I’ve been thinking about trying to depict some of the ideas from this conversation: https://slrpnk.net/post/12735795, using a sort of flat, diagram-like style similar to this old photobash:
Though a bit more complex. The obvious answer is ‘don’t build cities in swamps’ but we already have a bunch of them, and though I don’t live there I recognize that they have a lot of unique cultural and historical value and are peoples’ homes, so I’m interested in what a solarpunk-adapted version of these would look like.
At the same time, I know basically nothing about New Orleans or similar areas, have no background in civil engineering, and no qualifications to make this except for the capability to do so using an old version of GIMP. So I’d absolutely love to identify issues, places to make improvements, and things that are missing now rather than once I’ve spent days chopping up images and finessing them into something coherent.
So what’d I get wrong? What’s unworkable, out of scale, or dangerous? What style of buildings or cultural touchstones would you like to see? What kind of plants are missing?
Perhaps a dam to keep any floods at bay
Needs around 20% more solar and more punk.
needs more ducks and fishes
A few things. First of all the dolphins for the house boats need to be much taller. When you have flooding they have to be above the waterline to have the house boats not float about and so nobody rams them, which would be bad for the boat.
Amphibious public transport is not that great of a solution. Boats can be easily larger then a bus and with proper waterways, which a city would have. In terms of capacity a fairly small boat can easily carry as many passengers as a tram. They also are more efficent without wheels in water. Also you have a problem with doors and other parts which need to be opened often on a bus, since those nearly have to be under the waterline. That also is somewhat true for the ropeway. A ferry connection would be just as fast and can have the same capacity. So a ferry elevate rail interchange might be better.
Good point on the dolphins!
The amphibious public transit idea came from another discussion where someone suggested them so they could double as a fleet of rescue/evacuation vehicles. They basically wanted sturdy buses that wouldn’t stall when traversing a few feet of water, and which didn’t pose as much risk of getting stranded. I don’t know if that makes them any more practical or if a flood-prone city would just maintain a fleet of buses and a fleet of boats for rescue situations. Duckboats would almost definitely be harder to maintain than either one separately, but they might justify the cost if it means they’re getting their money’s worth by using them normally for public transit?
I think you’re absolutely right that a ferry connection would be easier to set up and maintain.
People are making a lot of good points about boats, but on the other had, I know that indigenous people, poor communities, and communities outside main developed areas use boats a lot just fine! I wonder what the difference is–I was thinking about this earlier. Maybe, in a swamp city (not just water, but kinda salty water, which is even worse), we want to go all in one quick biodegradables–stuff that only lasts for a year or two but then is easily composted. Natural materials, and then digging out the canoes or whatever is a community activity! This wouldn’t work for emergency vehicles, because they wouldn’t be motored and wouldn’t go that fast, but it would prevent big waves from like disrupting houseboats like someone said.
One of the ways that maybe the traditional biomes shown in solarpunk might not translate as well to my city: they really seem to want infrastructure that lasts near-forever, and I literally don’t think that’s possible here. We’re just too storm-battered, too humid, too wet. I’d definitely wanna see what more people think about short-use biodegrades. I know solarpunk hates single-use and waste, but I think maybe this doesn’t count if the materials compost well?
I hate cars and car-centric urbanism, so maybe this is a way to make sure the use of boats doesn’t just become the way cars are in New Orleans today–a slower pace of life, you have to paddle the boat. More like bikes than cars that way/
I’ve heard Roman concrete can withstand and even be strengthened by salt water.
As you say, the obvious answer is “don’t build cities in swamps”. Before designing anything concrete, you have to decide why you want to overcome that answer - Is it a harbor, like New Orleans or Amsterdam used to be? Is it a cultural heritage site, like New Orleans or Amsterdam now primarily are? Are there natural resources? Is it a hub for locals to access more specialized goods and services, like specialty medicine? Or is it there because people think it’s cool and they have enough money to let it exist regardless of sense?
Whatever the answer, the form follows that function. Build everything on the principles that drive people to want to live there rather than anywhere else.
So why do you think solarpunk people would choose to build a city in a swamp? And what are the amenities that follow from that need?
