Australian-born speculative architect and filmmaker Liam Young will live-narrate an extended version of his visionary short film Planet City as part of the Vivid Ideas program and Sydney Film Festival.

When it debuted at the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2021 Triennial, Liam Young’s original 15-minute, animated short film presented a hyper-dense, self-sustaining metropolis where the entire global population of 10 billion people – the projected population by 2050 – coexisted, freeing the rest of the planet to rewild and heal from environmental destruction.

Young’s vision of the future offered a techno-utopian view of Earth if radical, global climate solutions are implemented, allowing for planetary rejuvenation. Along with a consortium of designers, environmental scientists, energy experts and political theorists, Young designed the city to allow for ecological recovery while reversing planetary sprawl.  This provocation is not a roadmap for urban planning, rather it offers a singular, shared account of climate solutions paired with hopeful imagery that may disrupt the cultural hang-ups and fractured narratives preventing collective climate action.

Now, Young is coming to Sydney in June to narrate the extended Planet City: Live, accompanied by a live score by British electronic musician Forest Swords and other voice actors playing characters within the city.

Rethinking the role of architecture 

Trained as an architect at the University of Queensland, Young recalls it was a “very traditional” form of architectural education. After moving to Europe post-graduation, he immediately began work in the STAR architect industry, though he largely felt the practice was reflective of a “service economy”. 

Seeking to work in a way that kept up with the rapid nature of technology, and not the “incredibly slow pace of architecture”, Young pursued broader global issues.

“I felt that the [traditional] form of architectural practice that was so aligned with buildings as physical objects in the world was being increasingly marginalised by the forces of technologies that were increasingly redefining spatial experience,” he tells Australian Design Review (ADR).  

He began working with those systems to “tell stories” about global, urban, and architectural implications of new technologies.

Young challenges traditional thinking that continues to shape the industry, while advocating for a greater sense of climate responsibility.  

“If, as designers and architects, we are not tackling something like climate change, then what on earth are we doing?” he asks.

“The world doesn’t need more chairs. The world probably doesn’t need more buildings. It needs new strategies to reimagine the ones that we already have, or material systems we’ve already extracted.”

Climate change as a ‘cultural and political problem’ 

While his designs are focused on the future, in the present, Young labels our reality a “slow motion catastrophe” in need of radical solutions. 

Young identifies climate action as a “cultural and political problem”, not a technical one. He suggests that climate change has morphed in our generation to become a “crisis of the imagination”, rather than a crisis of technology.

“We can do it tomorrow,” he says. 

What gives him pause is that we’re not doing enough. “If anything, we’re making things many, many times worse,” he says.

Addressing the scale of current crises   

Believing we already have the technology needed to adapt to and mitigate climate change, Young has posed a thought experiment intended to provoke conversations that question our own assumptions and systems. 

Young argues the images we typically associate with a hopeful or aspirational future are “no longer fit for purpose”. 

“They’re all based on the failed ideals of boomer environmentalism,” he says. “They just don’t scale against the scale of current crises we have created for ourselves.”

As we’re faced with such radical problems, “the solutions need to be equally as radical”, Young says. Planet City supports radical densification, reverse warming and an immediate end to fossil fuel production. 

“The scale of action needed is planetary in scope,” he says. 

Speculating our future through fiction and film 

Planet City is a counter-narrative to typical sci-fi dystopias that often portray bleak outlooks of desolate cities and a mass exodus from Earth to space. Instead, Young fuses fiction with film to explore what a viable and sustainable life might look like. 

“The only way to explore them in any meaningful sense is to speculate.”

He says we must abandon our misguided impressions of climate solutions, like density, which is mostly portrayed as “dirty, congested and undesirable”.

Young hypothesises the potential of future self-sustaining cities. “If we can get a city working at this most extraordinary scale, sustainably using technology that is already tested and proven, then the only thing standing in our way of reimagining a city like Melbourne, Sydney, or Los Angeles is our own political blind spots and prejudices.”

Hopeful futures 

One of the rules set out in making Planet City was that the team “wouldn’t invent any magical, unproven technology to make the city work”, Young says.

“It’s built entirely from technology that’s already here, and in most cases, has been here for 10 or 15 years.”

Young hopes to introduce imagery that not just works at planetary scales, but is also viable and pragmatic, and can equally be “filled with joy and dance and colour and life”.

Ultimately, Young remains optimistic about our futures.

“Our generation is in a really powerful and exciting position where, if we wanted to, we could wake up tomorrow and change the world,” he says.

“That’s why I try to perform a project like Planet City to connect audiences to these narratives. It’s because the front lines of climate change are now culture.”

Planet City: Live will show at City Recital Hall, Sydney on 10 June. Find tickets here.

Photography and stills supplied by Liam Young.