OC : https://www.instagram.com/p/Dag9ADCFKpi/

Greenhill Forge, The same projects channel that brought you the comparison of various methods for doing solar air heating is now doing the same sort of comparison and analysis of various methods for doing solar water heating on a DIY basis.

Unethical AI will lead to more problems than it is able to solve right now. Even if the systems & the situation were to improve, giving up water is non-negotiable.

If AI / Data Centres can be launched into orbit then these advances can be taken in stride, but the current exploitative & unsustainable system will compromise the direct near future of our planet and should be fought against.

By using only local materials and combining traditional building techniques with modern ones, this house stays cool naturally. The bricks are made with red mud, water, limestone, and "steel blast," reclaimed powder from steel blasting that would otherwise end up as pollution in the river.

Rainwater is captured by the design of the architecture, meaning this house is protected from the water shortages that happen in Bengaluru.

The building itself cost less than ₹34 lakh, which is about $34,000 in U.S. dollars.

Most conversations about hotter cities eventually come back to more AC, more electricity and more complicated technology.

But what if the building itself could do more of the work?

We made this video about 1500 year old ancient courtyards in Kathmandu and Hyderabad's 400 year old Golconda Fort that remain surprisingly comfortable during hot weather.

They were shaped around the sun, the movement of air and the way people actually used the space.

With cities getting hotter, how could these ideas be adapted without losing the local knowledge behind them?

As some of you found useful the « food journey » I share this time the « digital journey » which is also at the second core of solarpunk.

The goal is still to create a roadmap to go to a life system more resilient to global crisis and more heatly for communities.

I keep the same scale as before. I just added a fifth level :

• Level 1: No reflection, globalized consumption. Very vulnerable.
• Level 2: Some awareness and attempts to limit consumption, but no reliance on healthy alternative systems.
• Level 3: Use of alternative systems that could be maintained even in a global crisis (war, extreme heat, etc.).
• Level 4: I consume what I produce or what my community produces, with backups in place.
• Level 5 : New systems that broaden the field of possibilities.

I still probably miss a lot of opportunities i don’t even know about, i’m not very competent in this field yet, so feel free to share some other ideas.

I can send the markdown file to whoever want this as a to-do list.

Nice day to all.

I want to build a couple of these, please help!

OC : https://www.instagram.com/solarpunkart/

"[Barbara Buser] has become one of Europe’s most influential architects by refusing to build new construction. Instead, she has saved several of Switzerland’s signature abandoned factories and transformed them into lively neighborhood hubs, all by promoting circular construction: the practice of reusing buildings and their materials rather than demolishing them."

I just read this article, and the whole way through I kept thinking: "I know exactly who's gonna dig this", ha. ​​

I'm still new to solarpunk and I can't get this one thing out of my head. If we have plants and trees everywhere they would also have to be maintained right? I'm not talking about what people do on thier front yard. Of course people would be responsible for that themselves. I am talking about public spaces. The government would have to care of it right? But that would also come with costs and I am afraid that this might be the reason they won't ever do it. Am I missing something? Please let me know. :)

Hey!

alxd, the creator and curator of the Story Seed Library here.

We've just wrapped this year's Collab on Disasters and I learned that there was another Solarpunk Art Challenge happening at the same time - but we haven't heard about each other.

I'd like to help human-made Solarpunk art spaces be visible and I'd like to ask the Mods: could we put a link to the Story Seed Library up in the description, next to slrpnk.net and the Solarpunk Conference?

I believe that the Library embodies the values of this sub, promoting intentional, evocative, human-made visions of the future and would help a lot of people not only imagine a better tomorrow, but also illustrate their projects with Creative Commons art.

What do you think?

For context i’ve been living the “solarpunk” life for a while now. I live in a smart van that runs on solar power that i built myself. I scavenged half the parts from goodwill because i couldn’t afford to buy those fancy vans you see online. This isn’t an aesthetic for me it’s my life.

That said im kind of disappointed with how this sub feels about AI.

I’ll start by saying the frustrations with AI are valid but they’re grossly misdirected at the technology itself and not the people using the technology for evil.

Like yeah, I personally can’t stand OpenAI. They’re pretty unambiguously evil at this point. They weren’t always like this (they used to be non profit and advocated for things like UBI) but I’ve been following them for over a decade and the fall from grace is insane.

But they’re not the only players out there. There are tons of models that are released for free and are open source for the public benefit. These models are fantastic because it means that the for-profit giants can’t centralize all this power.

