Animations of the urban cliffs of Planet City, an imaginary city for the entire population of the earth.
"The planet is a building. Architecture is a geologic force and across our history we have remade the earth, from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. Sheer cliff walls now mark the edge of our new, concentrated city and everything beyond is rewilding in our wake."
Planet City
Humans dominate the planet. As a consequence of hundreds of years of colonisation, globalisation and never-ending economic extraction and expansionism we have remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. But what if we radically reversed this planetary sprawl? What if we reached a global consensus to retreat from our vast network of cities and entangled supply chains into one hyper-dense metropolis housing the entire population of the earth? Planet City is a conceptual design project explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness. 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. Planet City is simultaneously an extraordinary image of tomorrow and an urgent examination of the environmental questions facing us today.
Designer and Director Liam Young
Visual Effects Supervisor Alexey Marfin
Visual Effects Case Miller, Aman Sheth, Vivian Komati, Yucong Wang
Lead Researcher Case Miller
Researcher Pierce Myers