet. The aliens would have to confiscate our nuclear weopons and nuclear materials, cool and deacidify the oceans, remove 2.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, provide clean energy technology, and govern the earth while solving overpopulation and changing human civilization into a sustainable, equitable, meaningful society. 2. Humans can invent an army of billions of super AI robots that would clean up the environment and redesign civilization and govern it, by force where needed. Humans cant do it on their own. Even if humans could eliminate corruption and come up with a clean energy source, we cant pull 2.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere or clean the microplastic out of the ecosphere, or cool the oceans or deacidify the oceans, or lower human population significantly. Yes, doomed, because humans are not capable of responsibly governing ourselves. That is our hamartia.
Idealism and realism are huge factors. You can’t demand the general public to watch their foot prints while mega corporations keep producing garbage. How about we make them both co exist then through phases it will gradually becomes obsolete.
Great video and first time to hear about the light, dark & bright greens. 😊 That last model though of the cities on water. Why do we have to have to build on the oceans? Is it because of the inevitable sea level rise? We could definitely do a lot more on land such as ending dereliction, having community food gardens and work towards extremely low pollution cities like Amsterdam with most people cycling or electric cars like on the Not Just Bikes RU-vid channel. Keep up the good work 🙏🌎🌱
Yeah so the reasoning for this was in fact about coastal regions disappearing and instead of mass migrations inwards to allow relief onto artificial island communities. People living in costal regions are used to structuring their life around the sea and might find it hard to adopt to different jobs/lifestyle. Of course this is only one in a million things we need to do. So let’s do all of them 😊
Thank you for all your video cast! Your video cast are very informative and intriguing, about the architectural realm. It reminds me of my Architectural theory classes. Keep up the great work! ~meow
I think we’re doomed but projects like this can save us if enough people turn into heros to execute these amazing innovative ideas and rebuild our infrastructure :D amazing video
Just remember you are a person too, don’t wait for somebody else because you are a somebody also, how we do this is by doing it in some way or another, others will follow but everyone waits for someone around them to lead first.
We are doomed as long as we will think that we are doomed and as long as we will think that somebody will/should solve our problems for us. Just look on Europe now, for decades we were thinking that somebody will take care of our energy needs so we have shut down, even before Energiewende, virtually all gasworks, mines and even some water power plants went out of service as they were thought not profitable or harmful for given locality. Or were not build at all. We were not taking care of our future as we should have and now we pay for that.
Planning out a society from the ground-up inherently means, you know, socialism, and any change in production relations creates winners and losers, and the losers are those who are in power, who benefit from prior production relations the most, and will thus fight hard against any changes to them. Meaning that for this to even replace our modern day economic system you would need a whole revolution, and not just in one country, because if one country finds itself building sustainable development in a world of unsustainable countries, it will not only mean little, but they will likely end up contributing to the unsustainability in order to fund it. Take countries like Norway that are much more sustainable than others but fund it through exporting oil and gas because that's what the rest of the world relies on. So at this point we're talking about a global revolution needed to achieve solarpunk type socialist society, and we saw what happened last time there were socialist revolutions, capitalist world quickly strangled them then toppled them.
The problem is not innovating just polluting industries out of existence. Decarbonisation must become economically inevitable even as governments do everything they can to stop sustainable development.
Muito bom o video, também escolhi a filosofia solar punk como opção de futuro, porque , como já foi dito as opções são a negação da realidade ou o desespero profundo.
I have the strange belief that it is all easier to save than we think. The earth has proven to renew herself quite quickly, when given the chance. I know that technology has its wonders, but I would like to know from all the techies....do you all think there can be too much tech? Cos I find that to also be a concern. Thank you.
I don't know if I understood it correctly, but I think we need all the shades of green activism. We need the change on a person to person basis, teach the people that they can make a diffrence, then we need to overcome the harmful system and turn it to something beneficial for everyone, not just a priviliged few, all while innovating and researching, not just technology, but also new fomrs of community building and fair governance. A big part of Solarpunk is about building communities and giving power back to the people. Also like literally, decentralising: power grid (generate power where it is used), Governance (take it back to the community level and get everyone involved), Economy (building new a new infrastructure that rewards using local resources, f.x with local currencies) etc... Regarding overcoming captitalism: I think what a lot of people misunderstands is that ending capitalism is equal to end the free market, but thats not quite true. it's more about changing the system in that way, that makes it impossible to make money with money. We just need to dajust the rules, so the economy benefits the people and not the capital. There are actually already solutions to make the free market much more just. Like universal basic income paid by higher taxes, which is basically just a way to distribute wealth over all income classses. Also there is no need to have a be all end all solution, we need strong communities that come up with their own solutions. We need strong local regions that are interconnected in exchange.
Thank you for sharing your sources for that video. However, it seems this is not the correct Oceanix url. I think there's a bias in solarpunk illustrations which are always shown under a sunny day of spring. I understand how this is a valid "trick" for illustrations to reinforce the meaning they were created to convey. However, this becomes a little more dubious when used in architecture renderings, as it makes it easy to forget the amount of concrete, steel and glass needed to build such "utopias".
