Solarpunk promises regenerative, multispecies urban futures – but as its eco-futurist aesthetic travels from Singapore’s curated tourist icons to Brisbane’s 2032 Olympic transformation, sustainability risks sliding from systemic change into spectacle, and from ambition into greenwashing.
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Brisbane is reshaping itself under the banner of sustainability.
The 2032 Olympic Games were initially promoted as the first in history to be legally bound to be climate-positive. That commitment has since been quietly abandoned. Yet the rhetoric of environmental transformation remains front and centre. Architectural artist impressions glow with lush subtropical greenery, glass biodomes, flocks of birds in the sky, and happy children.
In a city preparing for the Olympics, it’s tempting to treat architecture like a medal sport – with shimmering renderings chasing awards as eagerly as athletes chase gold. But before we celebrate Brisbane’s latest “green” icons, it’s worth asking: are we building genuine ecological futures, or staging ecological theatre?
Brisbane is not the first city to wrap growth in greenery.
Singapore has long positioned itself as a global exemplar of eco-futurist urbanism. The Supertree Grove at Gardens by the Bay, with its vertical gardens, solar canopies and choreographed night-time light shows, has become an international symbol of technologically enhanced nature. Biodomes house curated ecologies under climate-controlled glass. Nature is monitored, controlled, and choreographed as spectacle – less a living ecosystem than a tourist attraction.
This model is creative, yet nefarious and powerful. And its appeal travels.
Urban theorist Francesc Muñoz describes this phenomenon as “copy & paste urbanism”: the replication of globally recognisable urban aesthetics to signal competitiveness, modernity and world-city status. What begins as innovation in one context becomes a cookie-cutter template elsewhere.
Brisbane is increasingly following that script.
Skyline virtue signalling
The replication did not start with sustainability. It began with iconic skylines. Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands SkyPark – a dramatic rooftop platform stretching across three towers – has become one of the most recognisable urban silhouettes in the world. Brisbane’s Queen’s Wharf Sky Deck now echoes that same elevated promenade logic: panoramic views, architectural drama, global city aspiration.
This is not coincidence. It is visual signalling – the architectural equivalent of virtue signalling: First we import the skyline. Then we import a solarpunk sustainability aesthetic.
Solarpunk: from radical imaginary to architectural aesthetic
Solarpunk is a speculative fiction genre that has begun influencing architecture and sustainable design. Think: The city of Wakanda in the 2022 Marvel movie Black Panther (also combining Afrofuturism).
It imagines regenerative, community-led, post-carbon cities powered by renewable energy and grounded in multispecies coexistence. It is optimistic without being naïve. It rejects dystopia and embraces ecological reciprocity and a relationist ethos.
At its core, it has a political message. It calls for decentralised power, ecological justice, and systemic transformation.
But as solarpunk migrates from a speculative design genre into planning documents and immersive architectural fly-throughs, the core message gets left behind. The aesthetic – lush greenery, solar arrays, glowing night-time landscapes – are detached from its politics. It becomes tokenistic imagery – a visually stunning veneer that is attracting attention whilst distracting from what is absent: urgent, structural reforms and a genuine commitment to avert the planetary ecocide.
Brisbane is already a subtropical, open-air city rich in biodiversity. Why enclose in climate-controlled glasshouses what already thrives outdoors?
Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay resembles solarpunk made concrete: vertical plant structures, renewable energy integration, immersive light displays. Yet beneath the visual language of ecological harmony lies a tightly managed, technologically curated system in which nature is rendered highly visible, carefully monitored and meticulously controlled. Jamie Wang calls this “authoritarian nature.”
Sustainability becomes choreography that travels globally. And that aesthetic has arrived in Brisbane.
Eco-spectacle transfer
Artist impressions of the Mount Coot-tha master plan show enclosed tropical domes, immersive ecological trails, and digitally enhanced tourist experiences. The resemblance to Singapore’s biodomes is striking.
Yet Brisbane is already a subtropical, open-air city rich in biodiversity. Why enclose in climate-controlled glasshouses what already thrives outdoors?
The danger is not inspiration. The danger is importing Singapore’s authoritarian nature governance logic, in which sustainability is staged through iconic objects instead of grounded in reciprocal relationships between people, place and more-than-human life.
This concern is not abstract. Brisbane’s legally binding “climate-positive” Olympic commitment has already been downgraded to an aspiration. Planning and heritage protections have been suspended under the Crisafulli government’s Olympic mantra: “let’s get on with it.” The pattern is familiar: ambitious rhetoric, then regulatory flexibility, followed by dilution.
Greenwashing research shows that environmental claims often rely on aesthetic cues rather than structural reform. A glass dome filled with plants may signal ambition. But if emissions trajectories, land-use patterns and governance models remain unchanged, the spectacle offers the necessary smoke and mirrors to continue business-as-usual. Although it does help business to lift the ban on developer donations.
Eco-entertainment
Singapore’s Supertrees are not just vertical gardens. They host nightly choreographed light and sound shows – immersive eco-entertainment designed for tourism and branding.
Since 2024, Mount Coot-tha proposals have floated laser and light shows layered over ecological settings – framed by the city administration’s trademark slogan of “giving people more to see and do in a clean and green Brisbane.”
If Brisbane continues to plagiarise Singapore’s eco-iconography and media architecture choreography without interrogating the systems beneath them, we risk building a city that looks regenerative while operating conventionally at best – and extractively at worst
Calling it “clean and green” doesn’t make it clean and green. Research confirms that artificial light and amplified sound can profoundly disrupt nocturnal wildlife. Ecologists have warned that prolonged light-and-sound installations can interfere with feeding, breeding and navigation, and increase stress in species that depend on darkness to survive.
Mount Coot-tha is not an entertainment park; it is prime habitat for bats, gliders, powerful owls and other nocturnal species whose ecological rhythms are easily disturbed. When media architecture is superimposed onto nature, the line between activation and commodification becomes thin.
What is presented as eco-entertainment may, in practice, reconfigure ecological space as programmable spectacle – curated for tourist (dollars), rather than cohabited with the more-than-human life that already resides there.
Garden Rhapsody Light Show, Singapore. Photo: Gardens by the Bay
When sustainability becomes spectacle, ecological life risks being aestheticised for consumption, and reduced from living co-inhabitant to utilitarian object. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The issue is not greenery. It is depth.
If Brisbane continues to plagiarise Singapore’s eco-iconography and media architecture choreography without interrogating the systems beneath them, we risk building a city that looks regenerative while operating conventionally at best – and extractively at worst.
Copy & paste urbanism erases ecological specificity. It treats architectural forms as transferable design patterns rather than tailored responses to local climate, culture and biodiversity. It prioritises visibility over ecological integrity.
Real solarpunk – the version imagined in speculative design – would demand far more: designing with existing ecosystems rather than enclosing them; strengthening planning scrutiny and regulation rather than suspending it; embedding biodiversity into everyday infrastructure rather than iconic objects; ensuring climate commitments remain enforceable, not aspirational.
Brisbane still has time to decide whether 2032 becomes a turning point in ecological stewardship – or just a beautifully illuminated case study in greenwashing.