-Planet City has been a long-term project, an imaginary world of mine, that I've been developing across multiple formats for many years.

I started the project by researching and exploring big planetary-scale visions of our future.

The one that caught my attention was a vision called Half Earth by an ecologist called Edward O Wilson.

He had this plan to stave off mass human extinction by devoting half the surface of the Earth completely to nature.

As we started to design and get this model of a city working, what we realized is that Planet City could actually be 0.02% of the Earth, about the size of Texas.

This would be a city that could contain 10 billion people, the projected population of the world in 2050.

I tell stories.

I build imaginary worlds.

I imagine futures as a means to try and think about what technologies, what ecologies we want to have in our lives, how these systems might change us for the better or for worse.

-We, as designers and architects, we're able to visualize and imagine worlds that we haven't yet lived What does it mean to live in the consequence of our actions today?

Not just today, also our future actions and the possible outcomes of that.

-We found in this process that people start telling stories about what dwelling means to you, what it means to live together, what it means to reside together, what it means to build and maintain together beyond landlords, beyond private property, beyond estate apparatus.

-Planet City evolved from an international network of people who are based all over the world who are the leaders in their field.

All of the technologies that you see in Planet City are actually already here, and in most cases they've been here for 10 or 15 years.

They've kept down by various political or cultural narratives.

Climate change is now a cultural problem.

It's a political problem.

It's not a crisis of technology.

It's a crisis of the imagination.

-We can play a role in our responses to the biggest problem that we face in our lifetime.

I think it's important to engage with current technologies and science to look at how we can do that.

-With the support of the Getty for the PST exhibition, what we've done is create views of Planet City, where we're literally inviting other artists in to inhabit the world and create their own view and their own perspective as a thought experiment.

Jennifer Chen, she's an artist, architect and filmmaker.

She's developing Pink Earth, which is a film seen entirely through the perspective of satellites.

-What does Earth look like, in the age of Planet City, but from space?

Would the engineer's straight lines be blurred in time?

Would the colors of the ocean come back?

My project Pink Earth consists of a two-channel film installation.

I use a variety of images.

Some of them are directly obtained from the satellite.

Other kinds of images that I have in there are simulated images that are computer-generated in order to speculate on what the different conditions might be down 30 years, 40 years, and so on, if we were to live in a world of Planet City.

-What we're doing is working with the best scientists around the world, the best experts in renewable energy technologies, basically travel around the world to see the world's biggest wind energy project, the world's biggest solar farm, the world's tallest vertical farm.

They're the technologies that we then scaled up and wove into the very fabric of Planet City.

-We imagine that all the agriculture would be done sustainably through large-scale vertical farms and so on.

I imagine that to feed a population of 10 billion in this environment, you would need so much ultraviolet light to power the agriculture in it.

Seen from afar, what we'll end up seeing is actually a glow of pink light shining through this one tiny corner around the globe.

The other part of Pink Earth, the project, has a tapestry.

I like to think about the satellites that are orbiting around the Earth as if they're doing a weave around the Earth to tell that story.

When you're at that distance looking at this planet on its own, you no longer think about boundaries within the planet, you no longer think about the differences between us.

You are necessarily having to think about everything that goes on a planet as whole and as one.

-One of the narratives of Planet City is that no new resources would be dug out of the ground in order to build this new city.

Instead, what we would do is mine our existing cities for their material and resources One of the other things I'm trying to do for the new exhibition is make physical a lot of the digital modeling that we did in the city for the film and the visual effects of the film.

This is one of what's going to be three fragments of Planet City displayed in the form of a movie miniature model with 3D printed literally thousands of buildings that you can see all around us, which are taken from scans of real buildings that exist around the world.

What we're doing is really mining our existing cities.

One of the new projects is by John Cooper who's a theorist and architect.

He took that quite literally and has been going around Los Angeles scanning fragments of buildings that might be potentially reclaimed and remade in this new world.

-On this machine is a set of scaled architectural fragments from the existing built environment.

The whole intention of this apparatus that we're making is not to produce a finished image of what Planet City could be like, but instead to initiate a process of direct architectural action by nomadically taking this whole apparatus out into the city into different areas of LA and being able to connect with the communities that exist on the ground there at whatever level.

The idea is to combine fragments into new configurations in Planet City that would never exist in this world, but if we can model it and imagine it, then it could happen.

Right here in downtown LA a lot of people living in communities the things out of which they're building their homes and dwelling places they've foraged, collected, and improvised.

-The rig itself has been composed of completely recycled materials, almost entirely recycled materials.

Also the beauty of the thing is that it is as human powered as possible, so as unmotorized as possible.

We do have a small electric motor for the e-bike, but beyond that, everything else is low-powered to really look at how we consume and how we create with a lower footprint all the way around.

-That action of building, taking people, and people that would not normally participate in architecture, and telling them, "Hey, you have a platform," is very empowering.

-We work with local groups to involve the people in the conceptualization, the dreaming, and the design of the city.

-What we tried to do was create a city that was full of joy and ritual and mythology.

Everything we've seen in the past shows that storytelling, ritual, and myth is actually how we cope as a species with the unknown where a lot of future cities are seen as dystopian.

One of the first things we did when making Planet City was map onto a calendar all of the cultural festivities, the holidays that would occur when you brought the entire population of the world into one place.

You realize that on any given day there's 20 different things happening.

Planet City would actually be a perpetual party.

One of the new pieces I'm making is a film, a film that captures a endless festival.

We were thinking about the cultural life of the city and the new rituals, the new myths that might take place in that city and how those myths would be enacted through the festivals and the celebrations of the city.

All the costumes in the city were developed in collaboration with Ane Crabtree, who's a Hollywood costume designer, who typically dresses the characters of dystopias.

We also work with a lot of indigenous knowledge and local communities.

We wove those stories into the foundation and fabric of the city as well.

These three masks here with the animal horns they're worn by the drone shepherds of Planet City.

These are people that were previously displaced from their farms through climate change and who had to leave.

They migrated and moved to Planet City.

There, instead of working traditionally on the land, they worked with agricultural bots and farming robots and the vertical farms of Planet City.

Then, for the festival of the city, they wear these masks to enact the beasts of burden of the past as a way of remembering the way that we used to treat animals.

Just like everything in Planet City, it's really a thought experiment, trying to force us to ask questions about what the necessary lifestyle changes we might be willing to make could look like.

For many people, that's a really powerful and extraordinary place to be, on the cutting edge of the potential for change, where we have all the technologies, all the ideas, all the systems we need to dig us out of the hole that we've created for ourselves.

That's a really powerful place to be.

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