This postcard was made as part of the 2026 Story Seed Library Art Collab, which was themed on Disaster Preparedness, Response and Relief. For my part of the collab I decided to focus on the disaster preparedness side of the theme, and specifically on levee removal, house shifting, and ceding unsafe land back to nature.

Humans have been building levees in my country ever since colonization - in a way they're part of an unending campaign to 'civilize' the land, smoothing out rough terrain, straightening and containing rivers, filling in wetlands, and generally drying out the continent.

Prior to levees, river landscapes were often messy, complex, and full of food for birds, fish and invertebrates. They would spread and braid across a wide area, and their slow-moving, shallow channels formed sprawling wetlands full of native grasses and willows which provided critical resting and rearing sites for young salmon before they headed out to sea. These wide spaces could flood safely during storms, and they played an important role in slowing and cleaning floodwaters.

These shifting rivers and sprawling wetlands were generally inconvenient to farmers and other settler types, who prized floodplains for farmland and development. To protect their new territory from flooding, they built thousands of miles of levees along nearly every major waterway, constraining their movement until some looked more like canals than natural rivers.

This was disastrous for the species which had evolved to occupy the niches now buried under levees and fill but it also hasn't worked out great for humanity. In a narrowed, straightened river, that surge of water has nowhere to go, and nothing to slow its movement. As climate change alters weather patterns, intensifying storms and worsening both droughts and floods, we've seen frequent levee failures as hundred- and thousand-year floods become routine events.

There's a self-defense truism that "the best defense is not to be there" which I think applies in this situation.

Levee removal recognizes that this modern configuration isn't working well for anyone, humans or the species we share our environment with, and seeks to restore rivers to something closer to their original configuration. This can be beneficial in two ways - it allows the river to safely spread into designated areas where it can slow during a flood and it allows for the restoration of habitats where native species can return and flourish surprisingly quickly.

In this way levee removal is part of a wider rejection of modern human landscapes. Flood- and erosion-mitigation tactics like sponge cities, beaver dam analogs, and rough mounding all focus on restoring or simulating preexisting conditions, and on slowing the movement of water and catching it in place, allowing it to permeate the ground again. And because these are the habitats most native species evolved to find their niche in, it's no surprise that they often start to recover almost as soon as we nudge things back in this direction.

Making these changes is difficult though. It's not just farmland behind these levees - the sad truth is that there are many places where homes were built, families raised, memories made, that were never really suitable for development (this will probably include wildfire zones soon) and we're going to have to reckon with that in the coming decades, whether we're in a solarpunk society or not. We're already seeing the beginnings in our present with insurance companies refusing to cover some areas and floodplain buyouts where government agencies purchase flood-prone land, moving or demolishing any structures, and returning them to open space to restore and conserve natural floodplain functions. Some areas just make more sense as floodplains and wetlands, providing important habitats and giving the rivers room to safely spread and slow their movements than they do as eternally-imperilled developments.

So that's where I wanted to set this scene. In the bittersweet work of returning a piece of the floodplain to its original purpose and removing the home that was there.

There is a lot being done to rewild this site. Work crews are digging out the levee and hauling it away (in real life this fill is often used to build another levee further inland, behind the floodplain). They're removing the house which was built on this parcel of land. And they're digging a channel to reconnect a wetland which was once part of the river system but which was severed by the levee.

The timeline here is obviously a bit compressed – shifting the home, removing the levee, and digging the channel to reconnect the wetlands would likely all be separate stages of work. I've jammed them all into one shot for expedience more than realism.

When the removal and contouring work is done, a crew will likely plant willows, cottonwoods, wapato or other suitable native species.

The house shifting was inspired by this levee removal project, where a structure on site was demolished to clear the floodplain. I don't know the specifics of that particular building, what condition it was in, whether anything was salvaged (or was worth salvaging). But there are two alternatives to demolition which I've been trying to showcase in my work: deconstruction – the process of disassembling a building to salvage as many construction materials as possible, and house shifting, the work of physically moving a suitable structure rather than building new. Both can be wonderful solarpunk alternatives to demolition which make the society less extractive on its environment and reduce the amount of landfill space it requires.

I've featured house shifting in a previous picture but I wanted to make it a bit more prominent this time.

