First Steps to Finding the Solarpunk Campus

Hello dreamers and builders!

We’ve got a dope 80’s nostalgia vibe for this post, enjoy!

One mantra we keep at Agartha is “The World is Our Home’”. What does that mean to us?

• This planet is ours to share: one sacred, messy, living experiment.

• No one is a stranger here: Every face, every story, every scar is part of the same sprawling family.

• We’re heirs and caretakers to a living miracle: Sharing collective responsibility to keep mother earth safe, clean, and healthy.

• Home isn’t a place you find: It’s a place you make… anywhere in the world.

  

What does home mean to you?

For years, I’ve dreamed of creating my own Solarpunk Campus- a sanctuary where nature, tech, community, and consciousness converge in harmony. It was following this very dream that led me to Nico. Now we’re co-dreaming Agartha’s Campus - a permanent HQ for our team, our communities, and our closest friends.

A 1st, 2nd, and 3rd space with:

• 🌿 Access to Nature - Ability to compost & grow our own food

• 🏙️ Major City within 30 min - Access to infrastructure, airports, restaurants, culture

• 🛌 Lodging near or inside the HQ - People can live within walking distance during stays, fostering depth of community.

• ☀️ Wonderful Climate - Mild, sunny, comfortable. Climate affects output, creativity, and health. This is weighted accordingly.

• 🥗 Ease of living - Easy to get around (public transit access is a huge +)

• ✨ Aesthetic richness - Beauty is inspiring, energizing, and healing and our physical space will embody it.

Building a village is one thing, but building a living laboratory for human evolution is another. We aren’t building a space for people to escape the world, we’re setting up fertile foundation to rally the people that want to redesign the world. We want our campus to emanate progress, creativity, and innovation.

I thought I was alone in this vision. Then I stepped into Edge Esmeralda and found hundreds of others who’d been building for decades. Pop-up cities. Regenerative villages. Urban third spaces. Co-ops. DAOs. Retreats. Sanctuaries.

For all the hundreds of builders all over the world, there are thousands upon thousands more who are looking to learn about, visit, and live in such places.

It turns out that the dream isn’t rare, but the unique flavors are infinitely diverse. Despite that variety, we’re all converging on a similar story: How do we live differently? Better? Together?

So how does one get started on this journey?

At our last residency, ‘Island Time’ we ran a collaborative workshop titled Solarpunk Campus Scouting Requirements. Our intention was to map out our requirements and build an assessment matrix to help us with our land project selection. But we got much more out of it…

Seven of us sitting in a room, a virtual whiteboard, and a question: What does the land need to feel like home?

The end result: A free, open-source template for anyone scouting their own paradise. We’re calling it the Community Scouting Requirements Matrix.

Within the doc we have:

• Instructions on how to use the tool

• A list of various categories and requirements you’ll want to consider when looking for your new community home

• A basic scoring & color coding system to easily visualize the results

Try Our Template

Experimenting with sustainability and permaculture? Project Kamp will probably show you lots of ‘green’.

A community ready to grow crops together while pushing the frontiers of tokenized governance? Perhaps Traditional Dream Factory would score all 4’s & 5’s in those categories.

Please feel free to use this tool and share it with anyone who might need it. If you’d like to collaborate with us to make it better, please leave a comment below!

Leave a comment

Choosing where to live or where to build is a big decision with massive implications on the quality of your life, family, and community. We hope that this tool helps you find clarity and ease your journey in some small way.

The workshop was full of little surprises… I organized it imagining we would better flesh out our own expectations of Agartha’s Solarpunk campus. However, we came out of it realizing that people have many different perspectives, needs, and values around ‘home’. We ended up with a more objective and comprehensive method of evaluating any land project / community. Here are some insights we gleaned from the process:

• Culture, values, leadership, and governance had the most focus, inquiry, and discussion - indicating an emphasis on social resonance as an even higher priority than the land and infrastructure itself.

• Our unique flavor of community living may not be for everyone, and that’s totally OK.

• We are not an authority to dictate what’s right or wrong. Rather, our responsibility is to chronicle what we can objectively observe, and share our own human perspective.

• Our aim at Agartha is to help illuminate what it feels like to put your feet on the soil and meet the actual people living on the land.

• If we do our job well, we’re giving you information that helps you find the right home for you. And what’s right for you might be totally different for someone else.

Special thanks to our crew from Island Time that helped make this template come to life: Deca, Jess, Stephen, Sofia, Christopher, Carmen, & Gillian!

• Know your values - culture isn’t a perk. It’s the soil everything grows from.

• Build your team / community - it always starts and ends with people.

• Don’t rush - finding a place to live is a BIG commitment.

• Start small - research, visit, experiment, prototype.

• Don’t force it - just because a few elements work doesn’t mean it’ll be a perfect fit.

• Don’t get discouraged - part of this process is to help you understand what you don’t want, in order to clearly know what you do want. Just because it’s not a good fit doesn’t mean you’re not on the right path.

Mother earth is humanity’s home. We believe that there’s a home for everyone here.

We want to hand you:

• The tools to find what’s meant for you.

• The stories to find comfort with others who’ve done it before.

• The guts to say, “Not for me” or “Let’s break ground.”

Your tribe is out there… and if it doesn’t exist yet? Let’s build it!

Check out the amazing research and educational work that Nicole Reese is doing with Terrenity.

Fools’ Valley (Portugal)

Amagi (Thailand)

Traditional Dream Factory (Portugal)

El Pantano (Argentina)

✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a creative studio on a mission to build a global network of solarpunk communities.💕 Join us as we chronicle our journey through residencies, co-living places, pop-up cities, regenerative villages, and solarpunk lifestyles. ☀️