A heuristic for how freedom-friendly your urbanism aesthetic is:

If you draw an image of a city with your urbanism aesthetic, and then replace a random building with a McDonalds, how much worse does it become?

Lunarpunk clearly beats solarpunk on this dimension.

That is one branch of solarpunk art, but I prefer this interpretation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqJJktxCY9U

It's also more resilient to the McDonalds test (although not perfectly so)

I hope the Dear Alice style is what people think of as solarpunk becomes more mainstream, though I think it's unlikely

The most common style of solarpunk art depicts scenes from an aerial view, rather than a human perspective

As a result, many solarpunk artists systematically underrate the texture of real life

Maybe it's because real life is messy, and it's harder to depict it without getting bogged down by the mundanity of it all

Ironically, cyberpunk dystopias do a very good job depicting the grungy details and discordances of life

I think this is because details are inherently complex and never as shiny and orderly as a skyline looks from afar

It's easier to depict a utopia when you don't need to explain any of the details

Reminds me a little of Studio Ghibli, which I love - I’d be fascinated to see an experiment where a few thousand people were to focus on this sort of thing and genuinely immerse themselves for 3 weeks.

I like this! Definitely feels like the sort of environment I would want to live in, and definitely more robust to McDonalds incursions!