Environments by Design

Abstract

In the next three decades, projections suggest that cities around the world will deploy enormous amounts of solar energy—enough to make solar the largest source of energy on the planet and the most inexpensive source of electricity in history. Those investments will radically re-shape the city’s future, its infrastructures, its look, its political economy, its resilience, its culture, its relationships with neighbors, and more. For two years, ASU has led an innovative initiative to explore what the solar city of the future might look like, drawing on people-centered approaches to understand the city as a composite of human communities and the socio-technological forms of life they inhabit. The initiative has drawn on interdisciplinary expertise in photovoltaics engineering, urban sociology, policy and governance, futures, and science and technology studies, alongside speculative science fiction, art, and literary imagination. Two exciting books, The Weight of Light (2019) and Cities of Light (2021), incorporate science fiction stories, artwork, and essays. The books highlight the central insight of the initiative: solar futures are wide open, from a design perspective, with an array of design variables, from where solar panels are placed in urban and rural landscapes to how they are woven into the social, economic, and cultural fabric of the city. The books explore what those design flexibilities might look like under different futures and why our choices how to implement solar designs will matter for the kinds of cities that all of us, our children, and our grandchildren inhabit in the second half of the 21st Century. This presentation will illustrate some of the key design challenges and why it is essential that we ask hard questions, now, about what kinds of solar cities we propose to build for the future.