If you are trying to preserve a historic town like New Orleans or Amsterdam despite floods and rising sea levels, then your goal is to defy natural change in order to keep things the same. The natural form for that function would be a massive dyke built around all that you want to preserve, so that everything looks just like you want, come hell or high water. (Lifting historic buildings is unfathomably expensive and would change the original feel, so it’s less ideal).
This is not a solarpunk design because the function of preservation is not solarpunk. New Orleans and Amsterdam weren’t built as a place for culture to arise, let alone to preserve some older culture. They were port towns, and they were built with practical purpose. Everything good there arose because working class people from diverse cultures decided to hang out and have fun together, and the same can be done everywhere. If we want to honor the meaning of New Orleans and Amsterdam culture, we let those cities sink into the ocean and focus on having lively third places for the working class in this day and age.
There are things we can bring with us or rebuild in the old style, but loss and adaptation are natural.
I’m writing a story about San Francisco, where greedy fucks filled in the parts of the bay to sell more real estate. Now those areas are going to flood. Worse, toxic groundwater will rise there first and make it unlivable.
To buffer the rest of the city against floods and toxins, I will portray wetlands restoration. What I’m not sure about is how wide an area the wetlands has to be.
The solarpunk reason to engage with these sorts of swamp cities is that they contain lots of infrastructure and housing that you would hate to lose. Reusing existing buildings is more efficient than building new stuff from scratch, especially high rises.
In fiction, you can pretty much always create a reason, and if you have a reason, then that is valid.
That said, the point of using wetlands as a buffer is that the area is too polluted for long-term human exposure, so you might as well give it to nature. Wetlands do nothing to filter out most pollution, the pollution is either removed through industrial processes or slowly allowed to dissipate out into the ocean. As for how wide wetlands should be - right now that’s just the area with an above-acceptable chance of above-acceptable pollution for human habitation or workplace exposure. It depends on where the pollution flows to, how quickly it dissipates and in which ways, etc.
So allowing human habitation in those wetlands is missing the point that caused our capitalist society to restore wetlands there: liberal environmentalists demanded a quota for natural area, and the polluted land is worthless for other uses, so by making them wetlands you satisfy the environmentalists at minimum cost to capital. The animals and plants suffering from the effect of exposure to pollution is not your problem, as long as it still looks pretty enough for photo opportunities and as long as you fund biologists who Monitor the Situation.
Hating to lose things can come from a place of sunk cost fallacy. Reusing existing buildings is often less efficient than building from scratch, and the reason it is so often worth it in the present day is because capitalism is horribly inefficient at land use because land ownership is basically an untaxed way to leech money off the efforts of everyone around it.
However, in your scenario as presented, you’re dealing with a neighborhood built by capitalists in the expectation that the neighborhood would be dry land. It seems very unlikely that the capitalists that built it would have paid the extra money to make those buildings able to handle flooding well. This means rotting drywall and insulation, waterlogged concrete, rusting metal frames, essential household infrastructure like fuse boxes and central heating and sewage pumps being destroyed beyond repair in flooded basements, etc. Using these places in spite of that would likely mean either massive maintenance cost or massive health issues.
It is plausible that in a capitalist society a place like this would be used as a shanty town. In most places in the US, shanty towns are demolished by police because “ew, gross” and because they prefer to send the people that would use them to for-profit prisons. However, it would be on-brand for California to officially endorse the shanty town as a capitalist pseudo pro-housing waffle. Between the lack of functioning infrastructure, the toxic pollution, the building damage, and everything else, quality of life would be pretty bad, but many people may choose it over not having a roof over their heads or becoming a slave to the prison industrial complex or even over the quality/cost of available regular lower class housing in California.
In a solarpunk society, I find hard to imagine that living in rotting flooded housing would be preferable to deconstructing the neighborhood and building adequate housing elsewhere. Reuse is only good if the cost of reuse isn’t greater than the combined cost of disposal and replacement or salvaging and reuse in a different context.