This would be a big day for these work crews. After weeks of planning and work, of emptying the home, disconnecting it from its utilities and foundation, removing a porch, and jacking it up so they can assemble a frame underneath, a flying crane cargo airship has finally arrived to hoist the house up into its hold to carry it away.

I imagine that they're probably using a mix of house shifting and deconstruction along this river - houses which aren't suitable for relocation, ones which aren't structurally sound, or have slab foundations, or are seriously damaged by flooding are disassembled and salvageable materials and construction waste are both hauled away by truck. The house shifting is probably done to relocate occupied homes to safer places, or to move abandoned-but-habitable homes to removal lots where a new family can choose them.

The concrete foundation left behind could be broken up and dug out with an excavator, used as fill or salvaged as rubble (it could even be cut into blocks for easier reuse if they have a lot of time or labor available) or it could just be filled in with dirt from the levee and left alone. (It's a bad place to have built a basement but I've lived in neighborhoods where half the houses were constantly running sump pumps because the whole place was built in a filled-in wetland so I don't think it's unrealistic).

You may have noticed a cargo airship in the upper section of the scene. I think modern blimps have helped us forget just how absurdly, sky-filling-ly large real zeppelins were, and the LCA60T (which this is based on) is bigger than most of those. Tremendous thanks to GrafZeppelin127 over on reddit for repeatedly pointing out when I under-sized it in my early drafts. I ended up having to add more image around the edges just to fit it in the shot

Moreso than usual, the airship for the task I'm depicting doesn't really exist. The closest fit is probably the LCA60T, which is intended to work as a flying crane, but its cargo hold is long and narrow in the current designs. It could fit a mobile home or pieces of a modular home designed to be transported by truck, but it wouldn't be a good choice for a larger structure. There are other airship designs with larger holds, like the Boeing Megalifter concept from the 1970s which had a cargo bay 40 feet wide and 40 feet tall, and about as long as the LCA60T’s and the Lockheed-Martin Rigid Airship concept from the 1990s and early 2000s which had a cargo bay 250 feet by 260 feet, nearly square. These weren't flying cranes though, and they were both designed to use a mix of buoyant lift and aerodynamic lift which could likely make them a poor fit for crane operations (or at least mean that their capacity would drop while hovering).

For a while I'd been thinking that a flying crane could simply carry large cargoes dangling underneath its keel. It turns out that that might be true in a few narrow cases (such as when transporting assembled high-tension transmission towers, which are already optimized to reduce wind exposure), but most cargoes would need to be transported safely in the hold. Once I looked up the damage normal mobile homes can endure while traveling 55 miles an hour on a highway, and after reading about the USS Akron's spy basket becoming a dangerous pendulum during its only test, I was even more convinced to rework the image. Something tells me that an ordinary stick-frame house would not do very well blowing around at high altitudes.

When it came to placing solar panels, I wanted to keep well away from any structure on the envelope which might need maintenance, leaving a sort of patchy layout not unlike solar panels on a household roof. I can't promise that's accurate, but I'm fairly pleased with the overall look. I read somewhere that panels would be reasonably efficient even pointing downwards, thanks to the high albedo of the clouds below/around the airship, but can't find an exact source. I think with our current tech they wouldn't be enough to drive the airship but could provide enough juice for slow maneuvering like station keeping, and cover other electrical needs onboard.

Hi, it's been awhile since I photobashed art for the solarpunk postcard series (I've been busy on a couple other, larger-scope solarpunk projects I hope to share soon) but I have some time while we work through final edits and I wanted to get back into it.

I've done a couple other nautical solarpunk pictures but they were both about modernized tall ships on the open ocean and I wanted to do one focused on the kind of activity you might see in a harbor, big river, or along a coastline.

The biggest/closest vessel here is an electric cargo barge originally from the Netherlands. These close-to-the-shore cargo vessels are a good fit for electrification as they run shorter distances and can swap their shipping-container-sized batteries whenever they transfer cargo using the same cranes. This article goes into more detail though it's a little out of date as much of what it describes is now happening IRL.

