this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Well for me Solarpunk is about what would be possible - except for our current global regime preventing it. So yeah it's fantasy.
I don't know if the costs work out low enough, but you could build such a lone apartment tower on farmland right now. If you had like a government owned "eco bank" funding this. If the land and construction costs can be kept low enough. It would be really cheap with some advances in premanufactured parts or 3D printing or house building robots. Kite power for very cheap wind energy.
If you could buy in for 50k and get all your living costs, food, energy, water and internet basically for free for the next 20 years, plenty of people would jump at this. And if it's big enough (500 units?) you could justify having a doctor and a kindergarden and hybrid local / remote school. If we were serious about climate change, everyone could live in luxury with a killer view.
so... I love the dream, but it is a utopia.
First of all, farmland is a diversity graveyard. Just because it is green, does not make it natural or even pretty. I live in a country that uses 61% of its area for farmland and although it makes for a cool Windows background, there is not much life in fields like that. Changing the farmland to food forests could maybe change this, but this leads to the second point
The reason why farmland is accumulated into larger and larger fields is, because it is cheaper and easier to run. Going the other way, diving it up into smaller production and mixing it up, will make everything more expensive, complicated and require a lot more (manual) work to run.
500 units is not even enough to support a local grocery store in current times, let alone a doctor or a school.
That said, i had not realized where this was posted in. It just popped up on my feed, so I guess you are right in that it could be a great setup if it could work.
Yeah I have no idea if or how it could work. Commie blocks used to design local neighborhoods with shops and kindergarden. Maybe it would be that when you have kids your move to a block with a kindergarden and school, then it would make more sense.
Maybe it would be harder to farm but maybe it could also be solved through lighter robotic farm equipment. I once calculated that you only need ~250m² for potatoes to produce enough calories so feeding yourself so it's theoretically not that difficult. I also hope in the decades to come we can genetically engineer better food plants. Like higher / better quality protein crops.
But my main idea was how to create a view for people that want to "live in nature". But the hippie ideal for a farmstead is unsustainable with so many people. An apartment block would save a lot on heating, cooling and infrastructure. The proper sci-fi utopia would then be to have underground railway tunnels connect thousands of such apartment blocks in nature. Then much surface area could be rewilded instead of having roads and bridges. But tunnels are rather expensive.