Creating Future Worlds

The coronavirus pandemic prompted director Liam Young to think about Earth as Planet City: an imaginary world of soon ten billion people, all living in a planet-wide, “unevenly distributed megastructure”, a man-made environment connected by technology and human settlements.

“Urban development has forever changed the composition of the atmosphere, the oceans and the earth. There is no city and country anymore, no nature or technology”, Young observes in the voice-over of a video that he’s presenting in this DLD Circular session. “Instead we have engineered a continuous urban construct that stretches across the entirety of the Earth.”

Young also describes himself as a “speculative architect” because creating imaginary models of the future can serve to illustrate potential dangers or create roadmaps to an aspirational future, he believes.

“With speculative cities such as this”, Young says, “we can immerse ourselves in the various consequences of the decisions we face today.”