Solarpunk needs a kitchen rota

You have seen the pictures even if you never knew their name. Towers wrapped in vines, rooftop gardens feeding the street below, an electric train running through a green valley with the sun behind it. They are beautiful, and there are thousands of them now, more every week as the image generators get better. Solarpunk is the most hopeful picture of the future the internet has produced in years.

And almost nobody lives any differently because of them. That is the strange thing about solarpunk. It has produced an enormous amount of art and a very small amount of life. The picture is more or less the whole footprint.

We have a lot of time for solarpunk here, which is exactly why that gap bothers us.

The founders saw this coming

Most people scrolling the pretty renders have missed something: solarpunk was never meant to be wallpaper. The people who named the movement were worried about this exact failure from the start.

When Adam Flynn wrote his early notes on solarpunk in 2014, he argued for a future with “dirt behind its ears” rather than a clean showroom render of tomorrow. He framed infrastructure itself as a form of self-determination: building your own systems is how you stop depending on someone else’s. The 2019 Solarpunk Manifesto went further and called on communities around the world to build “nests of self-sustaining revolution”. The instruction was to build them, at human scale, in the real world.

So the canon of the movement is about real life. Ecovillages and intentional communities, tool libraries and maker spaces, food grown on the actual street. Prefigurative politics, which is a long phrase for a simple idea: you build the thing you want now, rather than waiting for permission to have it.

That describes a way of living together. The render only describes a mood.

The aesthetic ate the politics

The honest answer to what went wrong is that the easy half of solarpunk travelled and the hard half stayed home.

The easy half is the hardware. Solar panels, green roofs, the train, the vertical garden. It photographs beautifully and it sells, and you can bolt the look of it onto almost anything. Flynn himself later warned about a fake kind of solarpunk urbanism: luxury developments with a green roof and a sustainability brochure that price out the people who already lived there. The look of a better world, resting on the same old arrangement underneath.

The hard half is everything the picture leaves out: who the place is actually for, who decides, and what happens when two people want the same thing or someone stops pulling their weight. That half does not render. You cannot put a consensus meeting on a poster. So it got cropped, and the movement drifted towards being a mood rather than a method.

Hope is a precondition

We should be careful not to talk ourselves into cynicism about the pictures, because they are doing something real. Solarpunk’s first move is hope, and it is a deliberate one. The 2019 manifesto refuses both denial and despair, and rules out dystopia on purpose. After decades of cyberpunk teaching us to expect a future that is corporate and grim, insisting that a good future is even possible is a genuinely radical act.

That hope is load-bearing. It is the thing that gets anyone to start. You cannot build towards a future you cannot picture, and despair is the most demobilising feeling there is. If collapse feels certain, there is no reason to give up a Tuesday evening for a residents’ meeting. A vivid, desirable image of a better life is what makes the unglamorous work worth doing. The beautiful render is the recruiting poster for the consensus meeting that follows it.

So the imagining matters, and we want to keep it. The trouble starts only when the imagining becomes the whole project. A picture with nothing built behind it stays a daydream. The point is to hold onto the longing for a better place and add the means to live in one.

The half we work on

This is where Distributed Republic comes in, because the half that got cropped is the half that is our whole job.

Solarpunk named the social ambition. It says, clearly, that the future should be decentralised, cooperative, and governed from the ground up rather than the top down. What it mostly did not supply is the how. How do a group of people who are not family share a building and run it together, without a landlord above them holding the real power?

That how is the social technology we keep writing about. The anarchic agreements a community makes for itself instead of inheriting. The rituals that turn a list of residents into people who show up for each other. The shared commons, and the contribution that everyone puts in and everyone has a say over. To borrow Flynn’s own framing, the agreement you wrote yourself is a piece of infrastructure too. A rule you made and can change is self-determination, every bit as much as the solar panel on the roof.

Solarpunk decentralised the power grid. We are interested in decentralising the power. They are two halves of one idea, and a community that runs on community solar while answering to a single owner has only finished the half you can photograph.

The garden is the easy part

We end up where we always do. The building is never the hard part. The rooftop garden is lovely, and it is also the easy bit. The frontier is who waters it, who decided, and what the group does on the week half of them forget.

That is what we mean by solarpunk you can move into. A real place, with the dirt and the disagreements and the kitchen rota, run by the people who live there. A nest of self-sustaining revolution is a wonderful thing to imagine. Someone still has to agree whose turn it is to cook.

If the hopeful picture moved you, hold onto that feeling. Then come and help build the part the picture leaves out. That part is the whole point, and it is the only bit that was ever going to be ours.