Planet City is a bold and visually stunning speculative project by Liam Young, an acclaimed architect, filmmaker, and critical futurist whose work lies at the intersection of storytelling, design, and planetary imagination. In this visionary film, Young explores what it might look like if all 10 billion humans—Earth’s projected population—were housed within a single, continuous urban environment, leaving the rest of the planet to be rewilded and restored. Far from a concrete proposal, Planet City is a provocative thought experiment that challenges our dominant assumptions about urbanization, resource consumption, and the boundaries between fiction and design.

Young is co-founder of the think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and director of the Unknown Fields research studio. His films and speculative worlds are grounded in real data, science, and emerging technologies, offering both cautionary and hopeful glimpses into possible futures. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Design Museum in London. Described by the BBC as "the man designing our future cities," Young uses cinematic storytelling and immersive world-building to engage public audiences with urgent environmental and technological issues.

In this video, created in collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria, Liam Young presents the narrative behind Planet City—a filmic journey into a future where humans choose radical collectivism over planetary destruction. Drawing on collaborations with climate scientists, urbanists, and theorists, Planet City becomes a platform for speculation: a space to examine what it would mean to radically reduce our planetary footprint and reimagine the role of the city in the age of the Anthropocene.