What Does a Solarpunk City Look Like?

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In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I examine why we need solarpunk, ecosocialist, and degrowth-oriented cities. Specifically, I look at what those future cities might look like, and the failures of capitalist cities today. 

Show Notes: https://ourchangingclimate.notion.site/Future-City-Resources-c1277c028cf84d91b565ec94ee419070?pvs=4

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Almir and Cape Town. Two cities worlds away but connected through the looming threat of climate chaos. Two cities wherein communities are rebelling against the capitalist notions of growth, accumulation, and profit seeking to shape an urban space that caters to people and the planet. These projects are an urban rebellion of sorts. Insurgent designs and practices that buck the trend of the inhuman urbanity that we trudge through every day. But the work done in Almir looks vastly different from that in Cape Town. A gap that reveals the inequalities, geographical differences, and local needs. Today, we explore the future of cities. Unpacking how capitalism has corrupted our current urban spaces, what future metropolitan landscapes steeped in solar punk and eco-socialist degrowth politics might look like, and how now topian projects like those in Almere outside of Amsterdam and the Empower Shack project in Cape Town might chart a path towards actually achieving a zero-carbon and just city for all. The capitalist city of today is one of immense inequality, environmental destruction, and isolation. In Los Angeles County, as the rich enjoy mansions and gated communities, over 75,000 people must live without shelter, forever under the threat of police raids and violence. In New York City, rent continues to skyrocket, leaving many unable to afford a roof over their head. Meanwhile, in Chicago, the city cleaves itself into segregated neighborhoods. And like dirt in an already festering wound, air pollution pervades these cities. In the US alone, outdoor air pollution kills 88,400 people annually as cars and roads dominate communal space. Streets and business high rises slice up parks and green spaces. And the few public spaces that do exist are underfunded, leaving very few options for casual gatherings outside the home. Often meeting up with friends or being in community requires some form of consumption and payment, whether that's buying drinks to sit at a bar, tickets to go see a movie, or buying a coffee to sit down in a cafe. This is what a city run on capitalist logic looks like. One where the city becomes more about generating profit and wealth than about the people actually moving through that city. This is especially true in the Imperial Core, where real estate has become the way to store and generate wealth. The very roofs over our heads have been transformed into speculative investments for capitalists. Indeed, two-thirds of the world's net worth is now in real estate. In US cities like Detroit, Phoenix, and Atlanta, more than 40% of home sales in 2022 went to people who were buying secondary or investment properties. And thought leaders in the business world drool over investment properties and the wealth generation of rental buildings.

SPEAKER_03 2:53

For most people who want to invest their money and build wealth, real estate has so many tax advantages that make it very unique and profitable.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

A third of my net worth is in real estate. Right now it's all single family dwellings because I can get rent for them.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

So our cities and the buildings that house us are just another commodity to be bought and sold. As the few accumulate vast sums through real estate, rent and housing costs have been pushed to the brink. As the host of the Dig podcast, Daniel Denvier notes, there's not a single county in the United States where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford the average two-bedroom apartment. Often you're paying 30% to upwards of 50% of your wage straight to the hands of landlords. So after your wage has been hollowed out to maximize profits for corporations, building owners then demand a large chunk of that wage back in the form of rent, leaving you very little left to actually survive or, god forbid, enjoy life. So as the author of Capital City, Samuel Stein explains in that same dig podcast episode.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

