Solarpunk Urbanism

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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.

Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.

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What am I getting wrong? Please point out my bad ideas for art of a solarpunk swamp city (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 months ago by JacobCoffinWrites to c/urbanism

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I've been thinking about trying to depict some of the ideas from this conversation: https://slrpnk.net/post/12735795, using a sort of flat, diagram-like style similar to this old photobash:

Though a bit more complex. The obvious answer is 'don't build cities in swamps' but we already have a bunch of them, and though I don't live there I recognize that they have a lot of unique cultural and historical value and are peoples' homes, so I'm interested in what a solarpunk-adapted version of these would look like.

At the same time, I know basically nothing about New Orleans or similar areas, have no background in civil engineering, and no qualifications to make this except for the capability to do so using an old version of GIMP. So I'd absolutely love to identify issues, places to make improvements, and things that are missing now rather than once I've spent days chopping up images and finessing them into something coherent.

So what'd I get wrong? What's unworkable, out of scale, or dangerous? What style of buildings or cultural touchstones would you like to see? What kind of plants are missing?

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[–] JacobCoffinWrites 6 points 2 months ago

Thank you, this is really interesting! I don't think I knew about Sacramento being lifted to reduce flooding risk, that's fascinating! I knew there were some places with undercities due to building over old ruins (or undermining themselves with, well, mines) but I this project is really cool! The current issue makes a lot of sense - I've seen the stilted houses in the southeast US, where they mostly seem to use the tall open space under house as a sort of boat/car storage, and with their tides and such it makes sense they'd want as little drag as possible (probably want to tow the boat out of there if you have time). And a more enclosed (but water-survivable) lower floor makes sense for a place where the water just kind of rises up without pushing on the building.

I love sponge city concepts, they seem like one of those rare multi-win solutions in most of the implementations I've read about so far. This article about how New Orleans are using some of the practices is pretty cool, though given the city is below sea level I guess there's only so much they can do.

I love the idea of referencing the chinampas agricultural system in spots where its just going to have to be wet. I'll have to read up on this to get a better idea of how to depict it.

Thanks again!