All cities are fictions. Their literal edges are nebulous, with their physical definitions being endlessly rewritten, but their boundaries come into focus as shared narratives. The fiction of a city weighs as much as its physical shadow. Such cities can exist on the network or exist as consensus. They are shaped like stories and coalesce around common practices or conditions of belonging. They are lived and occupied, read and watched with consequence and meaning. They are products of culture and, in turn, produce culture. The urban imaginary has always been a site to test out new scenarios and emerging cultures. In their speculative streets, we play out unexpected and unintended futures, along with their associated social and political ideologies. Whether it be speculation around the impacts of industrialisation and mass production, the imminent arrival of driverless cars, seamless augmented reality, or artificial intelligence, these fictional worlds give form to our most wondrous technological possibilities and gravest concerns.

The history of future cities is a chronicle of the hopes, dreams, horrors, and anxieties of the time in which they were made. They are the architectural and urban construction of ourselves, fraught with contradictions, encoded with the concerns of the present. It has been nearly 40 years since the spinners flew the streets of Blade Runner, and our dreams of a robot dystopia have washed away in the acid rain. The autonomous blimps drifting above should be calling us to the off-world colonies. The cavernous streets of 1982’s vision of 2019 LA were to be cast in the shadows of a scorched climate, and noodle bar neon would forever reflect in the wet tarmac. At the time of the film’s production, the world was amidst the personal electronics boom, dancing to the silent beats of a Sony Walkman and watching bootleg films on home video cassette recorders. Japan was emerging as the next global superpower. Most science fiction cities of the time played out this hybrid future: a cyberpunk cultural collapse of American and Asian aesthetics. In light of Japan’s subsequent economic decline, such urban visions could be dismissed as a failed prediction of a future that never was. Instead, we should value these visions as powerful visualisations of the political and economic climate of their day. Prediction is often just a side effect of science fiction, in that it offers a critical way through which we might engage and exorcise the fears and wonders of the present.

Sometimes, moments, places or cities are best understood by examining the fictions we construct about them. We are all literate in stories — and they are accessible and public in a way that an architectural drawing or diagram is not. Fiction is an extraordinary shared language; it is how cultures communicates and disseminates ideas. Narratives of imagined cities help us to visualise other possible futures that sit outside of the one that, all too often, feels inescapable. As we write stories, we write the world — and, in this way, storytelling can be considered a critical act of design. Such stories of the future can transport us, acting as an antidote to an angry and broken world. Sometimes, we tell stories to comfort, educate, or empower ourselves, to add mystery or to strip it away, to fall in love all over again or to scream with rage. We craft these tales of alternative cities because, when faced with a moment that is unnerving or unfamiliar, disappointing or disastrous, sexy or seismic, such madness is the only way of staying sane.

Today, we measure our age in apocalypses. The dystopias of science fiction that were previously read as speculative cautionary tales are now the stage sets of the everyday, as we live out our lives in a disaster film playing in real-time. In previous generations, science fiction would routinely project futures twenty to thirty years ahead. There was solid ground on which to stand and venture forward into a landscape of limitless growth, development, and expansion. Increasingly, however, the length of these projections becomes ever shorter, as the uncertainty of the present means that any kind of distant speculation seems like an act of fantasy or folly. The stretching shadows of economic ruin, climate collapse, recurring pandemics, an AI out of control, or catastrophic cultural divisions have cast tomorrow into darkness. The speculative imaginary of an aspirational or distant future has given way to the critical re-narration of the dystopian present. This is the death of planning, surrounded by ruined worlds and empty calendars. The future is broken and we are left stranded, doom-scrolling idly, waiting out the end of the end of the world.

In this context, the utopian urban dreaming of science fiction can seem decidedly naïve, and such optimism requires us to ignore all the evidence at hand. Aspirational social imaginaries rarely capture an inclusive, resilient, and productive city form. Instead, they tend to reinforce the assumptions of industrialization: that density is dirty and congested, always a tragic encounter removed from our natural life in the idyllic countryside. If it is not the colonialist, dystopian skylines of cyberpunk, then we either retreat into a Western-centric, pastoral nostalgia or gleaming techno-fetishism. Planet City eschews the science fiction tropes of previous generations. While Cyberpunk imagined the messy subcultures of the virtual and Solar Punk projects the aspiring communities of Ecotech, this city is an artefact of Planetary Punk, Infra Punk, or Geo Punk: a world that embraces the ideological and cultural consequences of planetary scaled computation. It is dismissive to imagine the utopian impulse as merely creating simplistic stories of hope. Rather, we need to understand that the value of these impulses is in the way they express possible alternatives. Planet City is not a project of satire. We must understand it as simultaneously utopian and dystopian.

Seminal biologist Edward O Wilson describes his “Half Earth” proposal as an “achievable plan” to stave off mass extinction, by devoting half of the earth’s surface completely to nature. For Wilson, the magnitude of the problem is far too large to be tackled with small gestures, and any solution must be commensurate with this scale and urgency. The byproduct of this global park, however, is the necessity to redesign the realities of the present-day planetary city. Rarely discussed, in defense of the theory, is the massive consolidation of our own urban development that will be required to withdraw to the remaining 50 percent of the earth’s surface. Planet City begins with this question and builds the story of another total urban fiction. Yet, this idea imagines radically reversing the sprawl and retreating from all our existing countries into one hyper-dense metropolis. In its most provocative form — reorganizing our world at the scale of our densest cities — Planet City could actually occupy as little as 0.02 percent of earth. This is the world collapsed into a single Post Westphalian city, a city for 2050’s projected 10 billion people. This city will be a microcosm of the planet that will afford us the space to re-wild nature and return almost the entirety of the world to a global-scaled wilderness. This is to be a city beyond geography, a city outside of place, a city of everywhere and everything, a city housing the entire population of earth.