Maybe it could work if most of the reconstruction efforts were done as a capitalist shanty town. Put one or more decades of capitalism after the flooding, enough that a rich amphibious local culture has arisen, the bulk of the reconstruction costs have already been borne, and pollution has diminished so it’s no longer an active health hazard in most of the town. It could be an incrementalist history, where the emphasis on capitalist incentives slowly diminishes over time and people go from living in the shanty town because of work and rent and shelter to living there because of the people and the land, or it could be a revolutionary history, where capitalist structures in the shanty town are finally removed or reclaimed.
With the first option, you would have to be careful to show that this isn’t just the first step of the same cycle of gentrification that has affected successful shanty towns since the dawn of time. Many fashionable capitalist consumer things are cleaned-up versions of poor people managing to survive and thrive 50-100 years earlier. What decisions does society make that show it turning away from the cycle of externalization, exploitation, and commodification?
With the second option, you would have to be careful to show which parts are capitalist and which are postcapitalist. When they use something that is only sensible because of initial capitalist investment, how is it clear that they wouldn’t build it that way today and what other choices they would make? What makes their lives worse than those of people from flooded towns who immediately got a solarpunk response, and why do they choose this place anyway?
I don’t disagree - I don’t tend to have much sympathy for folks who build in flood planes and end up getting wet, but then again, I’m blessed to live in a region largely free from hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, wildfires, volcanos, and floods. I suppose much of the United States wouldn’t pass my ‘‘so don’t build there, idiot’’ test. The folks who do obviously look at those risks differently than I do, consider their needs, their love of a place, a lack of available housing, opportunities, etc, and probably dozens of other factors when making that decision. I definitely understand loving a place and wanting to preserve it.
I think we’ve also seen the way culture fragments and changes and is lost when its place vanishes. I don’t know that a New Orleans diaspora would be able to preserve or rebuild everything that makes the city special to the people who live there now, and I’m not comfortable just kind of telling them to deal with it, even if it seems inevitable to me now.
I’m not sure what degree of realism I’m aiming for in this art, even after a doing this series for a year. My outlook on our near term future, (when I let myself think about it) is quite bleak. The postcards are kind of an attempt to focus on the potential for something better, to talk about possible options, and to emphasize the aspects of solarpunk I love and to introduce people to them. I want the scenes to feel aspirational and attainable. And in a place (country/national discourse) where a large swath of the population is fearfully/enthusiasticly examining any leftist media for glimmers of top-down, authoritarian conspiracies, I’m aware that pointing out ways things are going to get bad looks to them like a celebration of the end of their comforts etc. And that that can drive people away from solarpunk and from possible solutions. So I don’t know, I guess from a messaging standpoint, at the moment, I’d rather emphasize adapting to changing conditions and reconsidering our current ways of doing things in order to talk about those impending problems and what we’ll do in response. I’ve done some other scenes of deconstruction and rewilding but I try to keep them mostly to cultureless mcmansion suburbs rather than working class cities. I’m not really comfortable shrugging and saying it’s pointless to try to preserve what we can of something parts of the audience care about.
I want to emphasize that I’m talking about the tone of this particular postcard art series, and trying to find my own goals for it, and that I don’t think you’re being unrealistic, exactly. I’ll keep the difficulties of the preservation aspect in mind.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I appreciate you trying to keep your work accessible and comprehensible to casual viewers, and that it’s hard to describe a happy relocation, especially in a single image. You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into the messaging. I personally have difficulty accepting flawed/imperfect/good-enough solutions, and it’s nice to have more grounded people actually getting a positive message out there even at the cost of accuracy.
All of that said, refugees and migrants already exist, and they already face the same struggle of wanting to preserve the culture they have been forced away from. The question of how to make migrations as pleasant as possible and rebuild as much of the physically embodied culture that was left behind as possible is one that is very relevant right now, so I would love to see you make a postcard of a migrant town, if you don’t already have one. If you can show how even migration can be a place of solarpunk joy, then suddenly the people of New Orleans do have a realistic joyful future despite the bleak prospect of evacuation.
Personally, a full diaspora seems like an unnecessary loss. Modern western policies of spreading migrants thinly over as wide an area as possible to prevent them from coming together to celebrate the world they left behind are horrific. Migration is at its most beautiful in a place like 19th-20th century New York City, with the best parts of several dozen distinct cultures being reproduced side by side and then mixing together into something novel and rich.
