The Lost Cause: Blue Helmet Modular Systems

Context§

I want to share some inspiring science fiction that paints a picture of a future to believe in. A future with realistic challenges and realistic solutions. Fiction to help ground solarpunk into a vision of action.

Cory Doctorow, in “Science fiction and the unforeseeable future: In the 2020s, let’s imagine better things”, says:

The stories we tell about our future affect what we do when the future arrives, so science-fictional tales of weathering the crisis have the makings of a movement that allows us to do so.

In this editorial, he goes on to imagine the foundations for a possible future, one where a “Canadian Miracle” occurs:

As the vast majority of Canadians come to realize the scale of the [climate] crisis, they are finally successful in their demand that their government address it unilaterally, without waiting for other countries to agree.

…

Canada goes on a war footing: Full employment is guaranteed to anyone who will work on the energy transition – building wind, tide and solar facilities; power storage systems; electrified transit systems; high-speed rail; and retrofits to existing housing stock for an order-of-magnitude increase in energy and thermal efficiency. All of these are entirely precedented – retrofitting the housing stock is not so different from the job we undertook to purge our homes of lead paint and asbestos, and the cause every bit as urgent.

How will we pay for it? The same way we paid for the Second World War: spending the money into existence (much easier now that we can do so with a keyboard rather than a printing press), then running a massive campaign to sequester all that money in war bonds so it doesn’t cause inflation.

The justification for taking such extreme measures is obvious: a 1000 Year Reich is a horror too ghastly to countenance, but rendering our planet incapable of sustaining human life is even worse.

This premise then became a short-story, “The Canadian Miracle”, published in 2023, which you can read in full.

This continues as a book, “The Lost Cause”, also published in 2023, about near-future Burbank, California.

I highly recommend reading this editorial, short-story, and book in full. They are without a doubt my favorite contemporary author’s take on science fiction.

I want to share excerpts from this future that are specific to the Village Kit vision: a modular system for building the practical infrastructure we need to live, amidst a climate crisis.

In this future, Blue Helmet peacekeeping operations have become climate crisis responders. When cities flood, sea levels rise, forests burn, and so on, the Blue Helmets are those who respond to support new waves of climate refugees. Except, rather than the temporary refugee camps of today, they developed systems to build new permanent refugee cities.

I want to share these Blue Helmet modular systems, as an inspiring view into a practical future.

“The Lost Cause”§

The world of “The Lost Cause” is set in the 2050’s. The main character, Brooks Palazzo, is in the same generation as those who are born today.

Page 146-149:§

Let’s start with quotes from page 146 to 149.

Brooks pulls a job from the Jobs Guarantee: a federally funded, locally administered government program that provides good jobs at inclusive wages that serve community needs proposed by community groups and approved by local governments.

Here we see what a future construction process might look like, accessible even to those who aren’t professionally trained.

Preparing the lot for the new low-rise took three days: working under a master surveyor, we staked it out, got it leveled, and installed the foundation slab.

…

The original dwelling was a two bed / one bath on a one-acre lot. The new low-rise would be three stories tall, with six two-bedroom apartments and one four-bedroom apartment on the top story, and no garage.

…

The real excitement started when the panels rolled up. They came from a factory in Mojave, the same one that was providing the materials for the relocation of San Juan Capistrano. The sinterers only fused the concrete and polystyrene balls when the grid was saturated, scavenging solar energy that would otherwise go to waste.

…

I know it’s weird to nerd out about blocks, but I was a total block nerd and I knew that the Mojave plant had its own on-site research team that was always tweaking the formula, making them lighter and stronger and more resilient to temperature extremes and quake stresses. I was addicted to their
videos of test buildings being subjected to the most awesome tests, watching wrecking balls bounce off them and shake platforms making them shimmy without cracking.

…

I scanned the QR code on the tie-down with my screen to look at the manifest again. The panels—8′ × 4′ concrete sheets—weighed less than fifty kilos each.