Planet City is an antidote to the end of the world but not a vision that retreats into fantasies of idealized nature, the mythology of the local, or the impossibility of the rural, nor is it an imaginary of chromed towers, flying cars and extraterrestrial colonies. The fictional city is a space to provide a counterbalance to the prevailing media narratives around technologies, where the hype beast roars, and we are constantly sold simple solutions to extraordinarily complex problems. The typical response of the design community to planetary scaled issues, such as the pandemic or climate change, is the techno-solutionism that characterizes a project like Bjarke Ingel’s Masterplanet. The imposition of singular visions by starchitects often serves to only repeat so many of the processes that created our present condition. Such sweeping urban proposals are typically continuation of the European colonialist project that has already master-planned the planet in its own image. They have historically perpetuated forms of exclusion and reinforced existing systems of power. Most of these projects rarely engage with these root causes of climate change and, in fact, enable them. Projects need to engage with necessary cultural and ideological changes to support the implementation of these technologies. Utopias of the imagination, projected into reality, or speculative fictions that masquerade as real solutions without engaging with their embedded politics are deeply problematic. Planet City is an alternative vision, a future enabled by technology but not determined by the egregious systems that bring them to market today.Ideology rarely evolves at the pace of contemporary technology. Planet City is built entirely from sustainable technologies that are already here but just lack the cultural investment or political will to be implemented at scale. It is a city developed through this process of practical speculation and it is messy, uneven, resilient and inclusive. It is a city form that may appear extreme, but it is also one that has evolved through the most rigorous pragmatism. Planetary in scope, foregrounded voices are not those that are typically visible through Hollywood’s dystopian-focused lens. Planet City is not a plan for direct implementation. Rather, it serves as a grounded provocation that prototypes the necessary systemic and lifestyle changes that may be required for our world to continue to support human life. It stands as evidence that climate change is no longer a technological problem but an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

The Western colonialist project has master-planned the earth. We are witnessing the consistent failure of nation-states to act in any meaningful way against climate change. Traditional forms of architecture and the architect are both enabled by and complicit with these entities. Architects so often perpetuate the problems these models create and the systems of power and finance through which they operate. What we are seeing now is how completely ineffective these approaches have been in addressing problems of this scale and time frame. Typically, architects fail to operate as cultural or political agents and, instead, fetishize or attempt to impose simplified technological solutions onto what are extraordinarily layered and complex social problems. If the battleground of climate change is cultural, we need to make projects that have resonance in that space, not repeat outmoded master-planning projects with the hubris and megalomaniacal tendencies of previous generations. The type of imagination that designers and architects need is based around rethinking our relationship to these structural forces and developing new models of practice and projects that can engage audiences with these underlying problems.

Planet City emerges from a global citizen consensus, a voluntary and multi-generational retreat from the sprawling cities we all inhabit. It’s a slow and deliberate migration, not based on a compulsory mandate or enforced by a central governing body’s decree. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular position of power. Instead, network-enabled movements, such as the 2019 global climate strike and the 2020 Farmers Protest in India, some of the largest gatherings of humans in history, are templates for the early rumblings and first mobilizations of Planet City. Piece by piece, we will dismantle the world we once knew and remake it in new configurations. Some will stay behind, as stubborn holdouts refusing to leave; others will remain as stewards of the land. One day, when the carbon is tucked away and the soil is black, we all might return again.

Until then, as we gaze out over our Planet City. We need to radically embrace the uncomfortable place we now occupy in a world where we are no longer at its center. Beyond its new coast of city walls, where the forests are returning and the ground is re-wilding, we make space for other species and support the ecologies and systems we once thought beneath us. At present, we chart territory for the extraction of wealth. Outside of Planet City, we mark out regions to leave empty. Suggestive of a national park boundary, we might draw a line on the earth, not to own, develop, or occupy, but to keep us out and protect its recovery. Here, technology is deployed to intensify human activity and make more room for an intentional landscape: a carbon sink wilderness and a voluntary exclusion zone. We will keep to the edges, watching from afar. The beginnings of Planet City are the end of human centered design.

Planet City affords us this critical distance from which to reevaluate ourselves. It is not strictly a proposal, rather it is a provocation that helps us to see that normalcy is the actual problem. Following its own logic, almost to the point of absurdity, what comes into focus are not the extremes of this fictional city but the catastrophic models of contemporary, everyday urbanism. The existing planetary city and the glacial accident of the Anthropocene are the real impossibilities at the core of the project. The extraordinary and difficult truths that underscore the present moment are just as fantastic, implausible, and incalculable as any science fiction imagining. The live-action dystopian film we all occupy is, perhaps, more devastating, bizarre, and unfathomable than even the wildest speculations of previous generations.