Solarpunk Urbanism

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For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 1,753 stations from different European cities, motivated by the curiosity of understanding how engineers were able to fit underground stations comprising 4 or 5 lines under Place de la République in Paris or the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. 

A pen, a notebook, a bit of spatial vision and the willingness to navigate all the staircases, corridors, platforms and mezzanines are enough to draw a station. Some may content errors, despite I try to complement themwith information found in the internet: historic, construction and survey maps, pics and videos, as well with data about train lengths.

Due to the boredom provoked by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to digitalize all the sketches I had drawn in since the early 2010s, plus all the station plans I collected from construction projects. I have also drawn stations from cities I have never been. Sources may vary, but some of them come from construction projects (London, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro), other sketches found in Wikimedia Commons (Boston).

A home insurance policy offers a discount to AAA members. The discount is the same amount as the cost of membership. I so rarely use a car or motorcycle that I would not benefit significantly from a roadside assistence plan. I cycle. But there are other discounts for AAA membership, like restaurant discounts. So my knee-jerk thought was: this is a no-brainer… I’m getting some benefits for free, in effect, so it just makes sense to get the membership.

Then I dug into AAA a bit more. The wiki shows beneficial and harmful things AAA has done. From the wiki, these points stand out to me:

Even though the roadside assistence is useless to me, the AAA membership comes with 2 more memberships. So I could give memberships to 2 family members and they would benefit from it. But it seems I need to drop this idea. AAA seems overall doing more harm than good.

(edit) And doesn’t it seem foolish to oppose mass transit even from the selfish car driver standpoint? If you drive a car, other cars are in your way slowing you down and also increasing your chances of simultaneously occupying the same space (crash). Surely you would benefit from others switching from car to public transport to give you more road space. It seems to me the anti mass transit move is AAA looking after it’s own interest in having more members paying dues.

I also noticed most AAA club’s websites block Tor. So the lack of privacy respect just made my decision to nix them even easier.

Cities are never truly complete and done; instead they are always changing, always evolving. One positive change is the rise of regenerative cities—urban centers designed to have a restorative relationship with the environment that protects and enhances local ecosystems.

WIRED Japan collaborated with the urban design studio For Cities to highlight some of the world’s best sustainable urban developments, which are harbingers of what is to come. From using local materials and construction methods to restoring ecosystems, these projects go beyond merely making green spaces and provide hints of how cities of the future will function as well as how they will be built. Here are some places where the future is now.

I'm a country boy all my life. I can't cycle or take the metro anywhere. Walkable cities are great but they're a hundred miles away.

Everyone goes on about how they hate cars, but what else are you supposed to do?

https://electrek.co/2023/12/04/livaq-equad-unveiled-as-most-capable-electric-atv-ever/ – this article talks about something with a 108km/h and a range of 273 km. It's mad expensive unfortunately, but that is normally to do with adoption rates and scale.

(It says "claims a range of 170 miles (273 km) from its 15.4 kWh battery pack", which implies consumption of about 55 watt-hours per km travelled, though that'd be variable depending on speed and conditions)

If I had one of these, I could get to town, get to a train station, without a car. I could carry one child, which is worse than a car, but the energy consumption is a 3-4× lower than a car. If train stations had swappable batteries, that would be ideal, but I don't see that coming any time soon.

In New York and elsewhere, the rules typically take the form of ratios [of parking spaces to retail and housing] that have been copied from one city to another, handed from one generation of engineers to the next without much study or skepticism.

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cross-posted from: https://yall.theatl.social/post/3949298

From the Saporta Report:

Hurricane Helene rocked the Southeast in late September, bringing devastation to parts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and more. The storm, a Category 4 at its peak, arrived in Georgia on Friday night and affected almost every part of the state. Gov. Brian Kemp has called the damage left by the storm “unprecedented.” Georgia cities […]

The post Atlanta’s green infrastructure at work during Hurricane Helene provides an example of learning from the past appeared first on SaportaReport.

Related paper

I'll note that in the US, their urban area definition includes a lot of outlying and substantially unpopulated areas which fall within county boundaries; these areas tend to show up as having long travel times to services.

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This is a little different from my other photobashes in that this one can’t really pass as a postcard. I ended up having so many things to include in the topic of flood-compatible cities that the only way to fit them all was to keep expanding the canvas. I think I have enough for a second picture (and possibly a third), but we’ll get to what’s missing in a moment.