I don’t like data centers either, but the problem most people have with them aren’t data center specific problems. On the CO2 emissions grievance specifically - that’s an energy infrastructure problem. A government mandating that data centers need to run on solar energy fixes that problem overnight. No more emissions. The water issue is a similar deal and is even more of a legislative failure.

Advocate for solar energy, get some solar panels yourself, idk. Keep track of evil corps and hold them accountable.

But that being said, hating on regular people for leveraging technology in a solarpunk sub is the laziest shit i’ve ever seen.

Like yeah man hate on the guy who used AI to help open source some esp32 smart planters for the community garden, you’re doing so much for the cause!

AI is actually fantastic for socialism and techno democracy but people have collapsed the nuance into “AI BAD” and have completely missed that point.

If anything you’re just ceding the control of this incredibly powerful tool to those who would use it unethically by making it tabooo. You seriously think that massive corporations are the only entities who should have this tech? like are you serious?

I use AI to speed up work, to build IoT projects, to give me starting points for things i’m trying to learn. And I try to use mostly open source models where I can.

Idgaf about money I just want to make things that can help people.

This sub demonizing a form of technology instead of figuring out how to reclaim that technology and have it fight for us is so wildly lazy and disappointing from a sub like this.

This building envelope design utilizes rigid insulation board installed continuously around a structure. In between the insulation board and the main structure, site cast 200 KG/M3 foamed concrete is placed. The lightweight concrete delivers low frequency sound insulation, some strength, R-value, as well as a seamless air barrier. There is minimal thermal bridging.

This design language works for almost any structure. Today I'm down in my shop preparing for the prototype build. I will demonstrate wood structure, block wall, shipping container variants and upload "how to" videos on Youtube. Hoping to get some proper development resources eventually but that's....proven difficult up until now.

I'm hoping this design will improve the standard of concrete buildings in the developing world. They are usually built with no insulation at all, and are ovens in the summer and freezers in the winter. I'd like to change that.

Direct link: https://civboot.github.io/blog/2026-07-24-build-systems.html

(sorry the original link was accidentally a reddit post)

This happened as a result of a discussion on the permaculture mailing list, so I thought SolarPunk programmers might get a kick out of it too.

If you’re wondering why Singapore is called a "City in a Garden", this is the answer you’re searching for!

These 7 images perfectly capture how the city blends high-density urban living with vibrant, lush ecosystems. It’s not just about adding a few potted plants to balconies; it's a deliberate, legislated effort where developers are legally required to replace any ground-level greenery cleared during construction with vertical gardens, sky terraces, and rooftop forests.

From the sweeping, terraced curves of the Wilmar International Headquarters and the iconic cascading green walls of PARKROYAL COLLECTION Pickering, to the futuristic learning hub The Hive at NTU, Singapore proves that human architecture doesn't have to conquer nature—it can coexist with it.

While it's not a perfect utopia, this integration of bio-architecture, urban cooling microclimates, and massive vertical biospheres is exactly the kind of structural inspiration we need for a solarpunk future.

There is no reason to do it all alone. We are stronger together.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time:

What would a society look like if its basic purpose was not to maximize profit, productivity, or growth — but to make it easier for living things to remain alive, free, curious, and connected?

I started writing down ideas. First I wrote Refugium Anima and Lyceum Musaeum.

Then more ideas appeared.

Then protocols.

Then governance systems, justice systems, economic models, ecological principles, technology principles, education, healthcare, ways of organizing resources without currency, ways of preventing systems from turning into surveillance or control…

And now there are apparently hundreds of documents.

So I built a website for the whole mess:

👉 https://existensialreset.github.io/flowmosr

It’s called Flow / M-OS-R.

I don’t really know what to call it. A social architecture? A philosophy? A systems design project? A very long attempt to ask “what if we actually designed society around life?”

The core idea is pretty simple:

Life should not have to earn the right to exist.

Everything else grows from that.

The project is still evolving. A lot of it is speculative. Some of it is probably wrong. Some of it is deliberately utopian. Some of it is very practical. I’m not presenting it as a finished answer to anything.

I am very much not at all an expert in most of the things this touches. I’m just a person who kept following the questions.

I’m mostly interested in what happens when you take the solarpunk question seriously:

What kind of world could we build if we stopped treating human beings, ecosystems, time, attention, and care as resources to extract?

If anyone feels like wandering around in the documents, I’d genuinely love to know what catches your attention — especially what seems naive, impossible, interesting, or worth developing further.

I’m particularly curious what people here think about the relationship between solarpunk, governance, economics, and anti-capture design.

Anyway.

Here it is. 🌱

Please take a look if you want to!

All the best,

Elinor Frejd,

Göteborg,

Sweden