Hello World, I'm Tomasino. This is Solar Punk Promps, a series for writers where we discuss Solar Punk, a movement that imagines a world where technology is used for the good of the planet. In this series, we spend each episode exploring a single story prompt, adding some commentary, some inspirations, and some considerations. Most importantly, we consider how that story might help us to build a better and more sustainable civilization.
If this is your first time here, I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what Solar Punk is, why you should care, and why this series came into being. Today's prompt is The Great Infrastructure Project. There's a small rural town, next to whom a great infrastructural project was built. It was a dam, or a huge solar or wind power plant, or a gravitational battery, or something of the sort.
Over time, the corporations and the government forgot about them, and in order to avoid a catastrophe, they need to work with unusual, driven activists who came from all over to help them. This is a living reality for many small communities around the globe. The village of Zhennan Shen in southern Zhejiang, China, was an idyllic historic location which had fallen into disrepair due to depopulation from 20 years of migration.
It was chosen for a program called Adaptive Reuse, because of its beauty and close local location to Lee Shoe City. Local government brought in sponsors and worked with the historical Heritage Group to update and renovate all of the original houses regardless of their condition.
Space was rented out from locals, a downtown set of homes were converted to a boutique hotel, cafes, library, exhibition hall, restaurants fed by the local farms, public parks, and more were designed and built in a cooperative mode called Historic Village plus Crowd Innovation. Employment rates increased as did tourism. Farms were given a steadier income, especially during the off season. Designers even competed in house renovation competitions for public prestige.
This village may not be built atop a hydro plant, but it shares the experience set forth in our prompt. This type of infrastructure maintenance. and the revitalization was made possible by a combination of internal and external communities working together. In their case, the goal was the restoration of their infrastructure, but that won't always be the case. Your story may be about a town's need for the safe deconstruction of infrastructure.
The World Wildlife Fund has this to say about Most categories of infrastructure aren't inherently good or bad. It's all about context. The right dam in the right place can provide benefits with minimal negative impacts to the environment. But the wrong dam in the wrong place can do considerable and far -reaching damage. For infrastructure to be beneficial, planners must consider the long -term impacts, risks, and trade -offs.
They must take biodiversity and climate change into account, develop a plan for long -term governance and management, and engage local communities at the earliest possible stages of planning. It should come as no surprise that many infrastructure projects today do not achieve all of these goals. Without long -term governance and management accounted for at the beginning of the project, many projects are left to age, crumble, or fall as burdens to local communities whose survival depends on them.
I stated in an article from the Earth Law Center in 2017, due to the high cost of maintenance and safety, many of the world's dams get more dangerous as they age. The Mosul Dam in Iraq and the Kariba Dam in Zambia rank among the world's most dangerous. Should the Mosul Dam fail, it could result in the death of 500 ,000 people and deprive millions more of power and water. The 58 -year -old Kariba Dam.
could result in 3 .5 million dead, leave 40% of South Africa without power, cause untold damage to the surrounding wildlife, plus the destruction of another nearby dam, the Kahora Bassa. According to a paper published by the International Institute for Environment and Development, disconnecting from government energy services to develop independent energy sources, such as micro wind or biogas, can help build resilience for vulnerable groups.
The paper has a special focus on Vietnam, where fishermen face particular challenges when the electricity goes out. Lack of refrigeration and transportation options can cause great difficulties and losses getting their products to distant markets. The country's power grid as a whole is vulnerable to disruption and failure from extreme weather and flood events. This means that vulnerable populations are dependent on a system that's prone to collapse.
In Gorakhpur, India and in the Philippines, local committees provide an opportunity for community participation in infrastructure design. After being left out of the conversations for so long and suffering the brunt of their consequences, these communities are eager to exert some control over their lives. So what does that look like?
Kerry Scott, a social scientist says, The primary purpose of infrastructure and our built environment is serving the needs of communities, delivering better social outcomes and improving the quality of people's lives. He later adds, Integrating social outcomes at the start is a must if we want to leave a social legacy. Our prompt today deals with a legacy infrastructure project. One which clearly didn't take into account the present situation.
It must either be maintained or decommissioned safely. It may require conversion to some new method or function. That may require technical skills they don't have, hence the need for outside help. But do these outsiders have an understanding of this place, this environment? Do they know the needs of this community? One of our opportunities for tension and drama may lay between the community itself and the newcomers trying to fix the project.
There may also be tension between these groups and the government or corporation originally responsible for the installation. This two -way or three -way intersection of communities can be very solar punk, but can also easily fall into the style of other genres if we aren't careful. If, for instance, the corporation responsible for the project is made to seem as an antagonist and the local community must. throw off their oppressor in order to self -govern. That's just another form of cyberpunk.
The struggle there is about technology being used for oppression, rather than it being used to find a sustainable civilization. Be wary of blending genres in these stories as well. The atmosphere and aesthetic of solarpunk can easily be deluded by other genres until it's unrecognizable. A cyberpunk -solarpunk hybrid will just look like cyberpunk. As a writer, you may want to use that style of relationship between the communities, but be wary of how you frame it.
Is the community still your protagonist? Are they achieving the goals through solarpunk ideals? There is drama inherent to the infrastructure as well. Adding a time limit on action immediately increases tension. So maybe the infrastructure project has an imminent failure coming. The outsiders and the community must work together to save it from disaster, even though they don't trust each other fully.
The point here is to show some hands -on work with social stakes greater than just us versus them. We can also zoom in on the specific dynamics of the incoming activists and engineers a bit more. Are they strictly a professional bunch? Do they set up a separate camp with their own rules, schedule, and daily order? Or is it a hodgepodge assortment of skilled people without a prior relationship, who move into whatever is unoccupied?
Perhaps they have to stay on board with the locals in their own home. Or maybe the outsiders are a sect of their own, determined to save the locals even if they don't want it. These decisions will affect how your communities must interact, especially if there is a higher need at stake. Naturally antagonistic relationships could be forced into reluctant collaboration due to circumstance.
Such a story would be more difficult to align to the solar punk aesthetic, but if well done, could act as a moral lesson and strengthen the ideals. Finally, we should consider what daily life looks like in this small town. Is life oriented around the great infrastructure project, or is it just a backdrop? Perhaps the boom of construction jobs is over, the children left elsewhere, it's one of the dying cities where people want to be left alone.
Have they been asking for help, but no one's answered so far? Are they already self -reliant and happy, or are they working to get there? This could be a community on the verge of a solar punk renaissance, or it could be one that's already well established. One of the most difficult aspects of speculative fiction is imagining how everyday life might change due to some un -punctualization. related technological advancement.
We're going to discuss this more in further episodes, but for now try to consider the great infrastructure this town is dealing with and what it does. Is it a power generator or does it make goods, provide a service, or ease a difficult task? Then take that purpose and scale it up in your mind. If it was a power generator, now it makes unlimited power. If it eased a difficult task, now that task's time is reduced to zero.
Finally, try to think about how that change would affect the unintentional everyday things. For instance, when the airplane was invented and fast travel between continents became a reality, nobody ever envisioned a future where you could pop off to London for a stag party weekend. What is the equivalent mundane change in your world? Have an interesting idea? Share it with me. This podcast publishes on Mastodon, a federated social network. Our address is in the show's notes.
Come join us and let's start a conversation. Until then, I'll talk to you soon on the next SolarPunk front. Music in this recording is New Unity Donning by Bathroom Plants from Global Patterns Compilation, SolarPunk, a brighter perspective.