My own utopian vision from the landscape of wooden skyscrapers now has name: Project #Woodhattan. Probably silly, but at least most people would somehow associate it with megacity built from wood, which is more or less all we need just now.

The utopian community members in the story are not the only inhabitants of the landscape. The wooden skyscrapers are not towering over entirely postapocalyptic or dystopian society, but neither it is entirely utopian landscape. Community centers in wooden towers form something like fractal network of self-repeating patterns, consisting of sustainable and artistic elements, but not everywhere they were given chance. They were unexpected result of failing local regulatory framework, because at least the earliest examples of the structures would hardly meet construction, safety or fire hazard regulations of the previous era.

The landscape between creative fragments consists of traditional family houses, traditional suburban dependence on cars, traditional TV sets in living room and lot of other traditional or normie something, which was not really based on idea of utility the space to its inhabitants, but rather around inevitable of concept of the property having value on market, be attractive for someone else, who would try to bet what value the building would have for yet someone else. While this sometimes resulted in expensive looking habitable space, it was never really focused on the people who would actually live there, but rather on impressing someone else and trying to belong to certain social group. Which maybe even worked sometimes in the past - but no longer worked in the era, in which this story takes place.

The old society was no longer functional, but the new one was available only as ever evolving beta version. And there were also numerous intermediate mutations somewhere in between those two concepts.

#microfiction #utopianMicrofiction #solarpunk #Woodhattan

My own vision of utopian #solarpunk city should probably be something like Le Corbusier on magic mushrooms. It is something, which I see in most solarpunk concept art.

Unlike the modernist visions, based on strict geometries symmetries and precise planning, the basic layout would be more influenced by fractals geometry. The solarpunk city mostly raises from the partly abandoned ruins of 20th and early 21the century boring suburban sprawl, randomly acquiring land for projects of hi-rise wooden skyscrapers, funded by the continuous carbon revenue for indefinite storage of wood.

More wood you managed to use in your building, more funding would be available, so the hi-rise wooden structures, not really resembling anything else in the history of architecture, were inevitable result.

Use of renewable energy was not ideological, but very practical result of many years of fossil fuel blockade by the emergent semi-global powers. The waste heat of data centers was valuable. You actually saw lot of energy intensive activity on sunny days, while you could have done most of your machine learning during the winter.

If weather was favorable, the popular mode of transport was urban paragliding, with lifts running to the roofs of the highest buildings becoming important local traffic hubs. But not everyone was into paragliding, so local cycling and other forms of micromobility were still important modes of transport in that chaotic landscape.

While nominally the society was mostly opposed to competition, it was obvious, that some modes of existence were more likely to survive in the process of social evolution, than others.

Robots were generally not allowed in public spaces, but you could get permit if they were very cute.

It would be considered very rude to publicly display or reproduce AI slop. It was basically comparable to do sex or drugs in the public, which was on the other hand not so much frowned up.

#microfiction #utopianMicrofiction #solarpunk #Woodhattan