Since the 2008 United Nations declaration that the world is becoming increasingly urbanized, the notion of the ‘city-planet’ has become a well circulated trope, reflecting how urbanism is now understood as a phenomenon occurring on a planetary scale instead of merely a global one. In the context of planetary ecological crisis and extensive urban expansion in the Global South, the city has become a Janus-faced symbol of the Anthropocenic future. It stands for the extent to which the Earth’s surface has been transformed by human activity, which is a cause for both celebration and concern. Viewed from the planetary scale, the urban represents the creative capacity of applications of design and technology to organize and support the social, physical, and economic needs of the world’s population. On the other hand, it also epitomizes the extensive and destructive reach of the voracious resource consumption impelled and perpetuated by processes of contemporary urbanization (Gordillo, 2019).

Today, different planetary urbanisms are unfolding that contradict, complicate, and co-produce each other. These developments can be broadly categorized into two main trends: the construction of new ‘Smart-Eco’ cities, especially in the Arab Gulf, Asia, and Africa, and the proliferation of the megacity, which is defined by its population threshold of over 10 million people. The new ‘Smart-Eco’ cities claim to implement novel models of urban living in areas outside or by the coasts of established cities, creating enclaves of privilege; these enclaves are often framed as opposing the megacity and its rapid magnification of existing patterns of urban in-migration and (informal) urban settlement. But both these urbanisms and urban futures amplify the accumulation ideologies underlying the territorializing patterns of real estate development, land reclamation, and terraforming that have been behind the rise of colonial port settlements, new towns, and urban renewal projects in the 19th and 20th centuries. In doing so, they reflect the relentless trajectory of technology-driven city building, which extends capitalist and expansionist practices and logics inherited from the colonial past into the present. At the same time, they also entail the revival of biopolitical neo-Malthusian anxieties around planetary-scale overcrowding, as articulated by biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 publication The Population Bomb, which sparked a sense of crisis in the Global North over Earth’s limited carrying capacity.

Contemporary urban development increasingly relies on design methods and technologies, such as satellite-powered geographic mapping and computer-aided architectural design, to visualize the infrastructures, landscapes, and landmark features of new city complexes, as well as the areas demarcated as their ‘environment.’ In these methods and technologies, design acts as a scalar means for containing, securing, and expanding habitable futures. However, design functions highly unevenly given the disparities in how (and by whom) these futures are shaped and realized. For instance, the construction of ‘resilient’ lifestyles for some often involves the degradation and destruction of the futures of others.

The designs of new urban developments bring to the fore the multi-scalar tensions between global, capital-driven imaginaries and the regional and local material effects of their enactment. Thus, while the ‘urban’ has been identified as a geological and planetary force, its constantly growing and changing spatial arrangements under capitalism nonetheless form the physical and conceptual ground for multiple emergent futures. Defined by difference (Schmid, 2019), the ‘urban’ describes the coming together, juxtaposition, and interaction of disparate elements within one place. Looking forward, our collective planetary future appears to portend postapocalyptic urban forms in a constant state of flux that range from the utopic to the dystopic across locales and communities.

The Multiscalar Field of Planetary Urban Futures

In the last twenty years, a trend of planetary ‘Smart-Eco’ urbanism has become especially prominent in parts of Asia, the Arab Gulf, and Africa. New cities have been proposed and built that claim to represent a ‘planetary’ (or ‘civilizational’) future and to solve aspects of the planetary ecological crisis. The ‘sustainable’ architectural forms, operational procedures, and promotional media campaigns of these cities tell stories of calculated environmental efficiency extrapolated from environmental assessment plans, carbon accounting, and digital visualizations. As suggested from their architectural renders, these visions of ‘Smart-Eco’ urbanism are of seemingly self-contained worlds that are replicable across a myriad of landscapes, from the marine to the desert, and on all continents. Their designs project a smooth alignment of machine and natural intelligence – combining ‘smart’ infrastructure systems and futuristic high-tech architecture with features such as ‘green’ walls – to yield self-sufficient, modular ecologies. These developing ‘Smart-Eco’ cities purport to offer modes of ecologically-adaptive living in their maintenance of generic enclosed spaces that extract and metabolize resources from the environment based on cybernetic notions of resource efficiency and optimization.

One such example is OCEANIX Busan, a prototype maritime city at the South Korean port city of Busan that was commissioned under the UN-Habitat New Urban Agenda and designed by the Stararchitecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). It is an instantiation of the many planetary urban futures declared in the past two decades that are projected to be built by the milestone years of 2030 or 2050. OCEANIX Busan is expected to be the “world’s first resilient and sustainable floating community for 10,000 residents on 75 hectares.” (Oceanix Floating City, n.d.) It is to be a ‘net-zero’ “city to tackle climate change” that is expected to house climate refugees. As such, it is to serve as a solution for a key challenge of the planetary ecological crisis: the housing of populations who face the destruction of their homes from rising sea levels. The city is envisioned as a testing site for infrastructural technologies, which might be used in other coastal cities that will face similar predicaments.