The house shifting barge was lifted from a photograph of a real project carried out by a company in Vancouver, Canada though this appears to be common on coastlines. I'm a huge believer in salvage and reuse and have featured deconstruction in a previous postcard, but I haven't showcased the work of picking up and moving entire houses yet. House shifting is also done overland, using large flatbed trucks, but the width of the roadways imposes more limitations on how big a piece of a building you can move so some additional disassembly and reassembly may be required. I think a solarpunk society would strive to limit outright demolition to very specific circumstances where the structure and materials are truly unrecoverable, and to relocate buildings wherever possible so this kind of move might be a common sight.

I replaced the original lead tugboat with an electric one.

Closer to the opposite shore on the left, we have a cargo sailboat, or more officially, a steel-hulled, container-capable gaff ketch. I don't know how practical it is but I really liked this design as soon as I saw it - the mixture of a fairly traditional design with capacity for a modern shipping container (or 1 TEU sized 'bus' module to serve as a passenger ferry) just calls to me because I like a good anacronism. One of the big advantages of ships and containers is scale but single containers will still have to be moved from whatever big port they're unloaded at to their final destination, so I suppose this would be similar to a riverborn 18-wheeler truck. It's primarily wind driven but also has some configuration of electric motors. If these are viable we might see a good many of them in the bays, coasts, and big rivers of a solarpunk society, if only because they can reduce externalities like pollution or unnecessary draw on the grid.

In the middle there's a docked sailboat. Not much to say about that.

And on the right is a river cleanup craft. Hopefully a solarpunk society will produce far less trash overall, especially far less disposable plastic waste, and would recycle or dispose of it better. But there's always something that gets away and water has a way of catching anything blown around by the wind. Waterborne trash might also include debris swept downstream in previous floods.

It's more effective to catch this waste while it's concentrated in waterways near human settlements than it is to try to find and collect it on the open ocean, so I wanted to show one of these boats at work. There are many designs, but I picked Mr Trash Wheel from Baltimore, MD because the design is whimsical and probably easiest to recognize.

As for the shoreline, I was inspired by a photograph of Troy, New York, where a neighborhood of brick buildings look out at the Hudson river over a set of parking lots. I wanted to do a quick background with a dense community with a lot of four to five story brick buildings (as they're pretty sustainable/practical long term) with hints of forested streets and a big park/riparian forest buffer along the waterfront.

I've done one postcard about flood compatible cities and generally favor sponge city designs where applicable, but I'm not sure what the best answer is for old downtowns built right up against rivers, with reinforced shorelines already in place. Replacing waterfront parking lots with parks full of swales and other flood mitigation designs is probably a good start and those changes could also improve water quality in the river by trapping waste and filtering surface runoff, especially if any fertilizer/compost use is carefully minimized or eliminated. Perhaps the community has also bought up waterfront land nearby, removed levees and restored flood planes to give the river room to spread and slow. Levee removal can both mitigate flooding and restore important wetland habitats.

The amphitheatre-shaped recess in the embankment is intended to provide safe public access to the river. This is also kind of aspirational for me - canals, harbors, and rivers IRL often catch drainage from city streets contaminated with animal waste and vehicle fluids, overflows from sewers, outflows (legal or illegal) from various manufacturers and industry and even just fertilizers and pesticides from lawns. I've seen people swimming in all sorts of waterways I'd personally stay out of IRL, but I'd love to live in a society which was so conciencious about its impacts that the water downstream even from major cities remained safe and clean.

Spilled! is a cute little game in which you clean up waters and their surroundings with your little boat. I find it very relaxing and I hope you do, too! :)

It's available on Steam, iOS and Android.

I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to my full ideas with each concepts !
This one i'll try and gouache it when coming back from my vacations !

Source (warning, reddit) with comments from the creator of how they made and dyed it.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37159586

Hey everyone ! as some of you may know, i'm currently making some concept arts of a solarpunk city for an animation project, and there is one thing that i find particularly complicated, it's the urban design and street design ! It's one big puzzle and the things i find on the internet are not quite what i want and i might miss some keywords. (also a LOT of AI images so it doesn't help)
Does anyone have good resources on urban design planning, like cadastral maps in sustainable city studies ? I know there is a lot of take on that from wonderful artists, but I'm searching for a more "technical" point of view.
I've also heard that redesigning urban spaces is an effective way to help ensure women's safety. If anyone knows of maps designs made on the subject It would be greatly appreciated, I found serveral interesting articles on the subject but it is often staying kind of general in terms of solutions.
Cheers everyone !

