The book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life by Edward O. Wilson (1929–2021), published in 2016, argues that preserving biodiversity requires setting aside half of Earth’s surface as protected, human-free zones. Wilson envisioned this as essential for long-term survival, advocating for a major global conservation effort. Wilson also established the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, which organises the annual Half-Earth Day, which is exactly half a year after the official Earth Day, promoting the endeavours for biodiversity. This year’s event, organised by the Foundation, took place in Columbia on the 22nd of October, in the framework of the COP16, titled Peace with Nature.

First, a few words about Edward O. Wilson. He was an American biologist, naturalist, and author renowned for pioneering biodiversity and conservation work. He coined terms like biophilia (intrinsic love of life shared among living beings) and sociobiology, which influenced often controversial discussions. His groundbreaking contributions to the study of ants (myrmecology) were pivotal in developing the concept of sociobiology, which examines the biological basis of social behaviour in animals, including humans. Throughout his career, he was a passionate advocate for biodiversity and environmental protection and sought to inspire global action to preserve the planet’s ecosystems. Wilson was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Harvard University. Wilson authored numerous influential books, including Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) and The Diversity of Life (1992). 

His book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life influenced further ideas like Planet City, an investigation by Liam Young. His fictive worldbuilding projects circle worldwide (among others, we strongly recommend The Great Endeavor, which premiered at Venice Biennale 2023). 

Currently, Young runs an MA in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture), and he recently curated the exhibition Views of Planet City for Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide. In the exhibition, besides Young, artists Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Damjan Jovanovic, and Angelica Lorenzi explore the half-earth and planet-city implications. The exhibition at the Pacific Design Center Gallery in LA is open until the 26th of January 2025, accompanied by public events, and aims for a radical re-envisioning of a sustainable planetary future.

The Planet City is envisioned as a single, hyper-dense metropolis, housing 10 billion people, while the rest of the planet is left to regenerate and rewild. A year is a loop of processual dance, carnivals and celebrations of diverse cultures. Using the technologies available, Planet City is not a space-craft futurist but promotes the human agency to save the planet’s biodiversity. Visually stunning, it immerses us in the speculative urbanised world capital. The exhibition collectively imagines responses to centuries of extraction, globalisation, colonisation and expansionism, which would core its answers to climate change in politics and culture.

We asked Liam Young about Planet City, it’s back-story and the current exhibition.

What kind of landscape do you see outside the Planet City – does the Planet City have a boundary? It seems like a step back to the nature-culture division put forth by rejoicing the oneness at the same time. 

Seminal biologist Edward O Wilson imagined a new world he called “Half-Earth”, a plan to stave off mass extinction by devoting half the surface of the Earth completely to nature. For Wilson, the magnitude of the problems that face us are far too large to be tackled with small gestures, and any solution must respond to this scale and urgency. The byproduct of Wilson’s global park is of course the massive consolidation of our existing cities and lifestyles that would be required to withdraw to the remaining 50 percent of Earth. This speculation is where our Planet City project began. What if we were to design and visualise this radical reversal of our planetary sprawl, and how far could we push Wilson’s proposal to save the Earth? In its most provocative form, if we were to reorganise our world at the intensity of the densest cities that currently exist, then Planet City could actually occupy as little as 0.02 per cent of Earth. This would mean we could essentially construct a new national park of the world and would also allow us to give back stolen land taken across the multiple generations of colonisation. It is imagined that we will still have access to this territory but draw these new lines on the Earth not to own, occupy, develop, or destroy but instead to exist as custodians and scaffold the land’s recovery. It is about making space for other species that we have historically imagined were beneath us.

At the same time, the city itself is imagined as a rich hybrid co-species environment. We chase the seasons through the height of the city. Vertical orchards weave through the tower’s 160 floors. Between them, birds migrate across climate zones, while shepherds herd the harvest bots, and nomadic neighbourhoods follow the patterns of the fruit blooms. Algae canals rich in fish snake their way between the towers and sunlight is bounced deep through the layers of the city to foster growth across all its levels.