So awhile back, I stumbled on to this discussion on reddit about what solarpunk might look like in a wetland area (and what it'd mean for cities built in wetlands). I very much believe that solarpunk will look radically different based on location, with infrastructure, routines, fashion, etc, being carefully tailored to fit climate, local weather, and the available materials, so this really caught my attention.

That discussion lead to this one, and this one, then this one as well as this conversation back over there plus several good chats on the Fully Automated and Solarpunk Hub discords.

I received a ton of awesome input which I genuinely couldn’t have made this without. Thank you! Most of the ideas here came from those talks. Even when people disagreed with each others’ suggestions, I tried to include them in the scene if I could make them fit.

The basic idea is for this to be a city that expects to be flooded regularly. One where, if the water rises a few feet seasonally, everything stays basically the same, and if a huge storm rolls in and swamps the whole area, people grumble about it, but can mostly still go about their day (using things like elevated walkways). The lower portions of buildings are used for third place activities that can be packed up and removed when forecasts predict bad weather (like marketplaces) or which use sturdy, permanent structures which can be hosed clean later.

There’s an argument to be made that the best answer to building cities in swamps is the simplest: don’t do it. And if you’ve failed that step, then you shouldn’t rebuild when whatever you build inevitably gets flooded.

I think there’s a lot of reasons to push back on that. Most major cities are already built on waterways or on the coasts due to the value of those locations for shipping and industry. Some are already below seal level, others are likely to be in the future as climate change worsens. These places house millions of people, they represent home, historical legacies, and preserving them helps preserve the cultures and communities of the people who live there. Lots of cities are looking for answers to rising water, and I’d love to see what solarpunk versions look like.

Sponge city tactics came up a lot in our discussions but we struggled to find ones that fit for a city (like New Orleans) which are at least partially located below sea level. If I expand the image to the left, I think I can definitely include a few, but generally, the water needs somewhere to go.

That said, I think this scene fits a tight shot of a much larger take on sponge city tactics of slowing water and absorbing it where possible.

Our current society has spent a lot of resources on straightening rivers for shipping and building dams and levees to shunt extra water downstream, to make it the next town’s problem, rather than suffer floods themselves. Farmers don’t want their fields washed out or polluted with debris so they build more levees and so on and so forth.

I think a solarpunk civilization might accept on some level that rivers are going to meander, they’re going to rise seasonally, and they’re going to flood the flood plains they’ve always washed over, and it might build with those expectations in mind. A solarpunk setting might adjust itself to coexist with the weather and floods rather than use huge infrastructure projects to try to keep them away.

The admittedly thin backstory I’ve got in mind is that this was a city which frequently flooded, and where some of its lowest areas (possibly mostly abandoned already due to uninsured damages and unlivable conditions near the collapse) were ceded to the water but not surrendered altogether. People built some structures higher than the water is likely to reach, and everywhere else, they float on it in boats, float houses, or even large rafts which contain small neighborhoods. They farm locally using floating gardens, hydroponics, Chinampas, and more. This isn’t a pristine wetland that’s been colonized, but a flooded neighborhood which has been partially rewilded.

I pulled in a few different living-with-water concepts in for this one:

• The lifted buildings are an upscaled version of the lifted houses you can find all along the US Gulf Coast, intended to survive storm surges and floods during hurricanes.
• I based the covered upper walkway on the iron lace balconies found on some buildings in the New Orleans French Quarter. It’s not quite the ‘correct’ use of the design, since they don’t traditionally span from building to building, but I thought it’d be a nice reference. The goal here is that if the area really floods, and the ground level is unsafe to traverse, people still have a way to get around. For safety purposes, I figure each building needs a ladder on each road to access the upper level in an emergency. For accessibility, I included frequent, standardized elevators and 15 degree ramps.
• I used this amphibious bus design because it looked more municipal than the DUKW style duckboats many cities have for recreational purposes. Credit to Cromlyngames for suggesting this idea (and then making this 3d model about it). I suspect the amphibious design would be harder to maintain than a normal bus because of the sealed hull, but perhaps some of the efficiencies and practice that come with a larger, standardized fleet would help.
• Dutch-style floating houses (these exist all over the world but I referenced dutch ones while making this scene). These are just meant to be towed into place and parked. Unlike the houseboats which are more boat than house and can travel as they want.
• A Bangkok-style water bus – the idea is that the flooded zone is likely somewhat shallow, with deeper waterways intended for transit between neighborhoods of floating houses, large rafts supporting small neighborhoods, and through rivers and canals in the dryer parts of the city. If I do another scene, I’ll try to include a transfer station where passengers can switch between boat and an elevated train.
• Waterways with restored eelgrass for manatees. I wanted to show some of the work that’s been done restoring rivers in the US south.
• Chinampa agricultural system (farming on artificial islands) this is a pretty ancient farming practice from Mexico and Central America, which is still in use in some areas, and I’m still learning about it. I’ve done my best to get the scale and composition of the design correct. Some of the trees might be a bit overlarge, but they wouldn’t be planted very densely.