…

A couple of the work-crew-mates had spent a Blue Helmet year in San Juan Capistrano and knew the panel construction technique backward and forward. Our foremen were a couple of the refus from the
caravan who’d been general contractors back in the San Joaquin Valley. The rest of us had watched the training videos and done the online certification and in theory we knew what we were doing—the panel system was designed to be dead-stupid simple in any event.

…

Naturally, there was a lot of last-minute delay between the time we thought we’d start standing up panels and the first panel going in: triple-checking everything was level, comparing the panels with the plans to make sure the ones with built-in conduit for plumbing, HVAC, and power services were lined up in the right spot, and so on. But finally, around eight thirty, we were ready to go.

…

The first panel went in like butter, slotting perfectly into the groove and pin system in the foundation slab. It was now structurally sound, and as the tightening crew gave each of its lock bolts a half turn, it became rigidly fixed in place. This was the keystone, and we cheered as it went up but then quickly broke into the subteams that the apps sorted us into, each with its own piece in the logical path. With twenty-five people, we could finish the main work on the first floor by sunset, and while the upper stories would take longer, that would let interior crews work on the first floor, adding fixatives to the panel intersections, connecting and testing the plumbing,gas, HVAC, and power. Give us ten days, we’d be ready for paint and furniture. It was going to be so amazing, like a magic trick.

And then…

Something unexpectedly bad happens, outside the scope of the modular system. I invite you to read the book to follow the actual storyline. 😀

Page 207-210§

Next up, Brooks imagines if his grandfather’s house was given away to the city for infill: a process of using land for high-density development.

Here we see what a future housing design process, turned city planning, might look like.

The brainstorming session made me think they were just dreamers, but Phuong and her housemates were all ex–Blue Helmets. They were used to getting up in the morning, meeting with a community group about the destiny of some brownfield site, and building a new residence there in three days flat.

Don and Arina got onto some next-generation modular slab designs and then Arina realized she’d been in the field with the woman who’d led the project to create them, so they bridged her in.

Miguel had a contact in Simi Valley who coordinated GND Housing Guarantee builds for the whole region, and he took all of ten minutes to find us a flock of cranes, bulldozers, forklifts, and other heavy machines.

Meanwhile, Phuong was crawling these databases of parameterized build plans, dragging buildings of various sizes onto Gramps’s lot to check out the shadows, seismics, and whether they needed more water infrastructure than the city could provide from the nearby mains and sewer.

I had said “high-rise” but honestly, I’d never really thought about anything more than five or six stories. The tallest building in the neighborhood was only three stories tall. Plus, even with all my GND trufan energy, I couldn’t imagine a ragtag group of guerrilla builders erecting an honest-to-goodness skyscraper. Phuong had other ideas, and she clicked and dragged a bunch of legit high-rises onto her rendering of the lot before settling on a building that could be scaled up as high as thirty floors, though she’d settled for twenty, earmarking both the top and bottom floors for community spaces.

“How’re you going to sink the pilings?” Don asked, looking over at her screen. She tapped and showed him a picture of a machine with an auger bit on it that was insane, like something you’d use to drill to the center of the Earth.

Don laughed. I laughed too. It was absurd.

“That’s two, three days of drilling,” Miguel said. He tapped at Phuong’s screen to bring up a time-critical path chart. He dragged the top story of the building down to eight floors and we watched as the time ticked down.

“Ninth story is always the killer,” he said.

Phuong stuck her lower lip out. “I want a skyscraper!”

“I know baby, I know,” Don said, distractedly, tweaking the floor plans to create more flexible configurations, either a three-bedroom and a bachelor on each floor, or two two-bedrooms. I mirrored his work on my screen and started tapping around, finding a mode that let me tap into the city street plan and start dragging that around, and before long, I was transforming the whole Verdugo corridor into high-rises with a light-rail line down the middle of it, anchored to a subway station where the old strip mall was currently languishing, part-occupied, mostly used as a skate park and a weekend craft market.