Don't be afraid of saying CAPITALISM, its not "economy" in general it's Capitalism specifically (or at least what capitalism is in practice as opposed to socialism which basically everything capitalism is not or at least the true desire to be, do, and live better than capitalism) we're all here for it now days
I think wanting radical systemic change is compatible with "bright green" environmentalism as described. It doesn't make much sense to me to pit the ideas of systemic change and innovation against each other. Both can go hand in hand, and that's what solarpunk is to me.
I thought the categories of environmentalists was the most interesting. I've mostly thought of environmentalists as just that. I don't think any one category is more practical than the other but that in a group setting all of them would bring it's own unique value to a movement.
All tech needs precious minerals and metals to function tho, unless we learn to reuse the current ones (which won't be as good quality cause they are used) the mining of the needed minerals will cause big environmental damage which is not in line with the values of the movement, we need to be more inspired by the way indigenous people live and combine it with local symbiotic gardening (such as the three sisters method) and permaculture and learn to rely less on tech
it's not inevitable, but it's CLEARLY the direction we are going. And as long as developed nations don't get their shit together and start to give back the wellness they have stolen we have no chance to change that. So while I have nothing against solarpunk and that philosophy, I do believe that right now Solarpunk is not what we need globally Especially if the target for such transformation will be the already developed clean cities of the rich countries. Sure that is the place where is the easiest to put effort but it's utterly pointless as less than 1/3 of the global population lives in such conditions. Solarpunk is a beautiful idea, but before we have a chance to fight for that we need to make sure that the places that have accumulated the trash of our current state have been brought to speed. in short: The current solarpunk movement look's like a convenient excuse for developed nations to say in the future to the poor countries "you should have turned green when we told you so". that's spatially true for projects like that are openly aiming to sell toward the global oligarchs.
Recently, someone brought a book "The Whole Building Handbook. How to Design Healthy, Efficient and Sustainable Buildings" to our office. I opened it and realized that this book was created specifically for me. Two days later I came across this video on RU-vid. It is no confidence)
Can you research about a place in south asia, kashmir. It's literally a solar punk place filled with nature and people there live with nature. I recommend checking it out.
Thank you so much for this awesome informatin and great video you made. But from my view, all of this just a sweet dream until we don't have equality between nations and who has more power and strong policy, do exploit other nations while they could help instead of exploitation.
I don't really have much optimism but I can clearly see how we could be solarpunk in our everyday architecture & community... and I think we can all agree suburbs are stupid :P
i believe in concrete industrialist productivist equal utopia in which people overcome demographic stagnation colonizing whole new worlds and building new communist world on the marxist leninist principles with trillions of trillions people to build with the exponential growth of technology, economy and population
I appreciated your sketch of solarpunk, especially your optimism. Have you considered how we might apply solarpunk to the education sector, redesigning schools and universities?
climate change: stage four cnacer light green: nohing be can do about it bright green: maybe push it back to stage one and then stop treatment dark green: cancer erradication
I'm always a little disappointed that the urban ecology approach doesn't seem to look into the production of building materials, or at least doesn't emphasize it as much as dealing with food waste and sewage for example. Is there a way to produce the building materials on site here and allow for independent expansion of these?
There is a lot of going on, as mentioned with wood or better bamboo, clay walls, building blocks or 3 print hollow walls(ready to fill with insulation), compressed earth bricks(use onsite material and save on concrete). Design/orientation to manage heat of the sun, airflow/humidity, insulation-area. Problem is the scale, old infrastructure, limited knowledge or speed of distribution, price(sometimes, more of uncertainty)
They can, and the future will probably have elements of both, but I hope for solarpunk. Cyberpunk has a cool aesthetic, but would be a shitty future to live in.
While there are aspects of solarpunk that I really like (sustainability and environmental remediation), a lot of it seems tied to socialism and reeeing about capitalism (which is kind of silly - there's nothing magic about capitalism that make mining or concrete production or transportation uniquely polluting, any more than there's anything magic about other economic systems that makes people stop needing housing or electricity or food). I think that cyberpunk is one of the more prescient SF subgenres (You currently have an internet-connected computer in your pocket, manufactured in a third-world country by a multinational megacorp, for instance) but a lot of is aesthetics without real-world basis for them. (I don't believe that people are going to be casting off body parts willy-nilly in favor of technological replacements, and the giant neon-rimmed skyscrapers are always going to be expensive to the point where they are only found in city centers rather than being the norm of where people live and work.) I can see cyberpunk worlds incorporating solarpunk on the fringes, with off-grid communities using advanced technology to live sustainably. I can also see companies doing environmentally positive things because they've figured out how to make those things profitable (like harvesting the great Pacific garbage patch for materials that can be processed for sale, or diverting food/organic waste into enormous composting facilities to turn into fertilizer).
You really think that equality is good . Inequality is what keeps EVERYONE happy . If you are so happy with socialism you should go to Cuba . And if you want the whole planet to change one day you will have the entire planet for yourself to create in your SOCIALIST VISION . If you then live in a dystopia you can no longer blame the Capitalist BECAUSE they will be in space . But i guess you will always blame the Capitalist even when they would be in a other solar system .
