Liam Young is an Australian-born speculative architect and world-builder who constructs digital models of potential futures. With a background in architecture, his designs are grounded in plausible science and technology.

Young’s Planet City envisions a future where the entire human population of 10 billion lives in a single city powered by renewable energy and indoor farming, occupying only 0.02% of Earth’s surface. With new components of this transmedia project on display at the upcoming PST exhibit, “Views of Planet City,” held at SCI-Arc and the Pacific Design Center Gallery, I reached out to Liam Young for an interview, where we spoke over the phone.

Liam Young. Photo courtesy of SCI Arc.

Artillery: When exactly did you start building Planet City?

Liam Young: Planet City began at the start of the pandemic, when I thought the world needed different kinds of stories about the future. It’s an ongoing project that’s really not complete until we wake up and realize that the true fiction is not this fictional planet city at all. It’s the idea that we can keep on doing what we’re doing, imagining and building cities in the way that we have been for the last 100 years.

Do you feel throughout the process of constructing Planet City you were shaken out of an apathy towards climate change?
What that told me is that if we think about what a hopeful or utopian future looks like today, it doesn’t look like Planet City. What we were trying to do is put into the popular imagination new images, what I call “new planetary imaginaries,” that are radical in scale, collective, planetary. But they’re also ecological and sustainable, mindful of Indigenous relationships to land and mindful of the history of colonial infrastructure, but that also can be big and bold.

Have you gotten any feedback based on Planet City where people are incorporating elements of your ideas into actual architecture?

It’s less to say that people looked at Planet City and went, “oh, we could create this amazing wall of vertical solar panels.” Instead, I was taking the research that’s often lost inside the pages of peer-reviewed journals, buried in the back of the latest IPCC climate report. I’m just visualizing what they would look like if we really built them, so that people can connect and relate to it and maybe get on board.

It’s not to say that Planet City is the right choice, but it’s to start having those conversations because that’s where we are. There’s no space in between. It’s either consolidate and live within our means, or it’s shrink.