Digital Media Arts

Planet City

2022 年 8 月 22 日 /

Planet City: A thought experiment aims to tackle climate change by housing 10 billion people in a single metropolis

Introduction
 
“Planet city” is a speculative film: a fictional city, an exploration of a hyper-dense metropolis, and
speculation based on statistical analysis. According to the film’s vision, the entire population of the
planet would live in a huge sustainable city, occupying only a small part of the earth’s surface,
liberating the land that has been “stolen” by humans and allowing nature to return to its original
state. This city would be reorganized on the scale of the densest city, with 10 billion people living in
it, and could be built on 0.02% of the Earth’s surface according to the principles of circular
economy, covering an area the size of a single U.S. state. The author Liam Young developed his
talent as an architect, product designer, and director at the intersection of design, fantasy, and the
future. Young presents a solution to the global issue of climate change through the film. Through
this imaginary city, we can tell people that global warming is happening and we need to pay
attention to it. Young’s idea came from the biologist E.O. Wilson’s concept of “Half the earth”, who
believed that species extinction could be avoided by dedicating half of the earth to nature. The
paper will first summarize the scenarios in the film, and the interpretation from the author Liam
Young. Secondly, the essay will analyze the limitation of the film. Finally, the article will conclude
on the impact of the film based on previous analysis and an interview.
 

 

Planet City
 

Thousands of autonomous cleaning blades squeak along the solar fields, and waves of mirrors will ripple to rotate to chase the changing light. The river was full of pink algae, and the sky was full of blue-pink flakes. More than 10 billion people, over 7000 languages spoken, 90 million songs, 42billion fruit trees, 900 bee hives, 6 million dentists, 142 million squares of protected park, and one single city. This is Liam Young’s experiment thought. Along the pink canals of planet city, if we listen, we can hear the hum and flickering blue and red lights as they illuminate the lower reaches of the city’s farm fields. It smells of soil and hard drives and sweet fruit. 

The biologist E.O. Wilson proposed the idea “Half the earth” that by allocating half of the planet to nature, species extinction could be prevented. E.O. Wilson’s theory is where the speculation of planet city began. 

The costumes in the film are quite different from the normal clothes that we wear today. People wear wired clothes and keep dancing. The constantly dancing people imply that the Planet City running through planet city would be a continuous festival procession dancing across a 365-day loop. Each day it intersects with a different celebration and culture. The rhythm change with the dance, endlessly cycling through new colors, costumes, and cacophonies. 

The film involves many incredible infrastructures such as solar fields, agriculture fields, and algae canals. Through traveling, Young and his colleague get inspiration from the system of Planet City. They visit all of the mega-scaled renewable energy and agriculture sites that currently exist around the world today. The most productive wind energy network, for example, is in Gansu China, and the world’s largest algae farm in western Australia. These technologies provide evidence that people already have the requirements to support a Planet City. 

Young designs environments for the film and television industry, and he believes that by creating imaginary worlds we can connect emotionally to the ideas and challenges of our future. As Young said “To build Plant City we could remind our old cities rather than virgin ground. No new resources would need to be consumed or extracted to build this city.” In the speculative city, we can immerse ourselves in the various consequences of the decision we face today. They can be both cautionary tales or road maps to an aspirational future.

 
 
The limitations of “ Planet City”
 
The goal of the film is to respond to climate change. However, there are constraints to showing
people in the form of movies and VR. Firstly, there are shortcomings in interaction. When people
watch VR movies, they can only look at them from a few fixed angles. The viewer’s view of appreciation is determined by the filmmaker. Therefore, the audience viewing is restricted, not free to switch according to demand, and even in the case of not seeing the side they want to see.VR is very dangerous, because people wearing glasses are completely immersed in the situation, and will ignore the outside world, so it is easy to have an accident. Furthermore, movies or VR movies are not available for everyone to watch. For the wealthy, there is not much problem watching a movie, even buying a VR device is not a burden. Nonetheless, for some poor families, watching VR movies is a luxurious thing. They have problems with food and clothing, not to mention buying some expensive electronic products. Therefore, VR-film presentation is an ingenious way to present artists’ ideas but has limitations.
 
The audience response
 
Since there are some limitations to VR movies, there’s not much information about the impact of
the film. However, there are some interviews of people’s reactions to “ Planet City”, and this may
help to speculate the impact of this experiment thought.
 
First of all, from the visual aspect, people think that its whole style of painting is very beautiful, and
then there is a little bit of future realism combined with the feeling of a bit of chaotic beauty. For
example, it has a lot of residential buildings, which always reminds people of the very narrow buildings in Hong Kong. Then it has some very science fiction elements, such as a large row of solar panels, then some very bright neon lights, and a somewhat fine farm.
 
Secondly, some believe that the author intends to outline the biggest problem that people may encounter in the future is global warming. In this short film, the sea level on the ground is already very high, and the roads are already flooded, so people can only move to the mountainous areas, and the buildings are very narrow, and there are no roads to pass, so they can only travel by boat. The author probably wanted to raise people’s awareness and respect for environmental issues through this imaginary city that might happen in the future. Similar to many artistic creations, cartoonists or animation writers, like to use some short films to ironically or imply some phenomenon in society. There are some videos that the authors want to create to satirize capitalism or to raise awareness about big issues such as human rights and equality.
 
Thirdly, the audience assumes that people need to spend more attention on environmental issues,
especially global warming. As a teenager said in his interview: Many people will feel that they may
not think about my current generation, but our children and grandchildren may be in increasing danger. I’ve thought about a similar scenario before. I think at this point when people are crowded into such a cramped environment, I think it’s a great pity for the children and grandchildren that they are born in their little rooms, they don’t have playgrounds or parks. There may be classrooms, but everything may have to do with the network. They don’t have a physical location to play, like when I was a kid I could go to the playground, because there’s no room to build these.
 
Finally, the most appealing thing to the spectator is the way the author manages to present all these scenes through a video. It’s very short, but it’s fascinating because it has a sense of immersion. A girl claims that ” Imagine when I live in the Planet City one day, I feel confined in here. I would be lost a lot of things, not only I might have to think about food, drink, and housing, I might obtain psychological problems as well.
 
Conclusion
 
Planet City is a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research, and traditional knowledge. The scenes are also very touching and impressive. There’s not much information about the impact of the film, but some preliminary inferences can be made based on some interviews. Overall, the film is a successful artwork, people perfectly receive the idea that the artist Young is trying to call on people to pay attention to the global issue: climate change.
 
References
 
[1]Young, L. (2021). Planet City. AIS-Architecture Image Studies, 2(1), 30-43.
[2]Wilson, E. O. (2016). Half-earth: our planet’s fight for life. WW Norton & Company
https://planetcity.world/Main
 
 
 
 

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