Planet City: A Sustainable Circular Mega City For 10 Billion People by Liam Young
Geschreven op 12-1-2021 - Erik van Erne. Geplaatst in Bouwen-Klussen
The entire population of the earth could live in a giant sustainable city occupying a fraction of the earth’s surface, freeing the rest of the world for rewilding and the return of stolen lands, according to a new movie by architect Liam Young.
Young’s fictional Planet City movie proposes a hyper-dense, self-sufficient metropolis housing 10 billion people.
Built according to the principles of the circular economy, it could be built on 0.02 per cent of the planetary surface, taking up an area “roughly the size of an average US state”.
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 population retreats from our vast network of cities and entangled supply chains into one hyper-dense metropolis housing the entire population of the earth.
It is a vision of the future that runs counter to our current world, where humans dominate the planet. Where centuries of colonisation, globalisation and never-ending economic extraction and expansionism has remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate.
Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fantasy of designing a new world order. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular seat of power. It is a work of critical architecture – a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge. It is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmental scientists, theorists and advisors.
In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics. This is a fiction shaped like a city. Simultaneously an extraordinary image of tomorrow and an urgent examination of the environmental questions facing us today.
Planet City, 2020, is a newly commissioned immersive film by Australian film director and speculative architect Liam Young, which provides a window into an alternative urban future that has been created as an antidote to the climate crisis. Planet City is simultaneously an extraordinary image of tomorrow and a provocative examination of the pertinent questions that face us today. The work considers what might happen if we radically reverse the sprawl of cities, instead housing the world’s projected population in one super dense, but workable, city. Based on extensive research, involving a global think tank of advisers and collaborators, Planet City shares what it could be like to house all humans and their attendant infrastructure and resources in a city for ten billion, enabling the rest of the globe to heal as a vast wilderness.
Installed at the 2020 Triennial of the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, ‘Planet City’ depicts a world where the whole of humankind lives in one megacity, allowing the rest of the world to become a wildlife conservation area.
Conceived by filmmaker and architect Liam Young, the project draws on science fiction, as well as extensive research and imagination, to create a speculative image of what might happen if humanity would radically reverse urban sprawl and enact a strategic retreat into a microcosm of our planet.