I'm working on a personnal project called "Octa Solis" (just little stories taking place in a solarpunk city)! It turned out pretty good i think but in my next concepts i'd like them to be a lot more solarpunk in the designs
Ultimately I'll try and animate it! 😁

This is a critique of how Outsiders approach portraying Appalachia, however, it is also a valid look at how Outsiders look at and think of Appalachia as a whole. I had to move from a home I loved living in because the air polution from a Danish mining operation made it impossible for me to breathe. However, I do not think of that place as a place ruined, I think of it as a place whose story needs told. There are still people there demanding they be treated fair, and who envision for the great great grand children they'll never meet a river they can fish in.

(sorry i couldn't find a better place to post this to, thrs seemed the most appropriate)

OK a few things: firstly, is this where users submit their own artwork? I searched, and it looks like it -- but I am unsure. Pardon me if I posted in the wrong place. Plz redirect me as practical.

Secondly, I have been working on a new style. Specifically, I am painting on my own drawings with watercolors. My next step is to make my own watercolor inks. I have been watching hella youtubes on how. I had no idea it was so accessible. I'm hoping a similar process makes paint.

I had a thirdly, too, but it escapes me now. I blame this tiny keyboard.

"In a world where remnants of the past remind us of the mistakes of the 21st century, the memory of ancient animals fades. Our best engineers have combined documentation from history with technological innovation to offer you the chance to immerse yourself in a reimagined era, where the hopes of the 23rd century are reflected in every movement of our creatures!"
I've wanted to finish this since forever but oh well.. one day !

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33792914

The other Fully Automated devs are working on a new set of chase mechanics. We've been jokingly calling the create-an-obstacle-behind-yourself move "Summon Fruit Stand" and every time we say it I picture a walking robot fruit stand plodding slowly into the way, blocking the route. I don't need much excuse to make solarpunk art so I photobashed this scene.

Most of my solarpunk photobashes are researched in advance, this one was kinda off-the-cuff. I knew if I included a background I wanted a narrow side street climbing a hill, and was able to find that. I added some water permeable street surfaces and shutters for passive temperature regulation in buildings while I was cladding it with textures.

The robot design is inherently silly so I tried not to overthink things this time.

Speaking of the robot - I wanted something that said "my cabbages!" but couldn't quite justify giving it a thatched roof so we get a questionably-better tiled roof robot instead.

I wanted its human companions to look like they were guiding it to a new location, aimed for a kinda casual, happy posture, like they have no idea they're in the way.

saw this out working out

This is another bit of art from an ongoing solarpunk fiction project: a flying crane cargo airship docked at a mooring mast made from a recycled wind turbine tower.

I was looking for a modernized mooring mast design for a sort of prefab kit that might be used by frontier communities and one of the FullyAutomated devs suggested these reused segments because the turbines already get replaced regularly, and the structures meet many of the same goals with sideload and weather and even support elevators.

Realistically a lot of locations might use platforms on the ground which rotate so the airship can land and still weathervane in the wind instead of mooring masts. I've seen these called Boyant Aircraft Rotating Terminals or Depots. But some communities may not want to clear that much space, or might be supported by airships that don't land. Others may use mooring masts as a place for an airship to temporarily wait for access to a facility.

I've posted about airships a few times before. I think they have some good potential for certain kinds of cargo and especially for locations which are hard to reach overland, though I think that description might fit more locations if the solarpunk future deprioritizes cars and roads, and especially if a period of societal crumbles leaves behind extensive infrastructure debt.

Extrapolating modern designs with all the accompanying safety improvements is kinda hard when all you've got to start with is some lattice towers from the 1920s.

I'm not any kind of engineer, so it's mostly guesswork on my part. I wish the airship industry had had more time to iterate on this stuff. I know the designs and materials and control mechanisms of the airships have improved massively in the last century, but I'm not sure how the masts, especially simple, seldom-used ones like this might be redesigned. (With big airports I picture something like the Skylon Tower or Space Needle which rotate with the airship in the wind.)

If you're an engineer with the right skillset I'd love to hear your thoughts!