Agartha's Proposal to a Solarpunk HQ
By fundamentally transforming the way we live, we can fundamentally transform society.
This is a proposal for a Solarpunk intentional co-living home. It is the first physical manifestation of the Agartha world, something we own, grow, and flourish with.💕
Nature or Culture?
The common tension for choosing a co-living home is this:
A. Be in nature, and you end up remote. You get the land, the quiet, surrounded by birds, trees, stars, a life actually integrated in the natural ecosystem — but it takes hours for somebody to visit. This is the quiet struggle of most nature-first communities: beautiful places fighting for visibility, too far away for anyone to commit to.
B. Surrounded by culture, and you end up in the city. Fractal NYC, the SF Embassy Network — high-intensity nodes, easy to reach, always full of people passing through. But the intensity never switches off, the rent is brutal, the noise and the pollution is unavoidable, and you can’t exactly build an earthship or a robot farm in Manhattan.
The Solarpunks often choose nature over culture, from Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal to El Pantano in Argentina. As a result, a lot of these communities face challenges recruiting talent. It turns out, building a village takes a village, and where do all the young, driven, talented, passionate, open-minded people go? They go to the city.
How can we have the best of both worlds?
Choosing Location 📍
Everyone has a different preference, a different city, climate, size of home — there is no single spot that makes everybody happy. We want to move forward, and we can’t make everybody happy.
Based on the demands in our close community, and the reality of our team’s living situation, we have narrowed the HQ to be in the US.
I know. There’s a lot of bad juju in the US right now, and you’re not wrong about any of it. But it’s still one of the best places on earth to build something new — a country founded on the premise that new inventions can be made here. For access to capital, talent networks, and exposure, and the freedom to actually plan and build, the US remains the strongest choice we have.
Long conversations narrowed it to three cities: New York, San Francisco, and Austin. Among the three, Austin stood out as the best option:
It’s the most affordable, it’s easy to build new infrastructure, and — unlike the other two — it offers ample options that are close to both culture and nature.
New York and San Francisco are both beautiful cities with amazing culture. We see them as important strategic locations to establish ‘nodes’ where our community can arrive and gather, while Austin offers an opportunity for us to really build and innovate — something we own, modify, can establish culture with events & residencies, and really live the Solarpunk life without compromises.
Every space thrives with 2 layers of needs: The land, house, infrastructure as hardware; the culture, community, governance as software.
Special thanks to Janine Leger for coming up with this framing.
The Hardware: Land & Infrastructure
We are looking for a not-so-new, not-so-fancy house, with not-so-rich land, so we can REGENERATE everything, bring in more life, art, culture, and improve the infrastructure as we live through it.
This also gives us an opportunity to increase the value of the property, not the other way around.
The constraints are:
Less than 30 min drive from Austin city center
1 existing move-in ready house with 4+ bedrooms
2+ acres of land available for farming & regeneration
The goal here is to progressively become more Solarpunk instead of trying to be too ideological. Over time, we want to figure out how to ‘retrofit’ a Not-Solarpunk standard US home to be:
Running with 100% renewable energy, can be off-grid if needed
A zero waste home: compost, buy bulk, shop local, build local, up-cycle, use bio solutions over synthetic ones
Accessible to a local agroforestry farm
Have a plug & play indoor farming solution such as advanced hydroponics or a vertical food forest from Grant Frontier Farm
Implement other possible Passive House Technologies
Retrofitting possible design choices from Earthships
Install a DC Microgrid — this is so cool, worth an article to just dive deep
Have a Solar Oven — this would be very useful for Austin’s summer
If you want to go on some real off-grid circular energy Solarpunk rabbit holes, here are some great resources:
The Software: Lifestyle & Culture
This is beyond a co-living house, but designed to be a Solarpunk cultural hub. So what does the day-to-day look like?
☀️ A Solarpunk R&D Lab
This is a place for Solarpunk innovators to radically experiment and create. We want to progressively move towards a zero-waste lifestyle completely run on renewable energy, try out robot farming and a compost garden.
We want to invite the best and the brightest Solarpunk builders to help us make this happen — they would be surrounded by fellow builders, advisors, a loving community, and a nurturing environment to bring their wild ideas to life.
🎧 A Sanctuary for Deep Work
The environment will have quiet, ergonomic spaces designed for focus and flow states. Productivity is a top priority here. The house would have events in after hours, but it will never become a party house.
🌼 Creativity
Creativity is at the heart of the space, the co-working space functions also as a creative studio. There will be tools to expand your creativity, musical instruments for jamming, painting materials and makeshift crafting stations, a DJ deck. The house becomes a canvas for our creativity: DIY configurations, murals, CNC furniture… the sky is the limit!
👯♂️ Co-Creation
I’ve seen co-living spaces work out beautifully. I’ve also seen it falling apart. My observation is: when everyone who shares the space cares about it, from the bottom of their hearts, things often work out beautifully without much rules.
The space is as great as we make it. All residents are invited to contribute to the space — cooking, cleaning, making it cute.
👍 Holistic Wellness
The culture will focus on wellness: physical, emotional, spiritual. The co-living environment is designed to encourage regular exercise routines, mindfulness practices, nutritious diets, relaxation and recovery.
🧘 Ethical Consumption
As a co-living house, we are committed to reducing waste and harm. This means we shop in bulk from local farmers market, we buy everything organic, choose compostable materials whenever we can, reduce packaging as much as we can, and favor ethical meat. Even if that drives our consumption costs higher. By making conscious choice as we consume, we are making our ecosystem more balanced and our animal friends happier, every dollar is worth it.
