Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk

ABSTRACT Solarpunk’s commitment to the creation of hopeful and desirable futures may have transformative potential at a time when people are growing tired of the never-ending list of bad news. Its dynamic of realist audacity and radical hope makes it a fascinating genre to explore, but the importance of a third emotional state—utopian desire—is rarely mentioned explicitly. In Ruth Levitas’s influential definition, utopia is “an expression of desire for a different way of living and being.” The article argues that solarpunk is suffused and propelled by that desire not only in its manifold speculative storyworlds but also in its insistence on collective transformative action.