Planet City

By Liam Young, Kim Stanley Robinson and Saskia Sassen

Planet City is a project by Los Angeles-based film director and architect Liam Young, exploring the productive potential of extreme densification, in a speculative future where ten billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness.

It imagines a radical reversal of planetary sprawl, where the world's popu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uro Publications
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922601230

Liam Young

Liam Young is a writer and political activist who, aged 19, was one of the first to campaign for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. He has written for the Independent and the New Statesman. Having recently completed his degree in International Relations at the LSE, he now advises a member of parliament.

Book preview

The end of the end

of the world

Liam Young

In the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy, it’s bright and cold, the clocks strike 13, and the sky is the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. A merry little surge of electricity pipes from the mood organ and the sun peaks over the tops of the towers, their glass walls awash in orange. The sour gas stacks flare and Dr Robert Laing sits on his balcony eating his neighbour’s dog, reflecting on unusual events.

Cities are best described through fiction. Their edges are nebulous, their definition and boundaries are often unclear and endlessly being rewritten, but they come into focus as shared narratives. The imaginary city has always been a site in which to prototype new scenarios and emerging cultures. In their speculative streets we play out multiple, unexpected, unintended futures and their associated social and political imaginaries. Whether it be speculation around the impacts of industrialisation and mass production, the imminent arrival of driverless cars, seamless augmented reality, or artificial intelligence, these fictional worlds give form to our most wondrous technological possibilities and gravest concerns.

The history of future cities is a chronicle of the hopes and dreams, horrors and anxieties of the time in which they were made. They are the architectural and urban construction of ourselves, fraught with contradictions and encoded with the concerns of the present. It’s been nearly 40 years since the spinners flew the streets of Blade Runner and our dreams of a robot dystopia have washed away in the acid rain. The autonomous blimps drifting above should be calling us to the off-world colonies, the cavernous streets of 1982’s vision of 2019 LA are cast in the shadows of a scorched climate, and noodle bar neon reflects in the wet tarmac. At the time of the film’s production the world was amidst the personal electronics boom, dancing to the silent beats of a Sony Walkman, and watching pirated films on home video cassette recorders. Japan was emerging as the next global superpower. Most science fiction cities of the time played out this hybrid future, a cyberpunk cultural collapse of American and Asian aesthetics. In light of Japan’s subsequent economic decline, such urban visions could be dismissed as a failed prediction of a future that never was, but instead, we should understand their value as powerful visualisations of the political and economic climate of their day. Prediction is often just a side effect of science fiction—more often it offers a critical way through which we might engage and exorcise the fears and wonders of the present. If we airbrush out the action hero or the damsel in distress, then we can understand the urban imaginaries of popular culture as stage sets for both diagnosis and catharsis.

We can inhabit the spaces of fiction as a way of coming to terms with conditions that reality struggles to grasp. Sometimes moments, places, or cities are best understood by examining the fictions we construct about them. We are all literate in stories—and they are accessible and public in a way that an architectural drawing or diagram is not. Fiction is an extraordinary shared language; it is how our culture communicates and disseminates ideas. Narratives of imagined cities help us to visualise other possible futures that sit outside of the one that all too often feels inescapable. The geographies of fiction can offer a view back into a condition that has become so complex, ingrained, and familiar that it is almost rendered invisible. As we write stories, we write the world—and in this way storytelling can be considered a critical act of design. Such stories of the future can transport us, and act as an antidote to an angry and broken world. Sometimes we tell stories to comfort, to educate, or empower us, to add mystery or to strip it away, to fall in love all over again, or to scream with rage. We craft these tales of alternative cities because when faced with a moment that is unnerving or unfamiliar, disappointing or disastrous, sexy or seismic, such madness is the only way of staying sane.

In the space of writing this book and designing Planet City the world has ended three times. Today we measure our age in apocalypses. The dystopias of science fiction that previously read as speculative cautionary tales are now the stage sets of the everyday as we live out our lives in a disaster film playing in real-time. In previous generations science fiction would routinely project futures 20 to 30 years ahead. There was solid ground on which to stand and venture forward into a landscape of limitless growth, development, and expansion. Increasingly, however, the length of these projections became ever shorter as the uncertainty of the present meant that any kind of distant speculation seemed more an act of fantasy or folly.

The real and necessary work to be done has actually been to unravel the moment we are in. The stretching shadows of economic ruin, climate collapse, an AI out of control, or catastrophic cultural divisions have cast tomorrow in darkness. The speculative imaginary of an aspirational or distant future has given way to the critical re-narration of the dystopian present. COVID-19 has again put the future on hold, as we tread water, holding our breath, hoping to avoid a second, third or fourth wave. This is the death of planning, surrounded by ruined worlds and empty calendars. The future is broken and we are left stranded in the long now, doomscrolling idly, waiting out the end of the end of the world.

1816 is known as the year without summer as the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in the previous year caused average global temperatures to decrease by up to 0.7 degrees. Famously, to wait out the cold in Lord Byron’s Lake Geneva villa, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Polidori would create some of modern literature’s most iconic horror stories. 2020 is the year without outside—the year without places, without crowds, without the public, the year without end. In a similar moment of darkness, the creation of fictional dystopias are inevitable and the future is easily forgotten. It is in this context, when the streets are still and the fog rolls in it is critical and necessary to start to tell each other aspirational stories again.