People are paying huge amounts of the incomes that they're making, which are insufficient. The landlords, you can think of it as a pretty direct transfer of capital from employers to buildings.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Essentially, we spend most of our lives working just to hand that money over to people who own our living spaces. And if the rent doesn't get you, the streets will. City design has long been centered around cars, making many neighborhoods hostile to pedestrians, as I talked about in this video. The urban sprawl and endless traffic of cities like Los Angeles or Dallas reveal just how car-centric life in the capitalist hub of the world has become. This means that to get to that office or factory job, you have to go deep into debt to buy a car, forcing you into a vulnerable dependence on your job and wages just to live. Meanwhile, the web of highways carve up cities with racist designs. One of America's largest public works project, the Interstate Highway System, has a long history of racism when it comes to road placements in urban spaces. City after city, planners designed highway systems to cater to white comfort while hollowing out poor communities and communities of color by literally cutting through neighborhoods. Like in the case of St. Paul, Minnesota, where in 1968, the construction of Interstate 94 displaced one-seventh of the city's black residents. Cities in the Imperial Corps, then, have been built to facilitate profit and the accumulation of capital. With their luxury condos, highway overpasses, and commuter lines that bypass poor neighborhoods and communities of color, capitalist urban spaces prioritize profits and in the process create pollution, segregation, and isolation from community. But this is just in the imperial core. As the forces of imperialism, especially that of capitalist agricultural behemoths like Bayer Monsanto increasingly push for the industrialization and commodification of global agriculture, countries in the imperial periphery like India or Nigeria are facing a decline in subsistence farming populations as agrocapitalist pressures make it difficult to grow food. Food that has become increasingly exported and commodified, forcing rural populations to migrate towards cities in search of wages to sustain themselves. As Mike Davis writes in his seminal book, Planet of Slums, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result, in Latin America as well, was rural semi-proletarianization. The creation of a global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. We are witnessing the enclosure of the commons on a global scale. The industrialization and commodification of rural farming have pushed millions towards urban centers, much like enclosure laws in 17th century England did. Indeed, urban populations have more than quadrupled since 1970. And by 2050, 6.7 billion people will live in urban areas, with 90% of that growth projected to take place in Africa and Asia. For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in urban centers. And one in four of those city dwellers live in informal settlements, commonly known as slumps. Here, the inflow of refugees of agrocapitalism, of capitalist climate disaster, and more erect and maintain settlements on the edges of unwanted land of urbanity. Often situated on dumping grounds or land that is deemed otherwise undesirable for real estate developers, these informal settlements must not only face the brunt of local environmental destruction by way of water, air, and soil pollution, but also weather the fury of climate change-fueled natural disasters like hurricanes and floods. Like in the case of Cyclone Freddy ripping through Blantyre's Durrande Township, a storm that wiped away countless shelters and displaced over 19,000 people. And because residents are deemed to be illegally squatting on this common land in the eyes of the capitalist state, it can be hard to leave even with the threat of hurricane or wildfire looming. Because without the security of land tenure, there's no knowing if you will be allowed back to your home once you've left it. So in both the Imperial core and periphery, capitalist forces pervade and erode the strength of urban centers. They leave us exposed to environmental and climate catastrophes through lack of infrastructure, segregation, and an unnecessary emphasis on fossil fuel guzzling cars. For more than a century, the city has been built to cater to profits, not people and their environments. And it seems like business as usual will continue to push us down that road. But all is not lost. Cities might just represent a key pressure point to catalyze change. More people than ever are living in cities. Over half the world's populations call some form of urbanity their home. This means that if you change the landscape of just one city, its infrastructure, networks, and design, you are impacting the lives of millions. Policies that shift roads to bike lanes and major city thoroughfares like in Paris impact thousands more people than shifting parking regulations in some far-off suburbia or rural enclave. In short, a little can go a long way in a city. This is crucial because, according to the UN Habitat Report, cities consume 78% of the world's energy and 60% of global greenhouse gases. The fight over how cities are designed is quite simply a fight for a better world for all people on the planet. But as we have just seen, urban centers are hubs of capitalist development. Through real estate speculation, industrial manufacturing, and financial districts, cities facilitate capital accumulation and generation of profit for the few, while the rest are left vulnerable, in debt, and isolated. But as Karl Marx long ago observed, cities also collect, connect, and strengthen the power of the working class. By concentrating vast amounts of people in one place, capitalists enjoy immense access to cheap and readily exploitable labor. But within that concentration, there is also a seed of hope. Cities bring us close together. They allow the working class to easily organize and strategize, to struggle against the confines of capitalist extraction. So as urban centers grow, the power of movements for justice grows with them. The city is a landscape that is pregnant with possibilities ripe for change. When we bring housing, connection, and environmental healing to communities and cities, we immediately bring a good life to millions. In turn, those transformed cities can act as hubs that jumpstart global transitions to a renewable world based on solarpunk, eco-socialist, and degrowth principles. The visions of solar punk paint a luscious optimism. Ones of thriving cities interconnected with their surrounding landscapes. Here, Luc Chutin envisions dense apartment complexes full of