Other notes/elements included:

• There’s a Savonius wind turbine attached to one of the dolphins (poles) for the dock. I imagine this probably isn’t supposed to be there, since it could get in the way during a high flood, but perhaps there’s not much enforcement or its the subject of a disagreement.
• Awnings and porches to shade windows and balconies and buildings. The simple solutions work.
• The hospital in the background would need to be able to operate during a flood, and to have water access (possibly via canals) so that people with only boats can access it quickly, in addition to road access.
• The climbing wall probably isn’t ideal, as you’d want open spaces between the pillars if the flood will have a current. This was kind of an art decision - I needed a type of tall, narrow third place to include that would demonstrate its use even with the bus in the way and that seemed like the best option I could think of. Climbing walls are often made with wood frames and plywood – this one would have to be able to survive submersion, so perhaps it’s made from thick sections of recycled plastic or something similar. My other plan was just some trees, to show that it was a park, but that wasn’t as clear.

Speaking of third places, here’s some other ideas we had for third places you could have under these buildings. Presented in no particular order:

• Tide pools and natural landscape features
• Parks
• Dog Parks
• Meeting rooms
• Lecture spots (could double as a bring-your-own-movie movie theater)
• Squash courts
• Playground (depending on the design)
• Planetarium?
• Speaker’s corners
• Booths for food trucks or downstairs seating for a lifted cafeteria
• Parkour course
• Roller rink
• Laser tag/paintball arena
• Fresh water reserve tanks (firefighting, heat sinks, municipal cleaning as well as last reserve drinking water post major floods
• Possibly storage for flood-tolerant stuff like scaffolding

Things I’d like to include next time:

• Floating neighborhoods in the style of the floating islands of the Uros on Lake Titicaca (this would take a fair bit of space and a lot more reading)
• A transfer station where passengers can switch between boat and an elevated train
• Amphibious emergency vehicles

This image, like all the Postcards from a Solarpunk Future, is CC-BY, use it how you like.

A well-researched video that explains why some dense urban areas are quite expensive.

TL;DW: Despite a substantial historic housing stock, our most expensive cities have built very little housing in recent years, leading to very low vacancy rates and high prices. Ramping up housing construction will be a necessary part of solving the affordability crisis.

The surge in online shopping, accelerated by COVID-19, has driven up the demand for package deliveries, and that demand continues to rise.

As traditional delivery methods contribute to urban traffic congestion and pollution, cargo bikes - a staple of bike-friendly countries like Denmark and the Netherlands - are becoming a common sight in cities across Europe as a sustainable and efficient alternative to vans.

These larger, typically electric bikes with separate carriers can transport a wide range of loads, from small parcels to larger items, making them ideal for urban deliveries.

In Europe, it is estimated that up to 50 per cent of motorised trips involving the transport of goods in cities could be made by cargo bikes and bicycles, according to a recent study.

Hi, I just wanted to say thanks for all your help on my previous question planning art of a more flood-compatible city! I've tried to include everyone's suggestions from last time, plus everything from here, and discussions on reddit and discord.

I don't plan to clutter up the community with any drafts after this one, but I was hoping to get one more pass with my current sketch since its based mostly on your ideas. Is there anything you'd like to see added or changed in a depiction of a city that's built to flood? Thanks again!

This question comes with my thoughts on a swamp city, but is open to thoughts about any biome.

We know cities are their own form of ecosystem, and all ecosystems must have decomposers. Right now, people are always fighting against them and hating them, which I understand--I also don't like seeing cockroaches, especially inside my house! And fungi can be good decomposers, but all I ever see is mold that can make me sick in my bathroom.

But I understand we need them. I like to think once there's better protection for actual native species, more than just the hardiest decomposers will also thrive. IDK, what do we think? Is it fair to hope for different decomposers that gross me out less, or am I being a bully? Do we need to have more purposeful conservation to introduce native decomposers and eliminate invasive ones, or do we think it will happen naturally as native decomposers follow other native species? In a theoretical solar punk paradise city, do I have to accept molds in my house?