💕 Relational Wellbeing
Good vibes set up the foundation for everything else to thrive, and to curate good vibes, relational work is necessary. We want to be there to hold each other when we are falling apart. We want to be forgiving and encouraging to everyone’s shadows, because nobody is perfect. We want to be very aware of the emotional energy we take and bring to the space. And we want to work together towards creating a calm, warm, cozy vibe for the home, be present, be respectful, and most importantly, be kind to one another.
🤝 Compounding Relationships
The differences between this HQ and month-long pop-up cities or residencies is that relationships here are designed to compound over time. It is a permanent anchor for an exciting growing global community to call home. It’s a place where you can stay for long term, or visit seasonally. Over time, you’ll end up bonding more deeply with a similar group of people, and form kinship.
🏋️♀️ Growth Edge
We want to help uplift each other and be our best selves. Any goals you have: write an essay, exercise X times per week, meditate, ask someone out, host an event, complete a difficult task, try something new… whatever it is! Make a pledge to the house and we’ll make sure to hold each other accountable! We’ll be there to hold you if you miss a target, and be there to really celebrate when you do!
This is a community for builders and creators. Our belief is that by cultivating a safe, loving, growth-oriented environment, we unlock each individual’s highest potential for innovation, imagination, and creativity.
Our aim is to generate tangible outputs that improve the state of the world: whether it be a bountiful garden patch, an inspiring work of art, or a profitable conscious business.
If these principles resonate with you, shoot us a DM if you’re interested in investing or co-living with us!
Who’s It For
This house is for you if you:
🌍 Care deeply about the world and are committed to improve our environment and relationships by living truthfully to our values.
💕 Are a passionate builder working on Solarpunk solutions to improve our world (such as MakeSoil)
🌿 Want to live with high-agency, mission-aligned people — those who build robots, meditate, and compost.
🐬 Are a creative soul who has various hobbies and dabble between art, music, writing, sports, nature explorations, and want to live with others who resonate with this highly diverse lifestyle.
🌼 Have a mindfulness practice and are committed to curating a well balanced lifestyle (✅ meditation | 🚫 scrolling | ✅ rainbow plate | 🚫 McDonalds)
👼 Love people, want to live in community and are willing to contribute to make a co-living community thrive. (community building takes effort!)
Like the idea of Solarpunk and want to explore a more ‘Solarpunk’ lifestyle: integrating technology and nature in optimistic way with a healthy, loving community.
Want to empower others creating Solarpunk solutions with your energy & resources
Can any of this change? — Possibly.
We’re still negotiating & waiting for a few puzzle pieces to come together. If a great opportunity opens up that directs us to a different direction and it’s aligned with our purpose and value — we’re open for ideas!
Shoot us a DM if you’re interested in living in and/or funding a space!
Here is our Timeline:
Fundraising & Land Hunt - 1-2 months
Finalizing Offer - 1-2 months
Move In! (closer to end of the year)
Long Term Vision 🌎
A Network of Homes
The HQ is just the first example of a lifestyle that can be standardized and expanded across the world into a network of homes.
These homes share a set of values and culture, and are part of a trusted group that shares knowledge and resources.
The principles, culture, and standards of these nodes are emergent, with HQ as the first exploration to test some ideas. Here is my early thinking:
What Makes a Home Home?
Familiarity -- people you know, lived with, seen around, and the more time you spend in this network, the more it’ll feel like home.
Emotional Safety -- no judgment, no bragging, no signal, no ‘I am wearing the xyz hat so I deserve to be here’, the acceptance is unconditional, which is also why it will start off as a walled garden. Because the network is invite-based and so intentionally curated, you just know that it would be such a safe space.
Collective Care -- we’re cleaning it up, fixing it, taking care of the space altogether y’all. The culture is collective giving, nobody here is someone else’s servant, get ready to drop in, but take care of things all together. There should be a strong sense of ownership.
The Cozy Magic — this magic is mystical by design, the smell of a kitchen, afternoon sunshine on a countertop. The magic is also lived in and lived through. But the fact that a space is cared for and lived in makes all the difference; that’s what differentiates an Airbnb from a home. It feels intimate, it is wabi-sabi, it is not magazine picture perfect, it is lived.
What’s Special about This Network?
Trust — this is a highly trusted global network of friends who:
Travel frequently between different continents and want to have a trusted group of friends wherever they go
Live somewhere permanently but always open to expanding their horizon by immersing in new cultures & ideas from global visitors
Have/want to establish a few trusted communities they can call home across the world
Have a house / physical space and want to host interesting people all over the world
Diversity & Openness -- this is not just a conventional home, it’s a global network of homes, globalism comes with diversity, it comes with a wide range of culture and ideology, people would have different tolerance of dust, preference of temperatures, worship different Gods, work in different fields, have conflicting ideas about AI...
‘Edge Zone’ -- We want to curate space that is truly respectful and truly open, and it’s always a challenge. So get ready to get challenged! This can be both comfortable and uncomfortable, we create containers where you DO get to feel on edge sometimes, these will be spark events, things that you sign up to really challenge yourself, crazy hiking trips, sailing, intense relational circling, etc...
Genuine Compassion -- we want to curate a culture of love and care. This love starts from our homes, then ripple out to the world. This starts with people being proactive about contributing to others, love becomes infectious. When we create super tight-knit, loved and cared, healing community, we will heal our world.
If this vision resonates with you, follow along our substack to stay tuned on our next steps! Send us a DM if you’d like to collaborate :)
✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a creative studio on a mission to create a Solarpunk cultural movement. 💕 Join us as we chronicle our journey exploring Solarpunk lifestyles around ethical technology, planetary regeneration, loving community, and spiritual growth. ☀️
If this work feels meaningful to you, please become our paid patron and support this labor of love! We really appreciate it :)
So exciting! 🙌
Hell yeah!!! Can’t wait