SOLARPUNK: Recovering the lost art of landscape architecture

Honor Award

Communications

Comox, British Columbia, Canada
Laura Yumeng Liu, Student ASLA;
Faculty Advisors: Fionn Byrne;
University of British Columbia

Media Analysis

I created a framework to analyze solarpunk as a design language that expresses values, spatial logic, and visions of the future.

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World View Setup

The post-collapse world is a patchwork of biomes—some wild, some scarred. Tech and renewables persist as humans adapt to climate extremes.

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Site Analysis

Topography shapes the game’s trail and story. Site data becomes gameplay, guiding players through environmental challenges and narrative moments.

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Level Design

Scene 1–4 unfold along a topographic trail, each shaped by site data—town, meadow, forest, windfarm—revealing story through spatial design.

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Work Flow

Section reveals the site’s depth—grades, canopies, soil, and experience. It shapes how players move, sense, and interact with the terrain over time.

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Scene 1: Satellite Village

Scene 1: A satellite village nestled in lowlands—solar roofs, cob homes, and markets form a resilient hub shaped by community and renewable energy.

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Scene 2: Hillside Trail

A winding hillside trail reveals shifting slopes, wind patterns, and pollinator habitats—inviting players to read the land through movement.

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Scene 3: Logger's Pass

Scene 3: Logger’s Pass—scarred by past clearcutting, this highland zone reveals stumps, regrowth, and stories of ecological loss and slow recovery.

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Scene 4: The Windfarm & Scene 1.1 4.1: Meeting Place

Scene 4: A wind farm site under construction. Scene 1.1/4.1: A central meeting place where villagers and designers gather to discuss future plans.

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Ending 1: Master Plan for Bat Relocation

A master plan proposes relocating bat habitat to safer zones, prioritizing wind energy goals through design.

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Ending 1: Key Features

Restore Alternate Habitat Corridors; Establish Attractive Roosting Zones Away from Turbines; Feeding Grounds – Relocate Foraging Hotspots.

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Ending 2: Site Plan for Wind Farm Redesign

A site plan redesigns turbine layout to protect key habitats, integrating energy production with ecological buffers and community input.

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Ending 2: Key Features

Essential Pond Ecosystem for Bats; Repurposed Old Turbine Structure; Monitoring and Management Centre.

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Ending 3: Wind Turbine Design Benefiting Both

A new turbine design supports energy generation while enhancing bat habitat—integrating technology and ecology into a single adaptive system.

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Ending 3: Key Features

Vibrating Canopy – Power from Movement; Organic Outer Coat – Habitat Architecture; Seed Capture & Dispersal Chamber.

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Final Product: Video Game & Digital Art Book

A narrative-driven video game paired with a digital art book, combining design, storytelling, and site analysis in an interactive format.

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Project Credits

Joelle Sept
Senior Landscape Architect, PWL Partnership

Daniel Roehr
Professor and Chair, UBC MLA

Project Statement

This project explores how landscape architecture can be translated into interactive storytelling through game design. Set in a solarpunk future, at its core, grounded in the ecological realities of our planet, climate change, and guided by a quiet, stubborn hope in renewable energy. The player takes on the role of a self-taught landscape designer navigating ecological trade-offs, community dialogue, and post-disaster regeneration. By blending narrative, site analysis, and design methodology, the game invites a broader public to engage with landscape thinking. It reimagines how our discipline is communicated—not just through drawings, but through choices, movement, and care.

Project Narrative

This project reimagines how landscape architecture can be communicated and experienced, moving beyond static visuals and into the realm of interactive storytelling. Developed as part of a graduate thesis, the project takes the form of a playable narrative game set in a solarpunk future, where players step into the role of a self-taught landscape designer investigating the ecological and social consequences of redeveloping an abandoned wind farm. Through gameplay, dialogue, and site exploration, players engage with real-world landscape values—climate adaptation, multispecies resilience, and equity—through a medium that speaks not only to professionals but to the broader public.

The game is set in a fictional satellite village inspired by geography near Campbell River, British Columbia, where the Brewster Windfarm project is currently under construction planning. Drawing from this real-world context, the narrative explores what might happen when communities return to a site left behind by industry. After a major climate catastrophe, displaced populations resettled here, supported by local food systems and a distant EcoTower managing regional infrastructure. Now, the community considers reviving the abandoned wind project to increase energy independence—but the site overlaps with a bat habitat corridor, home to the endangered little brown bat.

Players explore four scenes: a village edge with young regrowth; a hillside trail destabilized by erosion; a logging pass marked by industrial memory and regrowth; and the wind farm site, now reclaimed by meadow species. Through site analysis and dialogue with stakeholders—including an elder, an ecologist, an engineer, and an EcoTower representative—the player must determine how to proceed. Each character offers a different lens, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of practice.

At the heart of the project is a question: how can we communicate landscape architecture in ways that include more people? Traditionally, our field relies on diagrams and renderings. In this work, game design becomes a tool of translation, not just to visualize design, but to simulate its consequences and invite others into the process. It turns the landscape into something to be explored and shaped through decision-making.

The project concludes with three design outcomes: one prioritizes habitat protection, another maximizes energy production, and a third attempts a 70–30 compromise between ecological and infrastructural needs. None are presented as ideal. Each reflects different climate adaptation strategies, ethical positions, and social values.

This work contributes to the Communication category by offering a nontraditional format that expands public access to landscape thinking. It makes complex systems legible to non-professionals while maintaining depth. As the discipline responds to climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequity, our tools for engagement must also evolve. Interactive storytelling offers a way to include more voices in shaping what our landscapes could become.

Looking forward, this project hints at new potentials for practice. Game-based tools could support community engagement, scenario-building, and participatory design. Clients and community members could explore design alternatives, understand trade-offs, and see themselves within the landscape narrative. This work is both a prototype and a provocation: a call to rethink how we share our ideas and who we design with.