Planet City, a short film created by architect Liam Young, proposes a hyper-dense, self-sufficient metropolis for 10 billion people – the projected population of the earth in 2050, according to an article in design magazine Dezeen. Built according to the principles of the circular economy with zero waste, the metropolis would cover just 0.02 per cent of the earth’s surface. The idea stems from the Half Earth concept developed by biologist Edward O Wilson, which proposes that mass extinction can be averted by dedicating half of the surface of the earth to nature.
The city would contain 221,367 square kilometres of buildings up to 165 storeys tall and 4,311,543, 982 bicycles. Power would come from 49,445,671,570 solar panels while 2357 algae farms would filter pollution, writes Dezeen. Food would be grown in indoor mega-farms and vertical orchards.
In the 15-minute film, Young, who is co-founder of urban futures think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, explores how thanks to the metropolis, "centuries of colonisation, globalisation and never-ending economic extraction and expansionism" could be reversed to solve climate change and the exploitation of natural resources.
"Planet City utilises only technologies that are either already available or currently in development and has been designed in consultation with a global network of scientists, theorists and economists," Young told the magazine.
The film was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for the NGV Triennial which runs until 18 April 2021.
