Planet City

2020 Young, Liam (b. 1979). Planet City. Ed. Andrew Mackenzie. Melbourne, Vic, Australia: Uro Publications, 2020. 408 pp. PSt 

A complex work describing and depicting in text and both color and black and white illustrations a city that contains the entire world’s population leaving huge areas of the planet rewilding. The front cover lists some statistics regarding the city, such as 7,047 languages spoken 2,555 cultural festivals and holidays, and 2,357 algae farms. The back cover calls it a work critical of architecture. It is a multi-media collaborative project and includes both essays and stories by Young and other authors, including Young’s “The end of the of the world” (33-42), Ewan McEoin, “The great rewilding” (43-49), Holly Jean Buck, “Planet City as planned retreat” (73-86), Saskia Sassen, “The planetary city” (87-91), Kim Stanley Robinson, “Finding out where you are” (93-96, 121), an original story, Andrew Toland, “The Laws on Planet City” (132-143), Nalo Hopkinson, “Covenant” (169-177), an original story (see 2020 Hopkinson), Ryan Griffen, “Inala” (179-189), an original story (see 2020 Griffen), Benjamin Bratton, “Planetarity and the final city” (191-192, 217-240, 265-268), Giorgos Kallis, “Against growth: Degrowth and the re-emergence of a radical environmental radicalism” (269-282), Chen Quifan, “A micro pilgrimage.” Trans. Emily Jin (283-288, 313-318), an original story, Amala Sánchez-Velasco, “Planetary social condensers” (319-333), Xia Jia, “From Mars to Earth.” Trans. Andy Dudak (335-336, 361-366), an original story, and Ashley Dawson, “The right to move” (367-379). Young was born and raised in Australia and currently works and lives in both England and the U.S. Information on the other authors can be found on 380-381.