Planet City: Liam Young (S02:EP03)

We’re living through a polycrisis - a moment where cascading ecological, technological, social, political and economic pressures are reshaping the world in the latency of the present. Complexity is not an anomaly of our time but its default setting. The challenge is not merely to decode it, but to engage with its temporalities, influence its exchanges, and anticipate reactions before they spiral beyond control.

The future is not a thing you stumble into - but rather a continuous act. It is the unravelling of hacks – that are coded, crafted, and built in the friction of the present.

Design practice in this realm holds urgency as its condition. The next lines of code… What we nurture, control, or push back against will determine continuity or collapse.

We are interested in the agency of critical design practice – the tools, stories, and strategies we need to move from paralysis to possibility. How do we investigate the blind spots of our technologies, the narratives that shape them, and the speculative practices - architecture, fiction, design - that help us inhabit the present more consciously.

This isn’t about imagining perfect futures or fearing catastrophic ones. It’s about a grounded optimism. This is a design problem to assemble radical frameworks and possibilities, even when the dominant narrative is collapse.

Because to speculate today is not an escape. It’s a responsibility.

To lead us through this domain - we are joined by Liam Young.

Liam Young is an Australian architect and designer, a film maker, director and BAFTA nominated producer and visionary storyteller whose work explores the intersection of architecture, technology, and the future city. Operating between design, fiction, and critical foresight, he is the co-founder of the think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and the nomadic research studio Unknown Fields Division.

His film work is grounded in academic research conducted at institutions such as Princeton, MIT, and Cambridge, and he now leads the groundbreaking Master’s program in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He has authored and edited several books, including Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene and Planet City, which imagines a speculative city designed to house the entire population of the Earth.