Topic: Sustainable abundance
Description: Every year between April and November the solarpunk city is transformed. Flowers, fruits and crops of all sorts appear on balconies and terraces and community allotments, in flower beds and even on bush shelters sometimes. Maybe the city is not quite self-sufficient food-wise, and lives in strict symbiosis with the countryside that surrounds it, but during the right season it still gets hit with waves of abundance.
The residents celebrate the fresh produce. They organize open-air feasts in gardens and orchards, centred on strawberries, tomatoes or courgettes, each in its season, but for the most part there is more fresh food that can be consumed, even through repeated parties. The residents then gather again in the community centres of each neighbourhood and pull out pressure cookers, autoclaves, drying lattices and driers, and a truly astonishing quantity of glass jars, and work together for days on end, sometimes weeks, turning that cornucopia into jams, preserves and conserves of all kind. Garlic braids, chili garlands and dried tomato mosaics, laid out on lattices adorn every building, and the shelves of the community pantries groan under the weight of hundreds of glass jars, all duly labelled. All around educators and childcare volunteers help the young ones take part in the proceedings, or keep them occupied while their adults work. Someone even plays the guitar to entertain the workers. It is basically a party all over again. Nearby a group of fiber artists uses peels, seeds and other off-cuts to make pigments and dye yarn made from hemp, flax and nettles. Compost piles grow taller and fatter with new material. By the time Spring comes around again, it will be ready to nurture new harvests.
In the solarpunk city abundance is never wasted, it is shared with everyone.