Liam Young Planet City a scifi vision of an astonishing regenerative future TED
More than 10 billion people.
Over 7,000 languages spoken.
90 million songs, 42 billion fruit trees,
900 zettabytes of data,
90 million beehives,
six million dentists,
142 million square kilometers
of protected park
and one city.
(Ambient music)
A Planet City.
What I’ve just described
is my thought experiment
for this world called Planet City,
an imaginary city for 10 billion people.
The projected global population
of the world in 2050.
I design environments
for the film and television industry,
and I believe that by creating
imaginary worlds,
we can connect emotionally
to the ideas and challenges of our future.
So we’ve been creating Planet City
in response to the rising red line
on the graph of climate change
because world building and storytelling
can do so much more
than just visualize this data.
They can help us to dramatize data.
So in speculative cities,
we can immerse ourselves
in the various consequences
of the decisions we face today.
They can be both cautionary tales
or road maps to an aspirational future.
So I invite you all to join me as we
journey along the canals of Planet City.
If we listen, we can hear
the hum and crackle
of flickering blue and red LEDs
as they illuminate the lower reaches
of the city’s farm fields.
It smells of soil and hard drives
and sweet fruit.
A purple sunrise over a new kind of wild.
So five years ago,
seminal biologist Edward O. Wilson
proposed 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
and then consolidating human development
to the other half that would remain.
And this is where the speculation
of Planet City began.
And as we started to visualize and design
this radical reversal
of our planetary sprawl,
we soon realized we could
actually go much further.
In its most provocative form,
at the intensity of the densest
city that already exists,
Planet City could occupy
as little as 0.02 percent earth.
Could we imagine coming
to such a global consensus,
radically reversing
all of our existing assumptions?
What would it take?
What would it look like?
(Ambient music)
So our Planet City
would allow us to surrender
almost the entirety
of the globe to nature,
to return stolen lands
and rewild in our wake.
A new national park of the world
to be visited and tended,
not engineered for extraction.
The invisible lines that once divided us
would fade beneath this planet of trees.
In the streets of Planet City
we can prototype some of the necessary
lifestyle changes that might be required
in order for us to sustain human life.
We can explore how
such a new world could evolve,
not in a singular forced move,
but perhaps in a slow, multigenerational
retreat from the world we once knew.
To build Planet City, we could remine
our old cities rather than virgin ground.
No new resources would need to be consumed
or extracted to build this city.
The world’s shipping fleet that currently
scatters matter ripped from the earth
into our malls and storefronts
could be reversed
and repurposed to bring
all this material back together again
into the geological strata
of our new city.
The ghosts of nation states
would give way to new neighborhoods
that could be formed around
shared cultural practices
as we perform new myths
of care, belonging and recreation.
(Ambient music)
If we were to map all the world’s
celebrations onto a calendar,
then we’d realize
that running through Planet City
would be this continuous
festival procession
dancing across a 365 day loop,
each day amongst the flickering confetti.
It would intersect
with the new carnival culture,
endlessly cycling through new colors,
costumes and cacophonies.
And to design the systems of Planet City,
we travelled to and filmed
all of the megascaled renewable energy
and agriculture sites
that currently exist
around the world today:
the world’s largest solar farm
in the Mojave Desert,
the illuminated indoor farms protecting
crops from harsh Siberian winters,
the most productive wind energy
network in Gansu, China,
the world’s largest algae farm
in Western Australia.
These monumental infrastructures
are evidence that much
of the technologies required
to support the generation of our climate
are actually already here.
And in Planet City, we just remove
the political roadblocks
or the lack of cultural investment
that’s currently holding them back
and we visualize them operating
at these global scales,
but not forgotten
out on an industrial periphery,
but woven through the very fabric
and life of the city itself.
So before dawn breaks in Planet City,
thousands of autonomous cleaning blades
squeak along the solar fields.
Waves of mirrors will ripple
to rotate to chase the changing light.
A billion panels collected
from all over the world.
And the batteries of Planet City
will be alive with fish and pink algae,
as excess wind and solar power
will be used to pump water
through the canals
to high-altitude holding lakes
in the city’s upper floors.
Power will be stored here
as potential energy
rather than resource-intensive
lithium batteries.
And tides rise and fall
as the lights glow and turbines spin.
So although wildly provocative,
imaginary worlds can be grounded
in the real science and technology
of the present moment,
meaning we can project ourselves
into these futures.
What would it be like to live here,
to fish amongst the city battery lakes,
to follow the seasons
up through the towers,
collecting honey
with the Planet City beekeepers,
to fall in love amongst
the pink algae blooms before harvest?
So Planet City is not a proposal.
However, it’s a provocation.
It’s a thought experiment that shows us
we don’t need to tread so hard
across the Earth
because if we can get these systems
working at the scale of 10 billion,
then the only things stopping us
rethinking and consolidating
our existing cities is ourselves,
our own politics and prejudices,
biases and blind spots.
So in many ways,
all of us have been living
in a planetary-scaled city all along.
We have urbanized our planet
from the scale of the cell
to the tectonic plate.
Planet City is both entirely fictional,
but also already here.
Simultaneously, a challenging image
of a possible tomorrow
and an urgent illumination
of the environmental questions
that are facing us today.
So at the end of our journey,
as we’ve been wandering through
this sci-fi safari through Planet City,
we will return to where we first started
to look back on our own cities again,
but with new eyes.
This journey has been a call to actively
visualize our possible futures.
Imaginary worlds in which
we can collectively shape
where we all might want to go next.
Thank you.