Hi, I’ve been working on a few photobashes lately, of different scenes in a fictional solarpunk future. I recently started a scene of a solarpunk village. I’ve been thinking a lot about rural places lately, since that’s where I’m from, and how they might change with some of the societal crumbles and contractions I feel like are impending. 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 spread out beyond that. With cars, people have spread out in these sprawling bedroom communities that are becoming ever more dense with people. Gas and groceries are 40 minutes away by car (more if you’re looking for a box store), and I feel like most people I knew drove an hour each way for work.
I wanted to do a scene sort of showing how things might change in rural areas if cars became impractical (due to shortages etc) and how things could be rebuilt better.
I’ve realized that this is a bit bigger in scope than most of the things I’ve depicted before. I’m trying to show most of a community in one shot here (albeit at a distance). And there’s so much we could do differently, I don’t really want to miss any ideas/opportunities.
I know I want to include the following:
- A dense village surrounded by farms and forest, an abandoned mcmansion or large house far enough out to be impractical
- High speed rail access to the village
- Solar panels
- Waterwheels
- Farms
- Algae farming
- Maybe a bit of an inside-out appearance where they’ve cleared farmland around the town but planted lots of trees between the buildings for cooling?
But when it comes to stuff like the layout and other societal-structure stuff, I don’t really have any specifics in mind, which is why I feel like I should look for input from others rather than just drag along my own assumptions. As always I plan to emphasize reuse, so I can grab some existing bits and pieces of towns, but this’ll be in the US where even the small towns aren’t (in my experience) clumped this densely, so we have some flexibility with what the current residents have changed.
Here’s the really rough version I currently have, so you can get an idea as to the general layout I’m planning for. The big green blank space and the surrounding woods etc is where the village and fields will go.
Sorry if I’m asking around too much, I posted to /c/farming yesterday for ideas for the fields (which I’m also happy to get) but I feel like a solarpunk society should be very consensus-driven, so it makes sense for depictions of it to be as well. I’ll be doing smaller, simpler scenes for a bit after this one and should be more self-sufficient.
ebike + bike trailer or an cargo ebike could be a potent light cargo hauler. you can pedal, but I could build a bike with off the shelf parts with a horsepower a decent percentage of a small car without all the extra weight, before you add in your own pedal power too
In a world with many fewer cars, where bikes would have more room on the road, I kind of wonder if people would go further - what kind of new pedal-powered or hybrid contraptions would they build? Cargo bikes seem very effective, would there be a benefit to cargo tricycles or four wheeled cart things?
There’s a French company that plans to release an ebike with a capacitor instead of a battery, which sounds pretty cool and a bit more sustainable.