Liam Young is trying to save the world – or, at least, show the world how to save itself. The Australian-born, LA-based architect and filmmaker has designed an imaginary world in which the Earth’s entire population lives in a vertical metropolis that takes up only 2 per cent of the planet’s land mass.

This dizzying animated vision – dubbed Planet City – is on display as part of Liam Young: Planetary Redesign, a solo exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Victoria on August 19. The exhibition also includes the film’s sequel, The Great Endeavour, which premiered at this year’s Venice Architecture biennale.

Disillusioned with building what he calls “trophies for despots and the ridiculously rich”, Young quit his architecture job with Zaha Hadid in 2003 to become an artist and academic. After commuting between Europe and the US, he moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to design imaginary worlds that grapple with surveillance society, AI technology and the existential threat posed by climate change.

With the help of experts in science and technology he designed a vertical metropolis that resembles the world of Blade Runner, but with less neon. Planet City’s buildings are stacked vertiginously, using wildly discordant architecture made entirely from existing resources.

“The city’s patina comes from a reuse and collage aesthetic [using] the simple design rule that we wouldn’t extract any new resources or touch virgin land,” Young explains. “[How do you] make a new city that isn’t about a tabula rasa, which is what all the modernist [visions] are like?”

The idea for this vision of mind-boggling density was triggered by biologist Edward O. Wilson’s book Half Earth, which proposes that half the planet be dedicated to restoring biodiversity. However, Young felt Wilson failed to address the acts of “extreme densification” required to make it a reality.

His team calculated the number of shipping containers required to move Manhattan to Planet City, and wrote algorithms that would populate the structures and allow the efficient vertical transport of goods and people. The algorithms also calculated the penetration of light into the deep crevices of the city needed for plants to grow.

“That’s all AI work,” he says. “To try and make those structures, literally placing those objects by hand, would take a team of [visual effects] artists five years.”

Young knows of what he speaks. His day job is helping “build worlds for the Hollywood machine”, a pursuit that isn’t just about the money.

“I wanted to engage audiences of a scale that don’t turn up at this exhibition at the NGV or to my lectures,” he says. “I don’t think entertainment and critical ideas need to be mutually exclusive. [Hollywood] films are like Trojan horses. There’s still going to be giant interplanetary super villains smashing up that city. But maybe that city will also be a blueprint for new ways of living. We can embed within them important ideas.”

Most recently Young was a visual consultant on the 2021 tearjerker Swan Song, in which a terminally ill man duplicates himself to spare his wife and son the grief of losing him. Young’s team designed the film’s sleek robots and minimalist augmented reality displays.

Rather than paint or clay, Young says his “medium is worlds”. Beyond designing urban plans, world-building involves considering the culture, politics, environment, ecology, non-human species, as well as the infrastructure and systems within, he says.

“Everything is part of this complex, tangled web that spans the entirety of the Earth.” That includes the props and costumes (by Handmaid’s Tale designer Ane Crabtree) which also feature in the NGV show.

What receives relatively scant attention in Young’s universe is the actual population and how it might interact. Planet City celebrates a treadmill of cultural festivals and even devises costumes and characters like “drone shepherds”, but avoids the human propensity for wars and nation-building.

The dystopic rivalries displayed in J. G. Ballard’s High Rise don’t exist here. It’s an optimism best expressed in the megastructures required to sustain life on Earth that are central to The Great Endeavour. Massive infrastructure fans sift the air. Retrofitted oil rigs take that CO2, turn it into liquid and inject it into rock beneath the ocean floor. Giant vertical greenhouses become beacons of survival that double as tourist attractions.

“The films co-opt some of the visual language of the sublime – those feelings of awe, but also fear,” he says. “All of the work is born out of the science and technology of the present. It’s just turning up the volume.”

Of course, sustaining the planet requires global co-operation. Young points to successful international collaborations on infrastructure projects such as the International Space Station and the Atacama radio telescope array measuring electromagnetic radiation in the Chilean desert.

“They’re structures that are so expensive and so complex that no single nation had the expertise or the capital to build them,” he says. “The Great Endeavour requires literally the largest global collaboration that we’ve ever embarked on, where we start to think at planetary scale, as planetary citizens.”

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For all the global-scale talk, it seems surprising that Young doesn’t start his films with a shot of the blue planet to remind us of Earth’s fragility. But Young had two reasons for avoiding the obvious. Firstly, identifying where the metropolis might be located became an all-consuming distraction. Second, the “Earthrise” image that showed us our home from space for the first time in 1968 is synonymous with what he sees as outdated environmental thinking.

“So much of the dominant language around images of a utopia involve lush greenery and landscape, and trees on rooftops,” he says. “I’m trying to talk about a different scale of action.”

Since its commission for the 2020 NGV triennial, Planet City has become a VR experience and a graphic novel. Both it and The Great Endeavour are in the process of becoming documentaries.

Not everyone will be persuaded, of course. After delivering a Ted Talk in 2021 Young was met with a barrage of people telling him “how unwilling they would be to give up their giant backyard or their country home with eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms”.

“I said, ‘We can keep your country home, but everyone else needs to stop having children so you can’. The biggest fiction isn’t this ridiculous idea to all move to a single city. The fiction is the idea that we can keep on doing what we’re doing, and that the way we currently make cities is in any way viable.

“The films are provocations to make people consider other options. ‘OK, I don’t want Planet City, but what am I prepared to scale back to?’ Ultimately, one of the takeaways is that climate change is no longer a technological problem. It’s a crisis of politics and imagination. But you can’t let that paralyse you, you’ve just got to keep on.”

Liam Young: Planetary Redesign is at NGV Australia, Federation Square, August 19-February 11. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/