Solarpunk and the Commune Form
The solarpunk aesthetic is going mainstream, freighted by digital renderings, artistic depictions, and AI-generated images of the future city: green, science fictional, and sustainable—an elegant cover for capitalism and authoritarianism both. Vibrantly political beneath its recuperation, solarpunk practitioners actively resist these depictions, satirise this greenwashing, and forward new and critical speculative urbanisms. This essay traces the shifting consensus over the future city, from the (post-)cyberpunk ideals continuing to animate megalithic urban projects to the commune form emerging across the solarpunk corpus, a twin vision and demand for a new ecological municipalism.
Anja H. Lind is a lecturer and doctoral candidate in Critical Future Studies at TU Dresden. She works on anarchist politics and feminist philosophy in and through science fiction and the energy humanities.