SolarPunk Cities: Our Last Hope?

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In my opinion, forming a specific architectural vision for solarpunk is hard because of it's focus on nature, the kind of materials you use will depend on your area and it's ecosystem. Even the styles should pull from local cultures and tradition to really bringout the human factor of it all.

I absolutely LOVE these video essays about these dystopian and utopian architecture styles, design and culture from this channel

Cyberpunk was a warning, not an aspiration. - Mike Pondsmith

A video about anti consumerism is sponsored by one of the biggest corporations in history,it’s very ironic 😂

Living in and growing up in a garden city and seeing it be sold out is an incredibly devastating marker in the course of history.

As a Dutch person and having worked for the municipality of Almere. The city doesn't have a great reputation. They tried. especially the city centre isn't recieved well by the people. But they are doing a lot of trials and experimentation with city building like Oosterwolde and Floriade. I reccommend looking those up. They also have plans to make the city centre greener! Almere is getting better!

Thanks for this. I never really had a name for the Solarpunk genre, but now that you talk explicitly about its architectural principals (or lack of thereof), it really helps. I now see that I've actually read a solarpunk novel: Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. It takes place in a society with advanced, but non-intrusive tech, buildings that melt back into the Earth after a period of time, and a main character that is a traveling tea monk. So, tech that helps humans to be in harmony with the Earth and a different philosophical take on what it means "to contribute."

I absolutely loved this video! Philosophy, architecture, social science, optimism, criticism, humor and style! A lot of videos have some of these, few have many of these, but a mere handful have all of them (switch out "architecture" with other sciences\design schools\etc. and ut still works for me). I came here because I saw some of the shorts - but I'm gonna stick around to see what else there is around here. I am very selective with my subscriptions, and more so with my notifications, and this channel just got both!

I think that the fact that cyberpunk books and movies and other artistic expressions are getting more noticed today is definitely a GOOD sign. I want my future more similar to solarpunk BECAUSE I've whatched and read dozens of movies and books depicting cyberpunk and I was like "Holy shit this feels so real we have to do something to stop it"

I love solar punk. It is a movement that gives me so much hope for the future. I started gardening on my city balcony this year thanks to being introduced to solar punk and its given me such a deeper connection to nature and a drive to preserve nature and biodiversity. I think most importantly that instead of the world's problems seeing too large for any one person, solarpunk says "hey, you can make a difference to your community", and that brings so much renewed energy and hope for the future that i think is really important

Honestly, architecture seems to be trending towards solarpunk/sustainable architecture more than cyberpunk/brutalist architecture. Obviously there's a long way to go, but the direction seems pretty clear to me.

I really love this channel and how you try to help us understand architecture and morality. All my life I've struggled to understand cities in terms of identity. The videos on Kowloon Walled City, CyberPunk cities, Megacities and this one on Solar Cities has helped me make sense of some of the questions I had. I still love the visuals of CyberPunk as fiction perhaps in part due to having grown up living in a brutalist, uncladded multi-storey high-rise flat in the city outskirts where even the fences were formed of shaped concrete posts and metal rails and the ground a uniformly slabbed place that rose up in places during the warm summers, intersected by strangely out of proportion "growing plant beds" which were originally fenced off with rough sticks wired together but grew little but litter, discarded pages from pornographic magazines and discarded beer cans. As kids we had fun nonetheless in this weird urban playground, but what a strange place it was.

I feel that realistically, both SolarPunk and CyberPunk are going to sort of coexist together. A comunal based society is going to be impossible in cities predicted to be like the pearl river delta but in an agricultural environment, is highly likely that technology and agricultural efficiency would develop that way (sort of how the rural Netherlands are right now)

Dude, I've been trying to define this movement on my own for awhile. I'm glad to here there are formal movements and aesthetics. Solarpunk, garden city, earthship. This gives me so many resources to draw creativity from! Thanks for the video.

That is fascinating to hear that you found the class on sustainability to be depressing. I had a similar experience. One of the last classes I took while working on my Masters was on Environmental Engineering and it was basically the same sort of thing. Lot's of discussion of problems facing the world, population growth, food production, pollution, etc. I found it extremely depressing and overwhelming. It wasn't because of the problems discussed, but because the solutions always came down to some variation of "well, we, as a species, need to get our act together and start cooperating." It this premise that was depressing, because it seems impossible.

Omg I think your channel is exactly what I’m looking for. I took an architecture and urban design class in college and I’ve been trying to emulate what I’ve learned from that class. And a lot of what you’ve talked about: Garden City, Bauhaus, hollywoods depiction, identity, is exactly what I learned about. Gonna sub!

Your videos have reminded me how much I HUNGER for someone to talk about these issues seriously. Eco-design, cyberpunk, brutalism, arcologies... all of these architectural topics are VITAL to the plot, setting and mood of the books, movies, anime and comics that I devoured as a developing young adult. Now, at 50, I YEARN to see these ideas and movements grow from "weird experiments" into real implementation. And inevitably, as science and art continue to grow, architecture will morph into new ideas that we couldn't have dreamed of in the 50's or 70's. Your channel is tapping into a deep part of me; I had almost forgotten how much these topics delight and excite me. And, like probably most people here, I am not an architect. I'm a physicist / mathematician. But learning more about the real history and science that led to these architectural ideas is FASCINATING to me! I'm SO glad to see that SO MANY people seem to feel the way I do about this project/channel. You and your growing team are doing an amazing job. Thank you so much; I feel like I have been giving a precious gift. It has reinvigorated a decades old passion of mine, and makes me feel young and excited again. 🤗💕

I am a born and raised New Mexican gal, but down south. This is oilfield country so to a lot of locals, sustainability feels like a threat to people’s livelihood. It’s unfortunate. Because of this, most people in my town wouldn’t know what an Earth Ship was if you asked. I don’t have any plans to ever purchase a home anywhere, I want to build an Earth Ship of some kind right here in New Mexico. I met a gentleman in El Paso, TX who was building something with a similar idea, and he was using old fabric and concrete to build homes super cheap. It pleases me to know there are people out here experimenting and trying something different, and it gives me confidence that it can be a real possibility.

Nice video ! thanks a lot, for solar punk, there is a book, the furtive, originally les furtifs that combines cyber and solar punk, where the cities are controlled by mega corpo but the people are trying to reinvest other living spaces outside of the cities, to form communities that lives in symbiosis with the environement. The book is in french though and I don't know if it has been translated. But if you can read french or find it in english it is a great novel.