Liam Young, speculative architect and director

Planet City is turning audiences into activists, inviting people to get creative in the face of climate change.

The immersive fictional world, one of the selections at Tribeca Festival 2022, presents a radically regenerative narrative for the future, imagining what life could look like if we took drastic steps to reverse our planetary sprawl and surrender the majority of the planet to nature.

The project was created and directed by Liam Young, a speculative architect and director who "operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures." Young has given a Ted Talk on Planet City, is the cofounder of urban futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a director and concept designer whose work has been collected by cultural institutions such as MOMA, the Met and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and has been described by the BBC as "the man designing our futures."

Young's work urges viewers to critically reexamine the environmental questions facing us today. Below, he catches up with us on how world-building is a form of activism, the power of science fiction and why thinking about the physical and digital as independent entities is problematic for our future.

Planet City, like all my projects, was born out of deep collaboration with scientists, technologists, political theorists, economists. Because even though what I’m talking about are imaginary and speculative worlds, the way those worlds work and the way that they become powerful is if we embed them in the deep reality of the present.

All of our most wonderous science fiction stories begin with research. My process as a designer is just one of exaggeration: taking existing trends from the present, taking existing technologies and expanding them into possible and potential futures. We do that because we’re trying to create worlds that feel believable and visceral, that punch you in the gut. When they’re rooted in reality, we connect to them more. Unlike Star Wars and spaceships and laser beams and Game of Thrones and dragons—these are works of fantasy. But works of science fiction are more meaningful because we don’t escape into them, but rather we’re confronted by them.

When we started Planet City, we were really interested in making a work that would respond to the rising red line on the graph of climate change. We all know the situation we’re in, yet we still aren’t really doing anything.

But I think the power of world-building, of creating fictional worlds, of storytelling, of fiction allows us to not just visualize that data and see patterns within it and understand it, but it’s what I call data dramatization. It allows us to imbue that data and those ideas with drama and emotion—and that means that we can’t really ignore it anymore. We become wrapped up in it and complicit in it and we’re forced to develop a response to it.

In these imaginary worlds, we can prototype ideas, we can prototype the decisions we might make. We can explore new and alternative cultures risk-free. We can model them and immerse ourselves in them and then we laugh or cry or scream or cry out with rage, and it becomes so much more active as an experience than just passively sitting back, watching the news and letting the horror of reality wash over us.