So it’s a project that hopes not to re-enforce a nature technology dialectic but instead just reimagine our exclusively extravice relationship to the natural world.

Where on Earth is the Planet City (in the West, East)?

Although we did define a location for the city for the purposes of running our calculations and simulations of the environment, resources and energy production, we don’t declare that location publicly. Instead, I am interested in discussing the city as a kind of myth, a city that is both anywhere and nowhere. Similar to the mythic cities of Eldorado or Atlantis, Planet City exists in the popular imagination and the stories we write about it. In this way, the project is able to be understood more as a provocation and thought experiment rather than a prescriptive proposal.

While in The Great Endeavor, the atmosphere is gloomy, heavy and dark, moist, vast and gigantic (and lifeless), in Planet City, it is exuberant with detail, colour, culture, food, fabric and body. Are these two antitheses or polarities or two possible (even concurrent) scenarios? The exhibited artworks in Views of Planet City weave the collective speculation of the Planet City fabric, each contributing its thread of imaginative potential – based on reality, technology and cultural implications. What is at the core of this collective envisioning and where do the works find their place beyond speculation (if they find a place at all)? I enjoy that it constructs a leap into the future, thinking against dystopia while not criticising but repositioning the discourse on urbanity. 

Whether it be in my own projects like Planet City and The Great Endeavour or my worldbuilding for the film and TV industry here in LA, I try to use imagined, fictional worlds as sites in which to explore important ideas, not to just sell tickets or create a backdrop for that superhero moment. Fiction is an extraordinary shared language; it is how culture communicates and disseminates ideas. We are all literate in stories, whereas traditional documents of a discipline like architecture, such as plans, sections, or diagrams, are sometimes opaque or privileged forms of knowledge. Narratives of imagined worlds can help us to visualise other possible futures that sit outside of the one that all too often feels inescapable.  They are products of culture and in turn, also produce culture. As we write stories, we can begin to write the world. The futures that we author, in many ways, become the futures that we live in.

So behind these works is an attempt to leave behind the future tropes of previous generations where Cyber Punk imagined the messy subcultures of the virtual, Solar Punk projected the hacker communities of Ecotech, this city, our new planetary park are artefacts of what we could imagine as a new kind of Planetary Punk, a world that embraces the ideological and cultural consequences of planetary scaled collective action.

Our utopian visions of the future are still haunted by the failed ideals of boomer environmentalism. With an emphasis on localism and small-scale gestures, we have slowly been guilted into the belief that it is our personal choices, not the massive infrastructural systems of extractive capitalism, that have warmed this world. Meanwhile, the Planetary-scale visions we see in popular culture are industrial and dystopian, the work of the bond villain or the faceless corporation. At this moment, we need new visions of a sustainable future that are radical, global, and collective in scale.

In this way, both Planet City and The Great Endeavour are provocations, attempts to introduce into the popular imagination new images of what our futures could be. They are controversial in some circles because they don’t look like the green futures that we have been fighting for since the 60s. But these futures are no longer fit for purpose, they don’t scale against the size of the crisis that now faces us. We need to begin to see that an essential part of our future way will be large-scale vertical farms powered by renewable energy, we need to understand that we need to live more compactly and that density doesn’t need to be understood as just dirty or congested. We need to see that there may be large-scale infrastructure work to be done in our generation, massive carbon removal systems and new post-fossil fuel energy structures. These ideas are all difficult to stomach, it’s difficult to accept that we didn’t listen or act when we had a chance. But this is where we are, and there is no time left to chase naïve fantasies.
These projects are produced in the hope that we all will keep making stories and building worlds that become vessels for critical ideas about our collective futures. 

These projects are produced in the hope that we all will keep making stories and building worlds that become vessels for critical ideas about our collective futures. 

Visions of Planet City

Published on November 11, 2024