natural light that interweave with the verdant landscaping and public transit below. Or here, Edmund Chan, sees a city built around pedestrians and greenery rather than cars and industry. Or even here in the streets of Wakanda, where public transit gives way to a bustling market of people and community. These are just a few quick glimpses of what urban centers could be. But what are the actual blueprints for these cities? What are its politics and how might these cities function? Developing the answer to these questions not only offers us a light in the dark of the shadows of our current capitalist trajectory, but also helps solidify what we're actually fighting for. Of course, these are utopias of sorts. The scaling up of these visions risks the ever-looming threat of capitalist co-option, which I'll talk about a little later in the video. But for now, what would a solar punk degrowth and eco-socialist-oriented city actually look like? We'll begin with sustenance, food and water, the fundamental building blocks of humanity. For many in the Imperial Corps, sustenance comes from the grocery store and the tap. What we eat is heavily distanced from the farmers growing our food. Our food is presented to us wrapped in packaging and placed in stores hundreds of miles away from where a farm worker toiled to harvest that lettuce, for example. And within those stores, food prices seem to increase every year, leaving many struggling to put dinner on the table. And in the US, the quote unquote good food is often cordoned off in wealthy white neighborhoods where companies can make the most profit, while those without means must live miles away from any form of fresh produce and groceries in a system of food apartheid. To add insult to injury, many urban communities must face down lead and toxic chemicals in their pipes, rendering their water undrinkable. In short, clean water and delicious food becomes inaccessible. This is unacceptable. The cities of the future must rebel against this urban agrocapitalist design. So an end to food apartheid must be facilitated not only by free, accessible, and delicious community-run food stores in every neighborhood, but also by a blanket of communal food gardens and farms across the cityscape. Much like Havana's organopanikos and vegetable gardens that satiate a substantial amount of the city's produce needs, the gap between the rural farm and the urban streetscape must be crushed. Alongside beautiful rooftops and streetscapes of vegetable gardens supplemented by rural farming cooperatives, physical infrastructure and plumbing will need to be repaired and replaced to ensure safe and clean drinking water to every single person. Food and water are basic rights. They should be free and accessible regardless of who you are, what you do, or where you're from. Ultimately, sustenance in this liberatory city should be guided by care, not profit. Stores, bodegas, and markets will no longer exist to generate wealth, but instead function as a vital backbone for thriving neighborhoods, offering themselves up as a place not only to find food, but also with the help of communal kitchens and dining spaces as a place for friends and family to gather and enjoy life. And in the process, food and water become tools of solidarity. And food and water are intimately intertwined with how people and goods move around the cities. If the food we eat is still transported via fossil fuels and highways, we'll fail at creating a just urban landscape for all. Future cities need to de-grow gas-guzzling individual transportation methods like cars, and instead invest heavily in public transit. Trams, buses, and the occasional electric taxi, which will all be free and highly accessible, will pepper the urban landscape, bringing people to where they need to go quickly, on time, and in a joyful manner. Because rapid and efficient public transit is just step one. The crucial part is making that ride enjoyable, making the subway, the tram, or the electric bus a space where community connection is possible. The bus becomes a cafe of sorts where you feel comfortable, cared for, and entertained. Whether that means attendance on every bus or streetcar trained in mediation, de-escalation, and therapeutic methods, or library shelves and reading nooks for quiet contemplation, or galleries of local artists, public transit should ultimately be about people, not just getting bodies to their jobs as fast as possible. And a future city will mean a city without cars. This inevitably means parking lots, streets, and highway interchanges become relics of the past. Much like the Highline Project in New York City, overpasses could be turned into public parks, while streets can be retrofitted into community gardens, pedestrian walkways, and copious amounts of bike infrastructure. Taking your bike out to go see your friends will no longer be a matter of life or death, but instead an experience of joy as you speed past farmers, trees, and beautiful art peppered throughout the city. Within this dense web of greenery, farms, and transit lie the buildings. In solar punk and eco-socialist cities, community living complexes will be the norm. Shelter is one of the most crucial parts of an urban space. Its design decides how and where we live. Local context is crucial to housing design, but there are some broad strokes that every building should have. Every new building should be completely electric and as passive as possible, employing ambient air and thick insulated windows to heat and cool houses, as well as supplementing that passive design with solar panels or even small wind turbines on the roof. Some buildings might shelter co-housing communities with individualized apartments designed for personal aesthetics, communal cooking and recreation spaces to bring people together at the end of the night, as well as care facilities located in the building like doctors' offices and daycares. Other buildings might house just two or three units for bigger chosen families. But crucially, all of these structures are owned by the neighborhood or the community, not landlords. Ideally, this would allow for much more autonomy for interior and exterior design, making the home a place that's not just comfortable, but also enjoyable to live in. Because an eco-socialist and solar punk city demands not just housing for everyone, but good housing for everyone. And outside the house, the future city needs to foster true freedom. Liberation. This could look like so many different things, like a complete abolition of policing and instead investing in community care and mediation. It could look like the development of green spaces and communal activities on every city block, with some parks acting as sponges for inevitable flood events and heat waves supercharged by climate