Solar Punk is just another version of the Nordic model

Maybe it's because I'm a person who regularly builds things from gardens to furniture to electronics to software, but I always thought of solar punk societies as worker-centered (farmers, mechanics, bakers, machinists, carpenters, etc.). I looked at solar punk as a tool to broaden the imagination of people who can't currently imagine a world structured in a way other than what it currently is; to show them a different kind of society that is sustainable.

Solarpunk itself isn't a problem, really. The issue is that it, as an aesthetic-focused movement, easily falls into utopianism. Ie, thinking of a perfect society, and trying to directly create it. This is counterposed to scientific socialism, analyzing the trends and trajectories of existing systems to figure out how to best steer development towards a better future. Utopianism is an utter failure, historically, while scientific socialism has resulted in many lasting socialist societies with great achievements for the working class.
Solarpunk cannot stand on its own. It can be a great supplement to solid leftist theory and practice, but without that it becomes daydreaming and utopianism. Imagining a better world does little to implement it, and without that theoretical backing, it can actually be taken advantage of by reactionary movements like ecofascism, just like cottagecore got taken over by tradwife fetishism.
- Exactly, the recognition of the central role of labour in society has to be part of any genuinely socialist aesthetic. Solar-punk sells a vision of a comfortable society while ignoring the labour that underpins it, how things are created is left entirely up to your imagination. Thus, solar-punk aesthetic becomes equally compatible with people enjoying the fruits of their own labour or a society built on slavery.
- That's all fine. That's not the argument being made in this post, though. The post is about solar punk itself being fascistic.
- Hope and imagining a better future is a crucial element of working towards such goals. Hope, like memory, is a mental capacity that can be trained. Reading solar punk novels can be part of motivation, even agitation. Calling it fascistic because it isn't enough is like calling walls anti-housing because a wall is worthless without a roof. Well, it is a start.
- This was the analysis I needed to understand. Much appreciated.

This is such a weird complaint to me. Because I follow solarpunk stuff on Tumblr, and when solarpunk artists draw cities and buildings they often show the people who live and work in them. Because buildings are habitat for people, and if you're not showing the community that inhabits the building, your habitat is incomplete. For example.

Or this collection of solarpunk art I just came across, which is roughly 90% humans front and center.

That solarpunky yogurt commercial from a few years back, which that thread mentions as an example? Is set on a farm. And shows a dozen people working on the farm. I mean, it literally shows a farm worker wiping the sweat from her brow.

The AI generated images of giant green skyscrapers, and the empty airport garden in Singapore, and so on, which I can only guess is what the OP is thinking of, are more green capitalism than solarpunk.

So my answer to "what percent of solarpunk art shows the people that live and work in it" is "pretty fucking high", tbh.

Wait, I'm confused. Why, again, is an empty area in an image of a town fascist? I agree that cities are populated, but I guess I've looked at too many architectural drawings to ever notice that aspect of solar punk images.

Solar-punk feels like of like an inversion of socialist realism to me. Socialist realism celebrates the worker as creator with muscles straining, tools in hand, actively building the world. Labor is heroic, collective, and visibly transformative. The aesthetic screams: WE made this. On the other hand, solar-punk envisions society after the work is done with comfortable citizens enjoying green tech built by unseen hands. The aesthetic whispers: Look what grew while no one was laboring.
- I can see that now, thanks