From the Solar Family to the Combustible Community

A recent advertisement from Australia's Clean Energy Council depicts a familiar scene: a family enjoying afternoon tea outdoors.

Set at a table in the backyard of a privately owned home, in the glaring Australian sun, a father is reading the newspaper, perhaps enjoying a day off from his stable tech job. A mother emerges from the kitchen bearing food, and four children are entertained by electronic devices. In the background an array of solar panels is mounted on the roof.

It’s a familiar image, one most Australians would instantly recognise as the happy nuclear family, that long-standing unit of social reproduction which crystallised in North America during the prosperous post-war period. We can feel the image working on us, convincing us that the transition to renewable energy can be effortless, simple, fun. The sacrosanct model of the family can remain undisturbed, and climate change—no longer an existential threat—can be overcome by upgrading appliances and swapping out one energy form for another. In this image, all the accessories of the nuclear family are intact: the genealogical symmetry of father/mother, son/daughter and the house with its front door, post box and white picket fence. New and streamlined devices help us to perpetuate otherwise unchanging lifestyles. Ergonomic work-from-home setups let us do more work, tablets let us consume more entertainment, and electric vehicles let us travel more guiltless kilometres.

This is a unit of social reproduction that we call the Solar Family, apparently our best hope to weather the storm of climate emergency and the ensuing social discordance. The Solar Family responds to climate change by focusing on new forms of energy production which promise to maintain our present relationships to technology and to each other. The Solar Family alleviates the fear that drastic social changes might be required. It supposes that we can avoid environmental collapse and still drive our own personal cars, denying the inconvenient prospect that we might be better off riding the bus. What this model of family life ignores is that new forms of energy and resource consumption require new ways of being together.

Architecture is not only the practice of building-making, but also a means of perpetuating the normative family. Consider the suite of technologies which helps to facilitate the smooth functioning of a family-based society: fences that delineate private property; addresses connected to mortgages; backyards apportioned for the exclusive use of kin and the occasional neighbour; garages which house the family car; the wheelie bin that directs waste away from the immediate biome; front doors, corridors, private kitchens, private bathrooms, and private beds for private individuals. Beneath this assemblage exists a messier reality: kids playing without regard for fences, birds that pull rubbish out of bins, second and third jobs to pay off private debts, sharing between neighbours, maintenance help from extended family and the occasional communal barbecue.

Architecture, when viewed from the vantage of the nuclear family, can be seen to reinforce the privatisation of care. But don’t worry—this is not a critique of your family, nor of the spaces you were brought up in. Instead, as queer theorists and family abolitionists remind us, it’s the model of the family which is getting in the way of an energy transition based on equality and environmental justice. In Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Sophie Lewis tells a “potted history of family abolition,” citing figures as diverse as Plato, Kim TallBear, and Karl Marx¹ . This eclectic ensemble serves as a reminder that resistance against the individual bourgeois family is nothing new. 

Charles Fourier, an 18th century utopian favoured by many architects, sought to liberate women through the creation of kitchenless cities, filled with luxurious free canteens.

His visions of an anti-work, polyamorous society came out of being enlivened as a teenager by the French Revolution, when private property, work, and markets lost their ideological stranglehold. He invented the term “feminism” and devised the phalanstery, a utopian structure for communal living involving a universal basic income and equivalent “sexual pleasure minimum” of assured gratification for each citizen² . This joint vision of material security and all-embracing satisfaction ensured that work was playful, when necessary. 

Lewis also recounts the revolutionary love of Alexandra Kollontai, the communist family abolitionist who saw the Soviet Union as a bright new society capable of caring for every child and providing moral and material support to all parents³ . In the 1960s, the Gay Liberation movement exploded from San Francisco to New York and across the world, with drag queens and trans women acting as mothers to young queer youth, who were often fleeing abusive households. Routinely characterised as mentally ill, queer and neurodivergent people formed a united “schizo-culture” of resisting doctors and parents, with the intention of dismantling patriarchy⁴ . 

