L’arte anticipa il futuro: Liam Young immagina una città per 10 miliardi di persone
This second episode of the series "L'arte anticipa il futuro" (Art Anticipates the Future), promoted by School of Vision in collaboration with ENI and ROAD and published on Artribune, focuses on the visionary project "Planet City" by Australian-born, Los Angeles-based designer, filmmaker, and architect Liam Young. The project imagines a hyper-dense metropolis capable of housing the entire global population of 10 billion people, thereby freeing the rest of the planet for ecological regeneration. The series, narrated by Marco Bassan (founder of Spazio Taverna and scientific director of School of Vision), explores how contemporary artists detect weak signals that anticipate transformations invisible to traditional analysis tools.
The article matters because it positions visual art and speculative architecture as critical tools for addressing urgent global issues such as population growth, climate change, land consumption, and infrastructure pressure. By presenting Young's work—which has been exhibited at institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Academy, the Venice Biennale, and M+ Hong Kong—the piece argues that art can function as a form of cultural and political inquiry, reshaping how we think about urbanism and planetary coexistence. It underscores the growing role of design fiction and worldbuilding in contemporary art discourse.