courtesy of
f there is hope, it lies in the solar panels.
The last decade has not been abundant in good news, but for perhaps one technological advance: we can now build solar, hydro-, and wind power so cheaply, at such quantity, and with such efficiency that, if our society were so inclined, we could run entire industrialized countries and their metropoles with no recourse to fossil fuels. What this would mean for how cities look and how they’re lived in is a great deal of new paraphernalia: solar panels on most buildings, wind turbines everywhere. Modern architecture, when it emerged out of postrevolutionary Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1920s, was all about taking the newest and most advanced technology and figuring out how it could work aesthetically and what kind of city it would make possible. So we should be asking: Where is the ecomodernist metropolis?
As ever, the future is unevenly distributed — the ecomodernist future city exists in patches. But it has a major fan club online. This community defines itself as “solarpunk,” and it’s disseminated mainly via memes, computer-generated cityscapes, and a few decontextualized photographs of real places. The name comes via the now rather venerable and hoary dystopian cities of cyberpunk, those 1980s visions of the future that proved depressingly accurate: the 2020s really did turn out to look like an aggressively cyberpunk Paul Verhoeven film. Solarpunk’s optimism is, in this context, refreshing. But the really great thing about it is that it offers an image of a post–fossil fuels future that you might actually want to live in, a vision of affluence and pleasure. There are few or no cars, and there are fast elevated trains and subways everywhere. There are no McMansions, and the imaginary apartment blocks are organic and visually imaginative. You won’t get a front lawn, but why would you want one, when the entire city looks like a botanic garden?
Ecomodernism has a long history. Arguably, even the most controversial of modernist city plans — Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (“Radiant City”) of 1930 — is an example of ecomodernism, bathing its residential tower blocks in trees. The better-built interpretations of that plan, like London’s Alton Estate or Warsaw’s Sady Żoliborskie, have significantly more breathable air, more birds, and more biodiversity than the average low-density suburb of lawns and spaced-out oaks. But in the contemporary sense of passively heated and cooled buildings, the pioneer is the all-but-forgotten Solar Campus, a comprehensive school built in the 1950s on the outskirts of Liverpool as an experiment: the first major public building to be wholly solar-powered. Through its rejection of the traditional way of doing things, and its belief that form follows function rather than preconceived ideas of beauty or historical continuity, modernism should lend itself well to the new, post–fossil fuels city. The problem with eco-architecture lies elsewhere: in the fact that, due to its links with anti-urbanist social movements from the 1960s onward, it has usually been an architecture of dropping out and going off the grid, tailored to a wealthy minority of guilty enthusiasts. Think of the geodesic domes of Drop City in Colorado, or a thousand exurban Californian eco-houses, reached by hugely wasteful acres of concrete freeways.
The great thing about solarpunk, and the reason it’s more interesting than other meme cults, is that its optimism is wholly urban — the images it shares are of cities, dense with buildings, places where people live together in a society rather than secede from one. One of the major architects referenced in the memes and renders of solarpunk is the Milanese designer Stefano Boeri, whose twin-tower skyscraper complex in Milan, the Bosco Verticale, features abundant gardens on every floor: real gardens with real trees in the sky, standing just outside the historic center of one of Europe’s great cities. But the real source of solarpunk’s inspiration, just like cyberpunk, is East Asia.
Skyscrapers, even when surrounded by greenery in the Le Corbusier manner, are seldom particularly green — they usually need a lot of air-conditioning, and a lot of energy goes into the lighting, the elevators, and, of course, the construction. The first designer to claim that it was possible to design green or, as he called them, “bioclimatic” skyscrapers, was the Malaysian architect Ken Yeang in the late 1990s. Yeang’s high-rises in Kuala Lumpur and across the border in Singapore included not only familiar shading devices like louvers and screens but also complicated passive systems to bring air into buildings, lessening the need for air-conditioning, and they increasingly used sky gardens and pools to make the project of high-rise steel and glass buildings in the ferociously hot equatorial zone less obviously insane. These ideas have often been honored in the breach. Norman Foster’s “Gherkin” skyscraper at 30 St Mary Axe in London was designed not as a curved form but as a bioclimatic skyscraper whose windows could be opened to bring breezes into the tower; its architect explained that if the building’s technologies were working properly, it would resemble not a smooth gherkin but a pine cone. Looking at the building for twenty-five years, I have never seen more than two or three of its windows open at any one time, and it remains a sleek, closed phallic symbol rather than a spiky eco-tower.
The idea of the green skyscraper has thrived, however, in the region from whence it came, particularly in Singapore and in the Chinese cities that have developed dramatically in the last decade as that nation became the global center of solar panel and wind turbine manufacture — inland Chengdu in the southwest rather than coastal Shanghai. Accordingly, it is the bioclimatic skyscrapers and biophilic sky gardens and living walls of Asian cities that mostly comprise the “photographs of real things” side of solarpunk meme pages. Indeed, with their abundant public transit, their walkable suburbs, their density and urbanity, most large cities in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan are genuinely more sustainable than nearly any American city. But this approach can easily lend itself to the facile. The highly praised Japanese architect Kengo Kuma is a particular offender in this regard: his buildings always look like they’re made of wood, in an update of the premodern Japanese tradition, but a close inspection will reveal cladding on an underlying concrete or steel frame. Yet even the stupidest “urban forest” towers — the Qiyi City Forest Garden, a Chengdu emulation of the Bosco Verticale, has been criticized for bringing so many mosquitoes into the apartments that they’ve been hard to sell — do actually include real trees that produce real oxygen.
The problem lies beyond making new buildings that use less energy and produce their own oxygen. Modern construction is one of the most carbon-intensive human activities. It is difficult (though not impossible) to design all those skyscrapers without steel, and it is impossible to build those metro viaducts without concrete, but the processes of forging steel and mixing concrete are considerably more difficult to decarbonize than electricity generation. Ecomodernism and its solarpunk cheerleaders can teach us much about what the new buildings we might want should be like, and there will always be a need for new buildings. Nonetheless, by now it’s clear that the greenest building is usually the one that already exists. I’m not sure what his status is in the solarpunk canon, but here it’s worth going back to David Harvey’s 2000 book Spaces of Hope, and to Edilia, the utopian city he describes there.
In Edilia, after a revolution precipitated by a global debt crisis, the working class remakes the urban world into a series of municipal “hearths” and communal child-rearing “pradashas.” There are green technologies and urban farms that are familiar; similarly familiar perhaps are the hydroponic urban glasshouses, which “guarantee a year-round supply of everything from salad vegetables to excellent high-quality marijuana.” The cities are dense, and older buildings have been transformed so that people can live a more communal, collective life: “Entrances have been punched through dividing rooms among the row houses or, in the case of detached housing and sprawling suburbs, walkways and infill rooms have been constructed between the already existing structures to link them into a continuous unit of high-density habitation.” The old suburban lawns and lots have become spaces of “intensive cultivation.” There are few skyscrapers, with buildings seldom going above seven stories, but there is a skyline: “The roofs of the habitations are adorned with solar panels and small wind sails.” Comparing the look of Edilia to the work of the famous British cartoonist of strange, gimcrack machinery, Harvey’s visitor from the future city writes that “the effect is somewhat Heath-Robinsonish and would probably not be aesthetically pleasing to you.” Perhaps. It’ll be the job of architects to make us believe in it.A City Built for Sunshine.
https://jacobin.com/2025/03/a-city-built-for-sunshine