If New Orleans had to be evacuated, I wouldn’t want its culture to dilute as everyone from there is forced to make the separate choice to let their distinctiveness be subsumed by their peers. I would like a bunch of Little New Orleanses, hundreds of migrants all living together in the same neighborhood celebrating the old culture and mingling with the locals, choosing their own rate of change and having enough mass to make other groups consider their perspective and values and artforms.
The question of how to make migrations as pleasant as possible and rebuild as much of the physically embodied culture that was left behind as possible is one that is very relevant right now, so I would love to see you make a postcard of a migrant town, if you don’t already have one. If you can show how even migration can be a place of solarpunk joy, then suddenly the people of New Orleans do have a realistic joyful future despite the bleak prospect of evacuation.
This is a heavy topic with some pretty high stakes but it’s going on my list. You’re right that it’s something worth rendering, it’s art we might need, though TBH I hope someone better qualified than me gets to it first.
If you’d like to discuss how these places and experiences should be represented sometime, I’d definitely be interested. I know I’m usually unqualified to make these scenes (aspirational fiction requires so much more knowledge to do well and solarpunk scenes often involve a terrifying mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, vehicle infrastructure, and more) but I’m profoundly unqualified to say much of anything about the experiences of refugees and migrants. That’ll be something to work towards through research and conversation, and perhaps to carefully reference in small scenes in prose fiction etc at first. References to Little New Orleanses and similar neighborhoods seem like a good place to start, with more detail in time.
Thanks for talking about this stuff with me. I really appreciate it!
Yeah. I constantly feel under qualified to write solarpunk fiction. But I do it because it needs to be done.
I think these look great! It’s definitely possible to have elevated cities and this was a common solution for cities in flood-prone areas prior to modern flood-control infrastructure like dams and levees.
I would look to real world places for inspiration. Many seaside towns reserve the first floor for parking because of possible storm surges. Obviously parking isn’t really needed in a solarpunk city, I would think about uses for this space that can either survive or be easily moved in the case of flooding. Your ideas seem fine although the marketplace would have to be thoughtfully designed to make it portable.
My city of Sacramento historically was very flood prone (and arguably still is, if the levies fail). An interesting feature of our history is that the entire existing downtown was lifted up to reduce flooding risk—this included buildings, sidewalks, streets. Everything! Kind of amazing, really. This particular strategy does leave some issues—the space under many streets is hollow and basically unused, although maybe a creative use for it exists. It also poses challenges in planting trees and building in spaces above the tunnels since they were only designed for a specific load.
Older houses in Sacramento also often have an elevated first floor with external stairs which I find charming. Historically the first floor was used for carriages but today people either park there or store other items. So a similar strategy to what you have here, except the space is more enclosed. This works well here because the city is very flat, so even during floods there is little current. Areas with hilly topography or with coastal flooding need open space on the lower floor to allow moving water to pass under without damaging the structure.
I would also look into “sponge city” concepts with bioswales, rain gardens, etc. Another possible source of inspiration is the chinampas agricultural system in Mexico. This is an extremely productive agricultural system created by alternating deeper ditches/canals with elevated areas. This allows for more ecological diversity to grow different crops. While I don’t think it’s wise to convert existing swamps to this system due to their imperiled status, swamps aren’t particularly hospitable to have in our cities, so this could be another possible strategy to deal with seasonal flooding in existing settlements.
Climate-induced flooding is going to be a major challenge in the future and I think we’ve really only begun to reckon with this new reality.
I’m amazed the entire downtown was elevated. Do you know enough about that subject to have an opinion about elevating the Ferry Building in San Francisco? That has to be done for it to survive.
I realized I never replied to this. I’m definitely not an expert on this type of work–I would guess it’s possible but the question in today’s economic system is whether it’s cost effective. I don’t know the answer to that question.
chinampas
Hi, I’ve been reading up on chinampas to try to get the details right and I was hoping to borrow some of your tree knowledge. Most sources mention a willow (Ahuejote (Salix bonplandiana)) and a cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) as the trees they used to reinforce/replace the underwater fences for soil retention. I’m sort of doing this picture as if its in New Orleans (for some of the buildings and other details anyways) and I think that’s outside these specific trees current ranges. I was wondering: can I swap in any other cypress or willow since there are some native to Louisiana or would some cause problems?