I zoomed out and saw that my own crude high-density corridor was being polished by Phuong’s housemates, who abandoned their work on the hypothetical high-rise we were going to build on Gramps’s lot in order to create green roofs, vertical farms, parkettes, a community center added to the main branch library at Buena Vista. I watched with my mouth open as they worked together, like musicians improvising a jam session, except they were improvising a whole neighborhood, and I could tab over to the spreadsheets where there were build plans, bills of materials, critical path and building-code variances we’d have to file for.

Jacob shoulder-surfed me. “It’s cool, isn’t it? It’s just Blue Helmet stuff, though; kind of thing we used to do in-country, helping people think through what their neighborhoods could be. We’d do a couple training sessions, turn ’em loose for a week to come up with designs, get into revert-wars, and then we workshop ’em and do it again. A month later, you’ve got some incredible designs, and all that stuff gets trained back into the model so it hints the next group who try it. That’s why it’s going so fast—it’s hella trained.”

“Don’t say ‘hella,’” Arina said. “It makes you sound stupid.”

“I am stupid,” he said, and crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue.

Then Arina took away his screen and wiped out and reshaped a granny flat he’d been sticking on top of a garage off California, tapping the seismic rating box when she was done.

“There, not a death trap anymore.”

I grabbed a screen and dug in, snuggling up to Phuong, who’d sometimes look over at my screen and show me a faster or more elegant way to do what I was trying to do, and the neighborhood took on a polish and veneer that made it seem like a real architect’s rendering. I was flying around when I realized I was looking at the building we’d started with. Gramps’s house. My house.

It was beautiful, eight stories tall, roofed over with photovoltaics and a couple of eggbeaters, a courtyard with vegetable beds and ornamentals. The apartments were neat, thoughtful, weatherized for cross breezes, with charming, self-adjusting shades that kept them cool.

I flew through it, one apartment after another, the utility spaces and infrastructure, and … Phuong … guided … as we flew through the house, through the neighborhood, through the city, flying off the edge of the map into the undefined places of Cartesian grid lines.

Page 243-247§

At this point in the story, the characters take the city plan that was started in the above scene, and present it to the city as a pop-up festival.

Here again, we see the possibility of future city planning, how we could re-imagine civic engagement and community consultation. We also see the importance of future social media moderation strategies.

We hustled. By the time the first cops showed up we were curtain-raiser ready, with all our booths up and the big screens shook out and powered up, showing displays of the new Burbank, first cooked up in Phuong’s living room and then wikified and edited by a couple thousand Burbankers, mostly affinity group members and their friends, whose designs got polished up by infill urbanists all around the world.

…

Every booth displayed a different aspect of the New Burbank. One group had done transit, another had done libraries, another had done schools. The big action was in the neighborhoods, displayed as big-screen flythroughs that you could view or modify, either from your own screen or by just dragging stuff around on the big screens. The kids did a lot of the latter, while their grown-ups were more interested in the former. I eavesdropped on a lot of conversations, hopping from booth to booth, and I started to see a pattern:

Rando: “Come on, you’ve gotta be kidding me. This is crazy, it’s not what the city is about.”
Guerrilla planner: “Did you see this park?” (or stadium, or rink, or subway station, or library, or business strip)

Rando: “Sure, sure, but come on. Be serious.”
Guerrilla planner: “Did you see the lake? The lake’s super cool, it’s part of the runoff system. All the road grades run toward it; if there’s a flood it’ll absorb all the water and then most of that will end up back in the water table.”

