SINGAPORE – Autonomous machines, climate change and a growing global population will change the world in the future. But what will this world look like?

At City Utopia at the ArtScience Museum from Tuesday to Thursday, Liam Young will present his vision of a sustainable future with his film, Planet City.

The 44-year-old, who trained as an architect at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, describes himself as a “speculative architect” who operates in the fields of design fiction and critical design.

His film credits include Swan Song (2021) – which was nominated for a British Academy Film Award (Bafta) – for which he was the visual consultant. Planet City was also nominated for Best Short Film at the 2017 Baftas.

It is set in the future when the global population is expected to hit 10 billion people. It imagines the entire population of the planet living in one giant, self-sustaining city the size of Texas in the United States. The rest of the planet would be left to heal.

In this city, buildings are 160-floors high and can go even higher. 

The hue of purplish light comes from blue and red LED lights – a spectrum of light Young says is most energy-efficient for plants to grow. Rows of these LEDs are used in the vertical farms with troughs of different plants grown with the changing seasons.

In an e-mail interview, Young says: “Planet City is trying to show a dense city that is full of nature and animal life. It’s culturally rich and not a single globalised culture – it’s diverse, it’s fun and it’s joyful.

“It’s not a solution that I’m trying to get funding for. It’s not a worldview that I’m trying to impose on everybody else. It’s a provocation to try and get people thinking about whether these are some of the lifestyle changes that we are willing to live with in order to stave off human extinction.”

Feeding its population is key to the survival of Planet City. Young says: “To feed 10 billion people, which is where we’re headed in 2050, we cannot grow food on green rolling fields run by a farmer who has had it passed down through generations. We need to grow food in stacked warehouses under LED light; and that food is super organic, it’s grown with no pesticides, with very little water, and is extremely optimised.”

In the future, Young believes there will also be less distinction between the physical realm and the virtual one, and designers will need to design both for a physical world and a digital world at the same time. 

“When designing a room, you’ll also be designing the augmented layers of that room. A good analogy is that contemporary architecture is going to evolve much more towards the way a green screen works – it’s a physical space, it has walls, it keeps the rain off, but at the same time, it’s a scaffold for a digitally constructed world and that world can be interchangeable,” he says.

Some viewers may find Young’s vision of the future more dystopian than utopian.

He says: “So much of the history of science fiction is about presenting dense cities as being dirty and dystopian. My job is to prototype what those decisions look like so that people can make more informed choices.”

The technology to counter the effects of climate change and over-population is not the problem because Young believes this is already available. Instead, he says what is needed is a “shared vision of what an aspirational future looks like – one that’s real and pragmatic and planetary in scale”.

City Utopia is a capsule edition of a 20-year-old creativity and design festival called Semi Permanent, which will – for the first time – bring its experience and footprint to South-east Asia, to be part of Audi Singapore’s House of Progress showcase at the ArtScience Museum.

As part of his presentation, Young will also talk about the second phase of Planet City. He will speak at the House of Progress showcase on Tuesday at 5pm, Wednesday at 3pm and Thursday at 5pm.

Book it

Audi: House Of Progress Singapore
Where: ArtScience Museum, 6 Bayfront Avenue
When: Till April 16, 10am to 7pm daily
Admission: Register for free tickets at str.sg/iZC9
Info: To register for free talks by Liam Young at City Utopia, go to str.sg/iZC6