change. Free museums full of art, tool sheds, free libraries of both books and unwanted goods. There would be community cinema on apartment blocks, and play areas filled with trees and activities both for children and adults. And of course, all of this built environment will go unused if we are stuck working every day all day. So a reduction in work time is crucial. Production must move from creating goods for exchange to focusing on producing materials for use. And in that process, we can spend a lot less time toiling away at the desk or the assembly line and more time enjoying life. But this requires planning and political transformation, which is why cities will need some sort of planning apparatus. Whether that's a form of federalism envisioned by the authors of Half-Earth Socialism, Direct Democracy, or community and worker councils deciding what goods should be produced. Ultimately, cities should exist to connect us deeper to ourselves, our community, and our natural surroundings. There is no one solution to build that city. As solar punk artists have shown, every city will look vastly different as cultures and local environments synthesize to build something new and beautiful. But at the end of the day, these are just visions. To move these imaginaries into the real space, we need to struggle against the forces working to keep our current capitalist urban spaces unchanged. We cannot simply live in the world of art and imagination. These visions may act as fuel for the fire or even a light on the horizon, but we need to strike a match to actually start burning down the capitalist structures blocking these urban dreams. As Maria Kaika and her co-authors write in a paper on implementing degrowth theory into urban spaces, if we don't start meshing these imaginaries with action, they run the risk of becoming yet another discourse for internal academic and activist consumption, an empty signifier that allows us to keep our souls clean, as it were, by staying clear of the political arena. Thankfully, we aren't starting from square one. There has been a long history of struggle within urban centers, because as I noted earlier, cities bring people together. They connect the oppressed and strengthen their power. Building local neighborhood and community power is perhaps the easiest place to start placing pressure on capitalism. As scholars Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleason write, it is at the household and community levels where people arguably have the most freedom to influence their urban existence in a post-growth direction. And there are countless movements and struggles already in motion to change the way we interact with and live within our cities. Here, let us return to the two cities of Cape Town and Almir. Almir represents a now topia that tries to wrestle free of some of the capitalist constraints placed on Imperial Core cities. Embracing solar punk-esque aesthetics, this city on the outskirts of Amsterdam is peppered with housing and green infrastructure that caters to people and connects them with the natural world. Like this housing block, which employs a strategy of affordable self-built structures. Families and individuals can purchase a plot for low cost, and then, according to The Guardian, the buyer is free to customize their home for a wide variety of different ready-made homes, many designed by in-house architects, essentially allowing for personal and community flair and accessibility needs to shine through in the built environment. Across the world in Cape Town, the Empower Shack project is attempting something similar, but for a different context. It's a radical project that struggles against the capitalist desire to cleanse slums through relocation, divestment, and neglect. Instead of displacing thousands of residents in the informal community of Kaylitsa, the architecture firm Urban Think Tank, together with the South African nonprofit Ikala Yalahami, are retrofitting and rebuilding existing housing. The approach to this project is crucial. The Empower Shack Project Buildings, as Ashley Dawson writes in Environmentalism from Below, are designed to be built in just one day. Their facades painted in distinct Of colors intended to help foster a sense of pride and community engagement. Dawson adds that homes also catalyze community connection through interior courtyards and playgrounds for kids. All the while, there's spacious flexibility and inclusivity in the designs, allowing residents themselves to design balconies and semi-private spaces where residents could plant small urban farms. This is important, especially because Empower Shack offered construction apprenticeships to residents, allowing the community to be front and center from initial planning to building all the way to living inside the home. Importantly, these buildings are also low carbon and energy efficient. As Dawson notes, the building roofs are clad with solar panels, while the complex uses a graywater recycling system and also features tree-lined streets designed to cool the neighborhood. This is a glimpse of solar punk eco-socialism in the real world, a project that deeply involves residents in building and maintaining housing that connects them to each other and to the natural world, all while minimizing their reliance on fossil fuels. But we must be careful of the co-option of these movements and designs. All too often, as these struggles and ideas scale up, capitalist forces overtake and corrupt them. As Maria Kaika and her co-authors write, there is a long history of cooptation of insurgent practices, from the 1970s urban social movements in Berlin to the recent social commons in Bologna. The contemporary C40s cities network mobilizes a rhetoric that can be interpreted as a cooptation of degrowth principles into tools and concepts for donut economics. To avoid this cooptation, Astrid Druif and Maria Kaika write in another paper that movements can avoid cooptation by setting clear goals and clear terms of engagement right from the beginning, and more importantly, by securing non-competitive funding flows that guarantee their independence, as well as by building a supportive network of institutional actors who do not try to fit radical initiatives into their frameworks, but are prepared and willing to align institutional frameworks with more radical agendas. At the end of the day, though, we can't let the fear of cooptation stop us from starting. We need to start getting our hands dirty. Whether that's fighting for affordable zero carbon housing, struggling for defunding of the police, organizing your union, or battling for better public transit and bike infrastructure, those visions of a beautiful city will never be realized if we just sit behind a computer. Only through action can our dreams be realized.