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
I’m probably not showing enough alternating layers of plant matter and mud, but I’m hoping it gets the point across. I’ve tried to find good sources, so far these diagrams are my favorites:
Some seem to show floating islands or like, a floating top layer with water underneath, inside the reed wall, which seems weird and inaccurate from what I’ve read. At this point, I mostly just want to get all the trees added, make sure they’re realistic, and find some accurate roots to include to show how they reinforce the earthworks. From what I’ve read it sounds like willow and cypress just kind of put roots everywhere (I’m used to being able to find clearer diagrams for trees like pines and oaks, but have struggled to find good drawings for these. Also might add cypress knees in the waterways where they’re really well established, we’ll see. Then I’ll start cleaning up the image and getting everything to match aesthetically.
Great work researching this!
In term of those trees–Taxodium distichum is very similar to T. mucronatum and will make a great replacement for a New Orleans version of chinampas. Many botanists now consider them part of the same species and it takes an expert to even tell them apart.
Willows are a more diverse group but in general they all grow well in flooded areas, so I am sure another species will work for this. I am not familiar with the specific species found in that area. I would probably just pick one that has a similar size and structure and call it good enough. Or you could just leave it as generic willows if you want since it might take some experimentation to pick the best species.
That said, I think other flood-tolerant trees could have their place in this system. Really it’s just substantial woody plants that can grow in flooded, disturbed soil. I don’t know the species in Louisiana super well since I don’t live there but if there are other species that fit that bill I think you could also include them.
Thanks!! That’s really good to know about Bald Cypress! That was my first guess for selecting trees. I ended up picking them and black willows, just based on range and look but I’ll take your advice and leave the willows generic. I think these chinampas are kind of overgrown at the moment, but I figure the trees don’t cover the entire thing, just the corners. I was able to find some roots to reference (mostly from washouts or other exposed roots) and tried to get the details right for cypress and willow (but I’m not an arborist and had trouble finding info on depth). Let me know what you think!
Generally, the depth that tree roots grow to varies greatly depending on soil conditions and species and isn’t very well studied due to the difficulty and destructive nature of such research, so this might not be fully answerable. In most cases, tree roots won’t grow very deep in poorly oxygenated, wet soils but I don’t have much experience with the roots of these species, so they could be exceptions. Certainly their ability to survive and grow in these aquatic environments that are deadly to other trees suggests that they might be.
Another factor is that if there is a seasonal fluctuation in water level, which would be the case in most places on earth, then the roots can grow deeper during the dry season and might be partially underwater during the wet season, similar to what you’ve depicted here.
Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions!
Sure, happy to tall trees any time haha. They are a big interest of mine.
In an open channel/lake situation like that, you probably want some sort of wave breakers in front of the houseboats. Otherwise a passing larger boat would cause a lot of hazard.
But I would find a scenario like this with a smaller channel and development on both sides to be more realistic. Maybe search for some examples from Bangkok, which already has quite a bit of what you imaging in that regard. Also their water-busses are way cooler 😎
Breakers are a good idea (or making it clear the channel is a narrow one). I’d like to show water agriculture and a ferry too if possible. One of the reasons I struggle with cityscapes is the scope creep - I keep wanting to add one more ideas until the image is overcrowded, awkwardly arranged, or has a funny aspect ratio. Then again, this sort of perspectiveless side view is a personal favorite because it simplifies the art tremendously. Maybe I’ll try doing a set that can be arranged together horizontally to form one wide image…
Thanks for the rec on Bangkok, that’s a really good idea and I’ve got a bunch of reading to do. Are there any favorite water bus designs in particular (or anything else) you think I should make sure not to miss? Thanks again!
These two links have some good pictures on the day to day use of the water busses:
https://thaiest.com/thailand/bangkok/khlong-boat
And if you search for “Khlong” and Bangkok you can find a lot of pictures from the small canals there. Most famously probably the floating markets, some pictures here:
This is so cool! Thank you - this definitely gives me a place to start