Planet City comes at this moment without a future. Urban development has forever changed the composition of the atmosphere, the oceans, and the earth. We have remade the world, from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. Landscapes have become resource fields, countries have become factory floors, the countryside has become industrialised agriculture, and the oceans have become conveyor belts. There is no city and country anymore, no nature and technology, but instead we have now engineered a continuous urban construct that stretches across the entirety of the earth. We are all already living in a planetary city, a distributed mega structure hiding in plain sight. Architecture is a geologic force and everything is city. In this context the utopian urban dreaming of science fiction can seem decidedly naïve, and such optimism requires us to ignore all the evidence at hand. Aspirational social imaginaries rarely capture an inclusive, resilient and productive city form, but instead reinforce the assumptions of industrialisation—that density is dirty and congested, always a tragic encounter removed from our natural life in the idyllic countryside. If it is not the colonialist dystopian skylines of cyberpunk, then we either retreat into a western-centric pastoral nostalgia or gleaming techno-fetishism. It is dismissive to imagine the utopian impulse as simplistic stories of hope, instead we need to understand that their value is in the compelling expression of possible alternatives.

Planet City is more a work of desire and longing rather than ebullient positivity. Seminal biologist Edward O Wilson has written on his Half Earth proposal, an achievable plan to stave off mass extinction by devoting half the surface of the earth completely to nature. For Wilson, the magnitude of the problem is far too large to be tackled with small gestures, and any solution must be commensurate with this scale and urgency. The byproduct of this planetary park, however. is in turn some kind of redesign of the planetary city. Rarely discussed in defense of the theory is the massive consolidation of our own urban development that will be required to withdraw to the remaining 50 percent. Planet City begins with this question, to imagine radically reversing the sprawl and retreating from all our existing countries into one hyper-dense metropolis housing the entire population of earth. If we were to reorganise our world at the scale of our densest cities however, Planet City’s most provocative form is much closer to the scale of 0.02 percent earth.

This is the world collapsed into a single city, a city for 2050’s projected 10 billion people, a microcosm of the planet that will afford us the space to re-wild and return almost the entirety of the world to a global-scaled wilderness. A city beyond geography, a city outside of place, a city of everywhere and everything.

Planet City is a counter to the end of the world, but not a vision that retreats into the fantasies of a return to an idealised nature, the mythology of the local and the impossibly rural, nor an imaginary of chromed towers, flying cars and extraterrestrial colonies. The fictional city is a space to provide a counterbalance to the prevailing media narratives around technologies, where the hype beast roars, and we are constantly sold simple solutions to extraordinarily complex problems. Today, technologies of the future are financialised products, glittering upgrades of the here and now, not the scaffolds of more distant aspirations. Planet City is an alternative vision, a future enabled by technology but not determined by the egregious systems that bring them to market today. Planet City is built entirely from sustainable technologies that are already here, but that just lack the cultural investment or political will to implement them at scale. It is a city developed through this process of practical speculation and is messy, uneven, resilient, and inclusive. The city form may appear extreme, but it has evolved through the most rigorous pragmatism. Although wildly speculative, the project is a grounded and possible proposal developed from real calculations, cutting edge research, and the support of an international think tank of acclaimed environmental scientists and technologists. Planetary in scope, foregrounded voices aren’t those that are typically visible through the Hollywood dystopian-focused lens. Our new city is shaped from a distributed city council of consultants, interviewees, and authors from all over the world. Ideology rarely evolves at the pace of contemporary technology. Planet City is a not a plan for direct implementation, but rather serves as a provocation that prototypes the necessary systemic and lifestyle changes that may be required in order for our world to continue to support human life. It stands as evidence that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

Set against the consistent failure of nation states to act in any meaningful way against climate change, Planet City emerges from a global citizen consensus, a voluntary and multi-generational retreat from the sprawling cities we all inhabit. It’s a slow and deliberate migration based not on an enforced mandate or a central governing body enforcing a decree. Instead, network enabled movements like the global climate strike and climate march, some of the largest gatherings of humans in history, act as a template for the early rumblings and first mobilisations of Planet City. The world’s shipping fleet that once dragged material ripped from the earth into the storefronts of our global streets has been repurposed and now delivers these same possessions to the shores of the slowly growing city. Piece by piece we will dismantle the world we once knew and remake it in new configurations. Some will stay behind, stubborn holdouts refusing to leave, others will remain as stewards of the land. One day, when the carbon is tucked away and the soil is black, we all might return again.

Until then, as we gaze over our Planet City, we need to radically embrace the uncomfortable place we now occupy in a world where we are no longer at its centre. Beyond it’s walls, where the forests return and the ground is re-wilding, we make space for other species and support the ecologies and systems we once thought beneath us. Today we chart territory for the extraction of wealth. In Planet City we mark out regions in order to leave them empty. It’s like a national park boundary—drawing a line in the earth not to own, develop, or occupy, but to keep us out and scaffold its recovery. We will keep to the edges, watching on from afar. The beginnings of Planet City is the end of human centered design.

Planet City affords us this critical distance from which to reevaluate ourselves. It is not strictly a proposal, rather it is a provocation that helps us to see that normal is the actual problem. Following its own logic almost to the point of absurdity, what comes into focus are not the extremes of the fictional city but the catastrophic models of everyday city making. The existing planetary city and the glacial accident of the Anthropocene is the real impossibility at the core of the project. This collection of texts is a chronicle of the present moment as much as it is speculation about a world to come. The book consists of both fiction and non-fiction in order