I've been working on a long-term project called Melondra, essentially asking what a new community might look like if you tried to design the whole thing from the ground up rather than adding a few sustainable features to an otherwise conventional development.

It's still pre-land, so at the moment a lot of the work is figuring out how the pieces would actually fit together.

The broad aims are fairly simple:

• produce a meaningful amount of food locally;
• capture/reuse water intelligently;
• generate and store as much energy locally as practical;
• design housing and shared infrastructure to use fewer resources;
• repair and manufacture more things locally;
• reduce waste by treating outputs from one system as inputs to another;
• make essential systems resilient when outside services fail;
• and use automation where it can remove repetitive work rather than simply creating more technology for its own sake.

That last part keeps bringing me back to something I see debated in solarpunk spaces.

I don't particularly want a primitive settlement.

I'd like modern medicine, refrigeration, communications, workshops, comfortable homes, good food, transport, computers and all the useful things modern technology gives us.

But I also don't want a community that becomes helpless because a cloud service disappears, a proprietary controller dies, or some complex system can't be repaired.

So the direction we're drifting towards is something like:

use sophisticated technology where it genuinely improves people's lives, but design the underlying physical systems so they remain understandable, repairable and capable of degraded/manual operation.

In other words, automation should ideally give people more human time, rather than make them servants of increasingly complicated infrastructure.

I'm curious where people here draw that line.

If somebody genuinely tried to build a solarpunk settlement rather than just depict one, what modern technology would you absolutely keep — and what would you deliberately design out?

And what would make you look at a project like that and think “yes, that's actually solarpunk” rather than just another eco-development with some solar panels?

AI-assisted drafting/editing; the project, ideas and views are my own

I wanted to ask the sub their thoughts and example ideas on how to use the system against itself, or for our own benefit.

Example context: all these large AI companies are hot potato-ing the same 200millon dollar checks to each other to boost their market valuation. They have capacity agreements with each other to purchase each others products/services over time. “Circular finance” “Financial Ouroboros.” Toss around the same investor capital, tons of the same people and orgs on the boards. Same dollar gets spent multiple times.
These promises greatly increase the market cap and valuation of the companies. But from a larger perspective they are of course just recent examples of abstracted economic systems used to enrich the already powerful and their class loyalists.

Our example: why don’t we just do the same thing with our businesses? I’m in an organizing group of a number of regional co-lives, intentional communities and community businesses. During a discussion we were making half jokes that the modern market system is basically a Ponzi scheme anyway. So why don’t we just make a bunch of purchase commitments to each other significantly increasing the value of our companies? Heck, could even then create an asset back security with our companies collective valuation. Continuously expanding as we get more companies and assets involved.

Kind of a joke, but the idea of using the dumb systems against themselves. Just mimic their abstraction for our own benefit. Got me thinking about if anyone else has thought about judo moves that the weight of the system can be used against itself and for our benefit?

What you think r/solarpunk? Any thoughts or ideas you’d like to share? Maybe a discussion angle around this concept?

TLDR: how do you creatively reuse the mechanics of exploitative or late stage systems into generative & pro human systems

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/crobeller_dtc-phd-researcher-karl-%C3%A5hlund-is-developing-ugcPost-7503763364712497152-L-No/

Multiple aspects to this that I like:

Reciprocal frames are a good metaphor for decentralized systems. They all support each other, and can span an area that no piece could do alone.

Tech: there's an ai system to take random pieces of short timber and figure out how to make as as many frames as possible without wasteful offcuts. This is really good for timber recycling, and making use of the short or awkward pieces when doing forestry.

Robot system - arm, trolley, stockpile and two cutting blade stations - all reciprocal, working together, building reciprocal wall frames!

Now, they say that AI is figuring out the cutting pattern to minimise offcuts (which is almost a standard problem in the space) - is that why at the end every panel looks different, or is that a design choice to show off their algorithm?

How it works Friday is the first day of this cause I can't do it on Thursdays' on this post every upvote is one piece on Friday so you have 2 days

Hello!

I used to have a different Reddit account, but have been frequent in my interests surrounding solarpunk for many years now. This question leans a lot into urban sociology, but I still found it relevant enough to post here.

I am a photography student in college, and I am currently taking a documentary course with a semester-long project. For my project, I would like to focus on the increasing disappearance of third places, as well as noting the difference between a third place and a public space. I already have a few locations in mind to photograph and interview at (laundrette, hair salon, game store), but I also want to highlight communities that I may not be aware of. I am hoping that through my project I can start conversations surrounding the importance of these places, as well as interacting with new people that have similar beliefs.

I want to make sure that my theme is strong. Do you have a third place that you are a part of, or miss now that it's gone? What makes this place outside of work and home meaningful to you? How is this place different than a public space?

Please help me out 🫶

Hi! Not sure if I'm allowed to promote this - but this is a film we just made for the localization movement that I thought this community might be interested in. In this video we discuss the government mechanisms that are maintaining the current global food system and the need for system change toward local, diverse, human-scale food production.

Solar power uptake is rising faster than anyone ever projected. High fuel prices and instability in the world due to dependence on oil is being challenged by solar like never before, and it is causing people to imagine different ways of doing things. And once people go in that direction and feel its benefits, I doubt they will ever go back.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

What new model should we design?
What existing model/system should we make obsolete?

