I've posted a few times around the instance asking for input on this one. huge thanks to everyone for their suggestions! I've tried to include all of them, and have done some others as separate scenes. I have more planned.
I’ve been thinking a lot about rural solarpunk lately. Idyllic farming scenes aside, there aren’t many depictions in solarpunk art of places that look like the towns where I’m from. But the towns where I’m from aren’t very solarpunk, despite being beautiful and full of nature. With cars, people have spread out in these sprawling bedroom communities that are becoming ever more dense with neighborhoods. Gas and groceries are easily a 40-minute drive away (more if you’re looking for a big box store), and I feel like most people I knew growing up drove at least an hour each way for work. When you live there, you’re completely dependent on your vehicles and you sometimes have at least one spare per household.
I’ve also been thinking about how these places might change with some of the societal crumbles and contractions I feel like are impending. Cars rely on a lot of infrastructure all over the world, from their manufacturing, to their maintenance, and fuel is a massive and complex tangle of technologies and politics, dependent on a ton of infrastructure for acquisition, refining, and transportation, and again, maintenance of all those systems. How would rural areas change if cars became impractical (due to shortages etc) and how could things be rebuilt better? Or what would they look like if cars had never taken off the way they did?
In my grandparents’ time, the region where I grew up was lots of small villages, usually bunched up around water and local industry, with farms and forests out beyond that.
So I decided to build this scene around a similar place. A small dense village, served by multiple kinds of public transit, and surrounded by multiple examples of agroforestry, and rewilded forests beyond that.
I realized pretty quickly that this is a bit bigger in scope than most of the things I’ve depicted before. In most of my scenes, I feel like you can usually assume everything else society needs is just out of frame, but with this photobash, aside from anything inside the buildings and under the canopy, you can see the whole place. So I had to try and make sure I included everything they’d need. I’m just one guy whose okay at cutting up images, and I don’t know much about community planning, so I reached out a few times for ideas:
https://slrpnk.net/post/2764472
https://slrpnk.net/post/4535056
https://slrpnk.net/post/4537582
https://slrpnk.net/post/2794425
https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/182w2vh/things_a_solarpunk_village_would_need/
https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/170etfr/what_would_you_like_to_see_in_art_of_a_rural/
And I received quite a few! I’ve tried to include every suggestion (assuming it would fit at this zoomed-out level). I’ve really enjoyed this process – I feel like any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.
So what’s in this scene:
Housing:
- Apartment buildings: To get the density and walkability I've included a clump of four/five story brick apartment buildings (figuring brick can possibly be baked in solar kilns and transported by train) around an open common area near the train station. (I think it can probably be assumed that these are mixed use and the first floor of some are shops and third spaces).
- Multi-family homes
- Houses: further out on the edges of the village, and some along the farms
- Tiny homes: possibly some are used for visitors to the village, or just people who don’t need much space and want more privacy or a better location
- An abandoned McMansion left over from an earlier age, far enough out and in bad enough shape that its not currently in use. Perhaps it will eventually be restored for use, or, if the damage is bad enough or no one needs it, perhaps it will be disassembled for parts/materials.
Recreation:
- An open common area/farmer's market/sometimes sports field
- The top of the train station is an open park and set of community gardens Some rooftops are community gardens
- Pond and surrounding park, possibly stocked with fish for the meat eaters, possibly used for ice harvesting in the winter.
- The river below the village (I'm trying to make it clear the main river swings below the village and there's a bit of a riparian buffer around it)
- Public amphitheater – one of the only man-made structures on the flood plane.
- The billboard in the foreground is part of a project inside the setting, where they’ve replaced any advertizements on the remaining billboards with artwork, just as a sort of public outdoor art gallery.
- Under the tree canopy there’d be parks, playgrounds, and other third places.
- Public workshops/makerspaces
Public transit:
- Train/train station
- Ropeway to a nearby village not directly served by the train
Agriculture:
- Agroforestry: in the foreground we mostly have alley cropping, in the back it looks more like strip cropping or wind breaks. There’s a riparian boundary around the river, and the forest in and around the village is a food forest where people can forage (in addition to sheltering parks, playgrounds, and other things). I’m not any kind of expert on agroforestry, sorry if my depictions have issues.
- A small paulownia elongata pollard plantation (tucked between the barn/recycling warehouse and the biogas generator and algae farm because the wrong type of this tree can be invasive) which are used for woodgas, and also for shelter for animals, possibly goats, who would also help prevent invasive shoots from spreading.
- Solar panel farm with crops planted underneath
- Algae farm (for nutrients or biodiesel?)
- Greenhouses/Walpinis set into the south-facing hillside
- Compost windrows with negative pressure airflow pulling CO2 into the greenhouses/algae farm.
- Grain bins for storage
Industry:
- Workshops/factories: some have waterwheels (fed using a levada style stone channel split from the main river), others are set up on higher ground.
- Road leading down to town, with a work crew hauling back an old car for recycling. Perhaps there’s a bounty type system in place, and this will be loaded on a train to be melted down in a solar furnace further south.
Power sources:
- Solar farm and rooftop solar
- Windmills (though these may belong to the next village)
- Anaerobic Biogas Generation from sewage
- Gas generator converted to run on woodgas
Not visible from here:
Under the canopy/ -Food forests -Parks -Playgrounds
Inside the buildings: -Places of worship -Cafeterias -Other third places
Thanks again for all your help!