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.

Includes contributions from: Benjamin Bratton, Stanley Chen, Ashley Dawson, Holly Gene Buck, Ryan Griffen, Nalo Hopkinson, XIA JIA, Giorgos Kallis, Ewan McEoin, Chen Qiufan, Amaia Sanchez-Velasco, Saskia Sassen, Kim Stanley Robinson and Andrew Toland.