Planet City

We are all already living in a planetary city, a distributed mega structure hiding in plain sight.

As we write stories, we write the world—and in this way storytelling can be considered a critical act of design.

Planet City may be more generative if we consider it to be a temporary destination. What if it was a place to retreat to while giving time for carbon removal and regeneration, while actively restoring the climate?

Planet City is built entirely from sustainable technologies that are already here, but that just lack the cultural investment or political will to implement them at scale.

Warehouses, department stores, strip malls, airports and all the rest are ‘an increasingly complex network of interlocking carbon forms’.

Seminal biologist Edward O Wilson has written on his “Half Earth” proposal, an “achievable plan” to stave off mass extinction by devoting half the surface of the earth completely to nature.

Carbon removal or carbon drawdown is widely recognised as a requirement.

A third part of the work involves carbon capture and geological injection underground, into rock formations where it can be stored safely for millennia.

Difficult decisions about who pays and who receives support would inspire difficult conversations about past injustices and current inequalities.