Planet City is Liam Young's speculative architecture project made book: a rigorous fiction that imagines ten billion people concentrated into a single hyper-dense metropolis, surrendering the rest of the earth to wilderness.
About This Book
What if the most radical environmental act available to humanity was to stop spreading out? Planet City proposes exactly that — a voluntary retreat from planetary sprawl into one impossible, all-encompassing city. This is not techno-utopianism or a masterplan imposed from above. It is critical architecture grounded in statistical analysis, traditional ecological knowledge, and speculative fiction, assembled with an international team of environmental scientists, theorists, and writers. The project reframes climate change not as a technological failure but as an ideological one, rooted in centuries of colonisation, globalisation, and economic extraction. At once an urban vision and a cultural provocation, Planet City is essential reading for architects, urbanists, and anyone grappling with the politics of the built environment.
Key Features
- 408 pages of speculative design imagery, critical essays, and multi-voice fiction spanning architecture, ecology, and political theory
- Contributors include Benjamin Bratton, Saskia Sassen, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ashley Dawson, Nalo Hopkinson, Giorgos Kallis, Chen Qiufan, XIA JIA, Holly Jean Buck, Ryan Griffen, Amaia Sanchez-Velasco, Stanley Chen, and Andrew Toland
- Edited by Andrew Mackenzie, with Charles Rice and Mark Campbell as contributing editors; book design by Stuart Geddes
- Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for the NGV Triennial 2020
- Published by Uro Publications, 2021
What You'll Discover
- How extreme densification — housing all of humanity in a single city — could theoretically return the remainder of the planet to global wilderness
- Why climate change is framed here as an ideological and cultural crisis rather than a problem awaiting a technological solution
- How speculative design fiction, grounded in research and statistics, can function as a form of architectural and political critique
- A chorus of perspectives from ecologists, sociologists, science fiction writers, and Indigenous knowledge holders, resisting any single authoritative voice or neo-colonial masterplan
About the Author
Liam Young is an Australian-born film director and architect whose practice operates across design fiction, critical design, and speculative urbanism. His work explores the boundaries among film, fiction, and storytelling as tools for imagining the future of the city. Based in Los Angeles, Young uses speculative design and the visualisation of imaginary cities to ask provocative questions about architecture, entertainment, and the planet.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 408
- Dimensions: 180 x 105mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780648685876
- Publisher: Uro Publications
- Publication Date: 2021
Perfect For: Architects and urbanists engaged with climate futures, academics working across design theory and political ecology, and readers who believe speculative fiction is one of the sharpest tools available for rethinking the planet.