Two months ago, we almost built the wrong thing. A green-painted cage that looked like the future, but wasn’t.
The yogurt-commercial future
You’ve seen the image. Glass towers. Tropical vines hanging off every balcony. Kids in linen playing in a rooftop garden while an uplifting violin tells you we’ve finally solved everything.
This is Solarpunk. It’s meant to be the optimistic radical answer to our neon-soaked dystopias — the one aesthetic that dares to say the future can be good.
We loved it. Our first mood board for Growden looked like it was ripped straight from a Solarpunk Pinterest. And then we started reading.
Solarpunk isn’t a philosophy. Right now, it’s a green-painted cage.
Exhibit A: the sinking city
Take Almere. The Netherlands built it from scratch, on land reclaimed from the sea. 100% more green space than its neighbors. Over 1,000 self-built, kaleidoscopic homes in a single neighborhood.
It gets held up as the world’s first real Solarpunk city.
But walk down its high street and the veneer cracks.
Three things Almere actually gets wrong
- The corporate shrine. The radical, colorful architecture ends up plastered with giant logos for Sony and Samsung. A utopia turned into an ad break.
- The literal sinking. Some of the “utopian” neighborhoods are subsiding into the reclaimed seabed. Repair costs are running roughly twice what a normal city would spend.
- The capitalist framework. The whole project was designed inside the same economic logic that got us here. Radical shell, business-as-usual guts.
We tried to design our way into a better future, but we used the tools that built the mess.
Exhibit B: the cabin that costs the planet more
OK, forget the city. Isn’t the real Solarpunk fantasy the cabin? Off-grid. Solar-powered. Rainwater catchment. You, the earth, and nobody’s small talk.
Here’s the gut punch:
Living alone in the woods creates a significantly larger carbon footprint than living in a well-designed urban community.
The math behind why isolation costs more
Urban residents share heating walls, transit, and infrastructure. The average dense-city dweller emits roughly four times less than the suburban or rural equivalent — because a car-dependent life burns more than a rooftop solar panel can offset.
The cabin is a beautiful idea. The commute kills the whole thing.
We flee cities because of poor design, noise, and exhausting social expectations. Then our escape into the wilderness burns down what we were trying to save.
Maybe we don’t actually hate people. Maybe we hate the environments we’ve built for them.
The click
So if the dream city is a shrine to Sony and the dream cabin is an ecological disaster … what are we actually looking for?
Not more stuff. Not better gadgets. A coherent system — the kind of home where every connection feels natural. The storage sits next to the garage. The kitchen flows into the dining space. Every room has an intuitive purpose.
Architects call this feeling the click.
What “coherent” actually means, in four parts
- Autonomy over utility. A home that manages its own power, water, and waste — an active ecosystem, not a passive consumer.
- Production over maintenance. A habitat that generates more energy over its lifetime than it took to build.
- Built lighter, lived fuller. Moving away from oversized, tech-dependent luxury toward space that feels safe, functional, and yours.
- Better ways together. Small-scale, grassroots communities sharing open-source solutions — the opposite of forced isolation.
So what are we actually doing?
Right now, we’re curators. We test items, the lighting, and the tools to see what actually improves daily life. But curation is step one. Not the destination.
The real goal of Growden is to generate trust. To ask, honestly and in public, whether we should be building better gadgets — or entirely new models of how to live together.
We haven’t figured it out. That’s the whole point of this section.
Are we looking for more stuff? Or are we looking for a better way to be together?
If you have thoughts — we’re listening. That’s what Our Journey is for.
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