Why we are world pioneers of Solarpunk

In 2011, when we started sketching UnitedCities, we knew nothing about solarpunk. We arrived at that aesthetic through our own philosophical question, not by following a movement.

In 2011 we started sketching the first notions of UnitedCities. We knew nothing about solarpunk. Nothing. The term didn't have the reach it has today, nor did it exist as a recognizable category within science fiction.

Before the world had a name

We arrived at that aesthetic, cities that grow with nature instead of imposing themselves on it, free and distributed energy, communities without the hierarchies that depend on scarcity, through narrative and philosophical intuition. We weren't following an existing movement: we were solving our own philosophical question, and the form we found to answer it turned out, without our knowing it, to be the same one others were already imagining in parallel.

How do you arrive at a visual language without knowing its name?

Only years later did we discover that this language had a name, and that others had reached similar intuitions through their own paths. It wasn't an influence we absorbed: it was a convergence. The philosophical thesis that sustains UnitedCities, the dissolution of the border between nature and artifice, demanded by its own internal logic an aesthetic that would make it visible. Solarpunk didn't come first. It came because it had to.

One of the genre's most ambitious

That makes UnitedCities one of the first solarpunk audiovisual productions in existence, and given the scale of the world it builds, one of the most ambitious of the genre to date: not a single city or building, but an entire civilization, with its own narrative physics, its own philosophical genealogy, and its own planetary conflict.

Solarpunk wasn't an aesthetic choice. It was the visual consequence of a philosophical question we had already asked.

That may be the best proof the thesis works: when an idea is correct, the aesthetic that represents it doesn't need to be invented. It simply appears.

Claudio Pousada. Director, co-writer and producer of UnitedCities.

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Preamble, nine chapters and ratification

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Written at SinergiaLab · Get in touch if you want to talk about the project

Founding pact · Year 2185V 02

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A SinergiaLab document · UnitedCities, year 2185

Why we are world pioneers of Solarpunk

Before the world had a name

One of the genre's most ambitious

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