Rando: “Yeah, that’s cool, but come on. Be serious.”
Guerrilla planner: “Did you see the solar capacity? Total energy independence, and we’ve got this concrete factory over here, it’ll just sinter prefab any time there’s more power in the grid than we can use. Then any time someone goes on the job guarantee, one of the gigs’ll be building one of these buildings, using that prefab. It’s carbon-neutral mass-scale construction—”

Rando: “That is cool. How the hell does that work?”
And then they were off. The excitement was infectious

… The people who couldn’t get to Burbank, especially other Californians who’d been in a fury about the injunctions and the bombings and the seizures, started building out our map, overlaying huge swaths of LA and the San Fernando Valley with their own dreams.

Even better: the Magas fucking hated it. This was culture-war clickbait times a billion, and it seemed like half the world’s reactionaries, trolls, bots, and assholes were determined to vandalize our virtual space (we had good anti-vandal, plus a swift revert-squad that the little kids on Magnolia joined in droves, cackling as their tiny hands smacked the screens to undo the damage faster than the irrelevant hunt-and-peck typists of the fallen past could wreak it).

Page 272§

At this point in the story, Brooks wants to follow through on his plan to tear down his grandfather’s house and building high-density housing in its place. To hell or high water.

“You want to blow up City Hall?”
“No,” I said. “I want to blow up this house.”

Not literally, of course. But knocking down a house and building an eightplex is a solved problem, as they say on the DSA socials. It takes a lot of heavy equipment and prefab slabs and a lot of people, especially if you’re in a hurry. But with every project in limbo, we had all the materials and equipment we needed standing by and most of it was in depots that were managed by friends and friends-of-friends, and there were also lots of friends and friends-of-friends standing by with nothing to do and a lot of pent-up nervous energy.

Page 275§

Here we see the participatory aspect of this future building system, anyone can contribute with the skills they have available.

We’d told Dolores and company what we were thinking of over lunch and asked them what they thought. We made sure they understood that they had a veto over this, because we weren’t about to turn them out into the smoke while we did our weird-ass shit. They were completely cool about it, though, excited once we’d conveyed what we had in mind and wanting to help out. They found friends who talked their host families into letting them double up, and pored over the floor plans for the new building, talking about how they’d furnish their places. Antonio was a finish carpenter and pulled up pictures of some of the kitchen remodels he’d done and we all noodled around with superimposing them on the renders of the interiors.

Phuong, meanwhile, had been exchanging disappearing/deniable messages with friends around the DSA, which led her to Tony Yiannopoulos, who found us a mole inside the Department of Public Works —a former shop steward who got promoted to management but never switched sides. After a couple of texts, she jumped on video and did this mind-meld thing with Phuong, ingesting her project manifest and locating available equipment at DPW lots all around the city. There was a lot of idle gear in town, thanks to the double whammy of the fires and the moratorium on emergency house construction—the city had requisitioned a lot of extra equipment from the county when the caravan first started heading our way.

Page 277§

When building an eightplex is simply a bill of materials.

I rattled the gate and shouted, “Who brought the bolt cutters?”

A figure loomed out of the smoke on the other side of the gate, bulky and shambling in a grayish, worn hazmat suit. “Don’t you cut my goddamned gate, child, or I’ll make you whittle a replacement.” The voice, muffled by the mask, was gravely and gruff, but affectionate. “You Brooks?”

“That’s me,” I said.

“You know how to drive a forklift?”

I shrugged. “Just a little I picked up on jobsites.”

“Uh-huh. How about a crane? Backhoe? Excavator? Boring machine?”

“Nope,” I said. “But they do.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the gang we’d organized over the DSA socials. There were fifteen of us, and with current certifications for all those and more.

“How about a tractor cab?”

“Uh,” I said.

He snorted. “Trick question, boy. Thing drives itself. It’s got fifteen hundred prefab slabs on it and all the electric and plumbing fittings on your bill of materials.”

“Bruce,” I said, “this is just amazing.”

Page 282§

When everything fits into interlocking components.

Blue Helmet prefab buildings are fast, but word gets around faster.