By contrast the patriarchal family, reliant on a male wage earner, became synonymous with industrial society in 19th century Britain and reached its apotheosis in 20th century America. Since then, the nuclear family has become the central model supporting the growth of industrial economies. It is in service of this ideal family that placeless and repetitive suburbs are rolled out en masse, along with, to paraphrase Elisa Iturbe, “the energy-intensive ways of life they give form to.”⁵ Even as it decarbonises the home, the Solar Family fails to challenge the nuclear family. The decarbonised home similarly fails to unsettle the suburb. The sites of extraction have changed, but the reliance on extraction remains the same. Now critical minerals are mined, refined, and processed, allowing for the construction of solar panels, batteries and semiconductors, all the while underlining the social and ecological unevenness brought on by the nuclear family. Since being occupied by settlers, Australia has been a receptacle for countless ill-fitting models, many of which have been naturalised in the public consciousness—from the introduction of plants and animals which have wreaked havoc on the existing ecology, to our adoption of an inefficient and car-dependent suburbia. 

If new forms of energy and resource consumption require new ways of being together, then what might eclipse the Solar Family? We turn now to the challenge of imagining a desirable future, where sociality and energy expenditure are aligned. 

The pandemic has encouraged fledgling forms of resistance and solidarity—forces of frustration like burnout, protest, and populism, which, when focused, work against the privatisation of care. These energetic expressions provide glimpses of a latent community, one which might chart a path for living together. A community where kinship and pragmatic affinities are defined by collective aspirations, more so than by wages, blood or genes.

Let’s imagine the Combustible Community lives where the Solar Family once did. But instead of a vast, formless ocean of suburbs dotted with island-like private homes, this new, more populous community has created a dense raft of activity. The formal hierarchy of arterial roads, main street, front yard and front door has been upended. Now we have a multiplication of entry and egress points. Front and back doors have become thresholds without distinction; new openings frequently appear and disappear. Furthermore, a diminished reliance on cars has made circulation more multifarious. With more people but far fewer forms of private transport, the amount of shared land has ballooned. Scents from compost and smoke announce themselves in air no longer pervaded by petrol.

In the Combustible Community, practical techniques for land management are rehearsed and carried out. On fire country, the oldest land management policy is also the most relevant: First Nations knowledge underpins neighbourhood governance. Instead of fire hiding away in the internal combustion engines of private vehicles, it is now a neighbourhood affair, with routine cultural burnings attracting crowds from near and far. Surplus is expended through joyous collective rituals, as communities cultivate symbiotic relationships with the land they live on. Indigenous languages accurately depict Country and its inhabitants. Country doesn’t speak in languages that have been imported. There is a palpable difference between guests passing through and those with millennia of deep connection to the environment. 

The creation of sturdy, sustaining shelters and ornamental gardens is superseded, as land has become recognised as something to be protected, cultivated, relied upon. Soils exhausted of nutrients and filled with trace metals are used for phytomining, where plants known as hyperaccumulators draw the metals out of the soil. Copper and gold are harvested right next to the veranda. Soils with more to give are planted with fruit and nut trees, energy sources for human and nonhuman creatures to graze on. The neighbourhood and streetscape is composed of materials which retain and disperse heat in considered ways. Private swimming pools and water tanks have become public batteries. Nature strips and highways have become carbon-sequestering grass reserves. In apartment blocks, private amenities like bathrooms and kitchens have been consolidated to take advantage of economies of scale. Luxury communal bathrooms, kitchens and laundromats are built on the ground floors and roofscapes of every suburban “six pack.” Kids play in the street, emboldened by the shared care and vigilance of their neighbours. The absence of enormous cars helps. The labour of child-rearing is distributed: children are not viewed as private property to be mollycoddled or guarded like assets. In solar creches children learn to read the landscape as a site of care rather than competition. Children are versed in forms of sociality that incorporate non-human entities, not for their use value but simply because they deserve recognition. Non-human kin are understood as inalienable components, however disruptive, of one’s world. Despite this, while the preservatives in aerosols have been removed and most have done away with bug spray, flies and mozzies remain a source of endless frustration and combative play. 

What of other types of work? Non-commercial sharing economies keep daily needs accounted for. Networked devices, the kind that created endless stimulation and distraction for the economic benefit of the few, have been cast aside in growing mounds of e-waste. The few time-saving devices that remain are run and serviced by energy ambassadors, allowing for more involvement in the happenings of the community. Informal building cooperatives grow up around Big Ideas, and everyone has an opinion on how to best define the limits and edges of the technological roof under which the community must live. Disputes often go unresolved, resulting in frustration and protest. Energy expenditure is either targeted, lest there be exhaustion, or exuberant, lest people get bored; the life-sustaining macroclimate is at stake. The Solar Family is spoken of as a distant, narrow-minded ideal—a necessary stepping stone, perhaps, to the time-rich, nebulous web of the Combustible Community.