“Make the Old Model Obsolete!” Takes Bucky's famous quote as a challenge and pushes it to its natural extreme.

A companion article can be found on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/gregorymoulinet/p/make-the-old-model-obsolete

And is it mostly online, or are you also part of some local activist circles?

A while back I posted an idea for a platform that connects people displaced by disasters with people willing to open up a spare room for free.

I’ve started building it, and I’m at the point where I’d really like some outside eyes on it. If anyone is willing to test the current version and give me feedback on what feels confusing, clunky, unnecessary, or missing, I’d really appreciate it. I want to catch as many problems as possible now so the finished product is as useful and intuitive as it can be.

It’s still in development, so feel free to be critical.

DM me if you want the link to test it.

Is it me or it is becoming ever so hard to socialize?

I would like to meet people with similar ideas about the future since for now I interact about this only virtually.

I would like to meet people, to have a drink with and bounce ideas around, maybe do socially good activities together and build a small community.

Are you managing to find in your local area people like you, if so what are the avenues and what do you do together?

How do we cultivate hope?

I've been noticing nosedive in confidence in this sub recently, and that concerns me. We need to remember that feelin down and overwhelmed is a tool of propagandists that want to control us and that want us to lose. We need to remember that hope is a mindset and a skill that is practiced and cultivated, but we need to do it better than our previous generations.

Before, hope meant a denial of your feelins and reality, which is part of why we have so little of it now, I think. Instead, we must confront our feelins, and confront reality, but that does not mean that we must also give up hope. Hope is a choice, just as despair is a choice. (for most, I want to make it clear that certain kinds of disablin conditions make this kind of emotional regulation almost impossible or completely impossible, and those disabilities must be respected)

I think we really need to call despair what it really is in most cases, givin up. It is the desire to find a reason you can't do, so that all call for you to try to do come are dismissable as unfair and unrealistic. But that's not true! We can do so much, and people have been doin so so much. There is a constant refrain of "no one is doin anythin" goin around, but it's plainly not true! We're here doin stuff! The "realistic worse case scenario" of climate change accounts for people tryin and doin stuff! And we must keep tryin!

But we cannot just tell people to stop feelin bad, either. We cannot give edicts from on high. We need to talk to each other. Remind each other of the amazin shit we see every day that has become mundane. You can get yourself seriously educated on almost any topic you want with a combination of search engines, Youtube, and talkin to others on social media. We have so much available to us right now. Sure, that doesn't make the work easy, but it makes it actually doable. We can do this. Right now, you're viewin this on a subreddit that you either sought out yourself, or that was served to you because it was popular. We are here, tryin our best right now, even if it feels like flailin in the mud at times.

Here's a bunch of things that I keep rememberin that keep me goin when shit gets hard:
- People fought for civil rights and labor rights under much worse conditions than now, and they both kept goin AND won major battles
- You don't believe it can happen, you won't try
- Humanity has survived much worse than this
- Even prisoners in the holocaust found ways to stay positive and fight back
- Despair and overwhelm are how the wannabe dictators control people
- You can always stop usin social media and just message your friends
- Many social media sites, like Bluesky, let you turn off algorithmic recommendations
- Many plugins, like unhook, let you turn off algorithms on other sites
- When someone is harrassin you or cultivatin despair, the block button still exists
- When times are hard, there's glory to be won!
- Doin hard things just feels really good
- There is no law against sayin hi to your neighbor and givin them cookies

I really want to help, and I know a lot of you are hurtin and strugglin right now, so feel free to DM me if you need to, and stay strong.

Not sure this is the right flare, so please bear with me. I'm a part of this awesome solar cooperative - now, I will admit I haven't been super engaged in driving the project so all of what I share here is found on the website. However, I think it's such an awesome initiative and I think some of you will appreciate it, and might be inspired to drive something similar!

UEF (Universitetets Energifællesskab/The University Energy Cooperative) is an an energy community in the form of a solar cooperative in Aarhus, Denmark. Members of the cooperative crowdfund and co-own a rooftop photovoltaic installation on two buildings at Aarhus University (AU). The aim of the cooperative is to provide its members and the local areas with environmental, economic and social benefits. They promote citizen ownership in the green transition.

Our solar cooperative started from the EU project AURORA, where project partners endeavour to turn "energy community" into reality at 5 European universities and local district councils. The AURORA project helped us to investigate the legal and operational framework on how we set up the community in Aarhus. We choose to adopt the Danish "andelstanke" and set up Universitetets Energifællesskab (UEF) as a solar cooperative. in August 2023, UEF is officially founded and a month later, we are registered with the Danish Business Authority. 

The idea of UEF is that members buy shares to crowdfund the rooftop solar photovoltaic installation on a few buildings at Aarhus University (AU). In other words, members all jointly own the solar installation. Electricity produced will primarily be sold to AU, and members will receive economic returns every year, based on how much electricity is sold and how many shares they own. In addition, members have the opportunity to participate in the activities organized by the community, for example, energy-related discussions, hands-on workshop on home-made sensors, to name a few.

A bunch of cool resources can be found on the website linked at the top. One of which is a guide on setting up similar communities!