We were able to recycle the foundation slab, which meant that once the pilings were in, one crew could go to work fitting and locking panels while a second crew added structural members for the next stage. Wilmar was in charge of double-checking the building against the plans, making sure that panels with inset plumbing and electrical components were seated correctly and had good interconnects with their adjacent panels.

Page 286-287§

When these interlocking components can self-validate their correctness.

Over the course of that day, progress had been amazing, then agonizing, then amazing again. The first two rows of slabs clicked into place quickly, accelerating as the work crews got into the rhythm of the job. There’d been a moment when I stepped back from sealing a slab into place and looked around and realized that there was a brand-new structure there, just like that, a magic trick in three dimensions.

Then there’d been a long period of agonizing slowness as all the services were checked and rechecked—electrics, plumbing, data. It all had interconnect and integrity sensors built in, but we had to activate them and get them initialized and chained before they could start working. Time crawled as we troubleshot persnickety problems, sometimes using Blue Helmet socials to conference in experts who could suggest fixes to thorny problems.

Then everything lit green and crews went to work snapping on the joists and locking them in, laying down the floor slabs, and putting in scaffolding for the second story and we were off to the races again, half of the next story racing around the building’s edge even as a crew added exterior and interior doors and other fittings to the first floor. We even got the plumbing working, and the jobsite got a sink and a toilet. With the door closed, the windows fitted, and the first-floor ceiling in place, we got filters running and then we had an indoor space with breathable air, just like that.

Page 293§

Imagine building the frame of a house in 48 hours.

“How did you keep this all under wraps while you built it?”

“We didn’t,” I said. “I mean, we did, a little, but it only took forty-eight hours.”

“Forty-eight hours for what?”

“For you to show up.”

I watched that land on her. “Wait … You built this over the last two days?”

“Well, the first day was mostly demolition and hauling. Most of this is day two. Phuong tells me it’ll take forever to finish the interiors, but like she said, we figure we can do all the structural work including the roof by tonight.”

Olivia opened her mouth. Closed it. Repeated the procedure. “Bullshit.”

Phuong laughed. “Girl, it’s only because you went into planning instead of going overseas with a Blue Helmet brigade. This is how we do it, when we’re working fast after a flood or a famine—the time it used to take to put up a bunch of tents and build some shithole refugee camp, now we can build a whole fucking city. We could do it here, if we had the same rules of engagement as we do in the field.”

Page 320§

In this future, building infrastructure become collaboration amongst peers, and the tooling made reflects that.

There’s a Blue Helmet truism that the last 10 percent of any project takes 90 percent of the time, and that was certainly my experience with the building that had once been Gramps’s house. The early stages had involved standard parts—slabs, infrastructure, glazing, insulation—but now that we were doing fine work, things had to be just right—exactly right modular kitchen cabinets, the right sliding doors for balconies and locks for internal doors. More than half of the work was just hitting the screens, wrangling with other crews nearby to see who had the part you needed and then figuring out how to make rendezvous and acquire it.

But over the next four days, things took shape, and a couple of the apartments got real furniture, a mix of prefabs and donated pieces, and it was wild to see the rough structure I’d left a week before with my lungs on fire and my arms so heavy I could barely lift them now looking ready for human habitation. And habitate it we did, as parts of our crew left to work on other buildings that needed more work, until there were fewer than a dozen of us on-site at any moment, many of us couples like Phuong and me, so that we ended up with our own temporary, personal apartments (though people on the third and fourth floors had to borrow facilities from their downstairs neighbors because the city hadn’t been able to upgrade our main
water service yet).

Reflections§

I want to live in this world.

If you haven’t yet read “The Lost Cause”, get yourself a copy and live in this world for a time.

There’s much more in the book than I can reasonably capture on this page, see for yourself and let me know what you see.

I want to make this future world a reality, that’s why I’m working on Village Kit. Join us?

What do you think? Discuss this further on the Village Kit forum