Solarpunk

Imho what I miss the most in solarpunk cities are workshops/makerspace and small scale factories of some sort. Maybe making some diy wind turbines, a bunch of 3d printer, converting cars into something more usefull and so forth.

Street music would be cool as well or some other form of life art such as theater.

Hey, sounds great! I was happy to read about reusing existing architecture.

options for a Third Place, where people can be outside home or work without having to be customers or tresspassers (I really don't have any of these yet)

Not my idea, but I liked it: repurpose streets, partially, into collective anything. Gardens, playgrounds, speakers corners, eating areas for communal kitchens.

It's literally the space which connects people, their common ground, and was historically used for all these activities before being invaded by cars.

You can keep one or maybe two narrow lanes for utility, but lots of street space can find a new purpose, reflecting the values and habits of the citizens around.

All the plants. Big beautiful trees but also green walls and roofs. Any surface that isn’t being used for some other purpose should be a garden.

I forgot to mention, I'm putting these out on a CC-BY license so you can use them for any solarpunk projects you have

Maybe an old gas station with a new purpose

I wish I could find a piece I saw once, I think you would like it. It was a woman in a Pacific Northwest rainforest, dressed in vaguely sci-fi Salish clothing, on a path with subtle down-lights. There was a scene in the background of solar-punk techishness. I can’t remember all the details (which is why I’m having no luck finding it). It might have been on Reddit.

Hopefully someone will see this and remember it and be able to find the art for you!

Edit: found it! The artist is Coleen East https://www.pinterest.com/pin/solarpunk-pacific-northwest--776448792016755069/

use of different types of solar where appropriate, we always see PV but solar thermal and bio-solar have some great uses - tanks of algae can be really good for various uses; nutrition for people and animals food and medicine ingredients such as carrageenan and agar, building materials from cellulose, biofules, bioplastic, wastewater treatment, fertilizer as well as potential future uses like being used in biodegradable electronics, as sensor materials (https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/50395) and for more advanced chemistry such as genetically engineered algae making cleaning solutions (great for cleaning solar panels), fuel for cutting tools, and of course alcohol and drug molecules (both medicinal and recreational)

Cody's Lab has some fascinating videos about his diy algae project, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64cEmjtwRgw might be useful as a visual reference, but basically they're tubes or tanks that sit in the sun or partial shade and grow algae.

people having a cookout on something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker or using a larger one to do things like fire ceramics (to maintain and regulate temperature over the duration you'd probably want something like molten salt feeding into a refractory chamber, by controlling the flow rate and mirror focus you could get very good temperature balance) there was a great video with a guy i think in the Nevada desert who had an array which he was using to melt metal and sand casting, this would be a great way to recycle heavy infrastructure from todays society - maybe a scrapyard with mirror arrays used to recycle old cars into useful new tools, the mirrors don't need to be perfectly reflective so could simply be sheets of metal made from the scrap and polished with a windmill powered grinding plate -- the only difficult thing is getting them all to line up, this could be complex tracking gears, digital sensor and motor based systems or a slightly cleverer solution using passive solar tracking where a windowed section of the mirror surface is linked to hydrolytic containers and thermal expansion causes it to realign when one side goes dark - i've seen diy people make them that work pretty well but they're still far from perfect even the expensive industrial ones

I want to see disabled people, and also generally a world that's more accessible.

Way too often, disabled people are treated like acceptable casualties, by the left and the right alike. I split with my local climate activist group because the things they were pushing the local council to implement weren't considering the needs of disabled people at all, and when I raised this as something we should consider, they outright said that they couldn't let people like me be an obstruction for progress.

I want to see a Solarpunk world because I believe that meaningful systemic change will only happen when we see disabled people and other marginalized communities as a source of wisdom, a sort of "stress-testing" that is necessary for making sure we're building truly inclusive societies.

I don't have the brain for any more specific suggestions right now though

Generally more high tech. Solarpunk is supposed to be futuristic and remind people that technology does not need to be environmentally hostile or corporate-backed.

More colorful buildings, emphasizing buildings as a canvas for art from graffiti to commissioned murals

That! :D I feel like in a solar punk utopia people would love to express themselves in more ways than our current society allows. I also believe that the tag/throwup style of graffiti would be way less common in a place where every wall is a canvas.

Have the city architecture look different. An efficient building in a hot desert isn't going to look the same as one in a temperate rain forest.

Nodes of density within the wilderness. Have a set of constrained city boundaries against nature or farmland. Make the dropoff between civilization and managed wilderness a lot steeper.

Physically smaller neighborhood streets for some neighborhoods. They might be only wide enough for two cars, but no one drives on them except for deliveries.

Street based garbage collection instead of building based. You might have a place with bins and compactors that collect an entire street's worth of trash at one location.

Public roads not just geared for cars. More bike and pedestrian paths. Maybe bus or streetcars can intermingle, but cars don't.