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?
As you say, the obvious answer is "don't build cities in swamps". Before designing anything concrete, you have to decide why you want to overcome that answer - Is it a harbor, like New Orleans or Amsterdam used to be? Is it a cultural heritage site, like New Orleans or Amsterdam now primarily are? Are there natural resources? Is it a hub for locals to access more specialized goods and services, like specialty medicine? Or is it there because people think it's cool and they have enough money to let it exist regardless of sense?
Whatever the answer, the form follows that function. Build everything on the principles that drive people to want to live there rather than anywhere else.
So why do you think solarpunk people would choose to build a city in a swamp? And what are the amenities that follow from that need?
If you are trying to preserve a historic town like New Orleans or Amsterdam despite floods and rising sea levels, then your goal is to defy natural change in order to keep things the same. The natural form for that function would be a massive dyke built around all that you want to preserve, so that everything looks just like you want, come hell or high water. (Lifting historic buildings is unfathomably expensive and would change the original feel, so it's less ideal).
This is not a solarpunk design because the function of preservation is not solarpunk. New Orleans and Amsterdam weren't built as a place for culture to arise, let alone to preserve some older culture. They were port towns, and they were built with practical purpose. Everything good there arose because working class people from diverse cultures decided to hang out and have fun together, and the same can be done everywhere. If we want to honor the meaning of New Orleans and Amsterdam culture, we let those cities sink into the ocean and focus on having lively third places for the working class in this day and age.
There are things we can bring with us or rebuild in the old style, but loss and adaptation are natural.
I don't disagree - I don't tend to have much sympathy for folks who build in flood planes and end up getting wet, but then again, I'm blessed to live in a region largely free from hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, volcanos, and floods. I suppose much of the United States wouldn't pass my ''so don't build there, idiot'' test. The folks who do obviously look at those risks differently than I do, consider their needs, their love of a place, a lack of available housing, opportunities, etc, and probably dozens of other factors when making that decision. I definitely understand loving a place and wanting to preserve it.
I think we've also seen the way culture fragments and changes and is lost when its place vanishes. I don't know that a New Orleans diaspora would be able to preserve or rebuild everything that makes the city special to the people who live there now, and I'm not comfortable just kind of telling them to deal with it, even if it seems inevitable to me now.
I'm not sure what degree of realism I'm aiming for in this art, even after a doing this series for a year. My outlook on our near term future, (when I let myself think about it) is quite bleak. The postcards are kind of an attempt to focus on the potential for something better, to talk about possible options, and to emphasize the aspects of solarpunk I love and to introduce people to them. I want the scenes to feel aspirational and attainable. And in a place (country/national discourse) where a large swath of the population is fearfully/enthusiasticly examining any leftist media for glimmers of top-down, authoritarian conspiracies, I'm aware that pointing out ways things are going to get bad looks to them like a celebration of the end of their comforts etc. And that that can drive people away from solarpunk and from possible solutions. So I don't know, I guess from a messaging standpoint, at the moment, I'd rather emphasize adapting to changing conditions and reconsidering our current ways of doing things in order to talk about those impending problems and what we'll do in response. I've done some other scenes of deconstruction and rewilding but I try to keep them mostly to cultureless mcmansion suburbs rather than working class cities. I'm not really comfortable shrugging and saying it's pointless to try to preserve what we can of something parts of the audience care about.
I want to emphasize that I'm talking about the tone of this particular postcard art series, and trying to find my own goals for it, and that I don't think you're being unrealistic, exactly. I'll keep the difficulties of the preservation aspect in mind.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I appreciate you trying to keep your work accessible and comprehensible to casual viewers, and that it's hard to describe a happy relocation, especially in a single image. You've clearly put a lot of thought into the messaging. I personally have difficulty accepting flawed/imperfect/good-enough solutions, and it's nice to have more grounded people actually getting a positive message out there even at the cost of accuracy.
All of that said, refugees and migrants already exist, and they already face the same struggle of wanting to preserve the culture they have been forced away from. The question of how to make migrations as pleasant as possible and rebuild as much of the physically embodied culture that was left behind as possible is one that is very relevant right now, so I would love to see you make a postcard of a migrant town, if you don't already have one. If you can show how even migration can be a place of solarpunk joy, then suddenly the people of New Orleans do have a realistic joyful future despite the bleak prospect of evacuation.
Personally, a full diaspora seems like an unnecessary loss. Modern western policies of spreading migrants thinly over as wide an area as possible to prevent them from coming together to celebrate the world they left behind are horrific. Migration is at its most beautiful in a place like 19th-20th century New York City, with the best parts of several dozen distinct cultures being reproduced side by side and then mixing together into something novel and rich.
If New Orleans had to be evacuated, I wouldn't want its culture to dilute as everyone from there is forced to make the separate choice to let their distinctiveness be subsumed by their peers. I would like a bunch of Little New Orleanses, hundreds of migrants all living together in the same neighborhood celebrating the old culture and mingling with the locals, choosing their own rate of change and having enough mass to make other groups consider their perspective and values and artforms.
This is a heavy topic with some pretty high stakes but it's going on my list. You're right that it's something worth rendering, it's art we might need, though TBH I hope someone better qualified than me gets to it first.
If you'd like to discuss how these places and experiences should be represented sometime, I'd definitely be interested. I know I'm usually unqualified to make these scenes (aspirational fiction requires so much more knowledge to do well and solarpunk scenes often involve a terrifying mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, vehicle infrastructure, and more) but I'm profoundly unqualified to say much of anything about the experiences of refugees and migrants. That'll be something to work towards through research and conversation, and perhaps to carefully reference in small scenes in prose fiction etc at first. References to Little New Orleanses and similar neighborhoods seem like a good place to start, with more detail in time.
Thanks for talking about this stuff with me. I really appreciate it!
Yeah. I constantly feel under qualified to write solarpunk fiction. But I do it because it needs to be done.