Thus far, these urban visions, ‘demos’ and ‘test-beds’ (Halpern et al., 2013) of “livability and sustainability” have materialized in ways that contradict with and fall short of their stated purpose of becoming models for planetary habitability. Built tabula rasa-style on remediated brownfields or reclaimed land within Special Economic Zones, these new cities are often masterplanned megastructures and infrastructural hubs pitched and run by global conglomerations and consortia. They exist in stages of (in)completion. City developments once promoted with spectacular ecological and technological promises, such as Dongtan outside Shanghai, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, and Songdo in South Korea (Halpern & Günel, 2017), are now recognized as “fantasy islands” (Sze, 2015), limited experiments in sustainability (Fattah, 2024), and examples of uninnovative urbanism (Mesmer, 2017). The most recent high-profile new urban development is the Saudi Arabian city The Line. Designed as a long and high linear city, The Line is the latest headline-grabbing project within NEOM, a new urban region in the northwest area of Saudi Arabia. The Line claims to be “the world’s first cognitive city” which incorporates AI, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the Metaverse into a seamless ubiquitous digital infrastructure. The greater region of NEOM contains other extravagant resource-intensive structures: an airport, a port city for advanced manufacturing, a mountain ski resort furnished by artificial snow production, and a luxury island resort.

Such proliferating cities exemplify planetary urbanism as model – as an archetypal vision that is driving the increasingly trophic construction of immersive media environments. The design of the ‘Smart-Eco’ city reflects intensifying trends in speculative global real estate development that draw on planetary ‘green’ aesthetics and ‘State of the art’ digital infrastructure to create appealing luxury lifestyle settings for residents. The ‘innovation’ demonstrated in these planetary urban futures often lies in the use of new materials and construction techniques, as well as their establishment in frontier locales for prospective populations. In logics reminiscent of colonial governance, urban developers and authorities apply the dematerializing algorithms of ‘Smart’ platforms such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Digital Twins physical landscapes. Such techniques of biopolitical control translate matter, living bodies, and nature into forms of data, which are configured together to produce future value. While presented as models of ‘planetary habitability,’ these developments are driven by profit-making motivations that primarily target the economically privileged and politically mobile few.

In the last 20 years, over 150 new cities have been constructed in Asia, the Arab Gulf, and Africa, and particularly in China, Indonesia, and Morocco (Moser & Côté-Roy, 2021). Established megacities, especially in the Global South, are viewed by government officials, planners, and developers as reasons for the development of new cities with which to ease urban population expansion, as seen in the case of Egypt and Indonesia’s proposals for new capital cities (Lewis, 2024). Megacities are also regarded in themselves as loci of immense growth potential in terms of population numbers and economic opportunity. They continue to attract speculative high-profile real estate developments and infrastructure projects, all while remaining afflicted with problems such as overcrowded housing settlements and pollution resulting from inadequate infrastructure systems. The promise of both megacities and new cities are based on projections by economic experts of growing middle-class populations in emerging economies (Wood, 2018), as well as the desire of local and national governments to ‘leapfrog’ economic development with infrastructural formulas of ‘fast urbanism’ to attract businesses and investment capital (Côté-Roy & Moser, 2019).

The on-the-ground material and social effects of growth-oriented, speculative real estate development often stand in contrast with the design aspirations and aesthetics of new cities. ‘Smart-Eco’ urban developments are overwhelmingly dominated by extraterritorial ecological design imaginaries involving simplistic ‘Whole Earth’ visions and technologically-advanced megastructures and gated biospheres that furnish the impression of environmental management. These design aesthetics inadvertently eclipse, if not exacerbate, the ongoing environmental crises facing expanding (mega)cities and their surrounding ecologies, as situated building processes enact mortal costs on preexisting human and non-human communities and established eco-relations. The construction of The Line, for instance, has unsurprisingly involved the destruction of villages and the displacement of the local Huwaitat tribe (Thomas & El Gibaly, 2024). The extraction and transportation of building materials, such as sand, from other areas in the region is destroying endemic ecosystems and disrupting the quotidian rhythms of communities who subsist on the land and water.

Poor urban communities – including recent migrants moving into the city from rural hinterlands and longstanding communities whose living areas are being encroached upon by further urban development – are especially vulnerable to displacement; they bear the weight of failing infrastructures and precarious living arrangements, especially as extreme weather conditions become more frequent. Megacities such as Bangkok, Jakarta, Lagos, and Dhaka are sinking cities which face the prospect of having parts disappear under water by 2050. In the case of Jakarta Bay, for example, traditional fishing communities (La Batu, 2016) have been evicted to make way for a large megacity of 17 islets behind a giant sea wall called The Great Garuda Project. This infrastructural plan, inspired by the eponymous mythical creature, was pitched as a coastal defense project against the threat of rising sea levels. While the sea wall has yet to be fully constructed, the rest of Jakarta remains susceptible to floods. Only half of the population receives regular piped water supply (Kooy & Bakker, 2008), which is partly due to the legacy of Dutch colonial governance (Colven, 2023).

Yet such inchoate and incomplete frontiers of urban development are also generative of disjointed ecologies and micro-practices of living that incongruently emerge from cracks, fissures, and momentary collapses. The half-built shells of much-vaunted ‘Smart-Eco’ cities and infrastructural projects become surreal landscapes that seem more like ruins and markers of failed futurities. But in their suspended states, they become sites where mundane forms of middle-class life, migrant labor activity, and shunted elements of the ecological environment interact with each other, producing a landscape of unanticipated and latent growth. These landscapes potentially engender a different kind of reclamation: an alchemical process that is slower and less evident than the rapid dredging, dumping, and sedimentation of new land. Other forms of planetary urbanism thus emerge from the endurance of communities against the uneven velocities of environmental degradation, as they persist in their subsistence practices while being increasingly pushed to the periphery. As their homes change and erode, their intimate knowledge of the ecological environment becomes increasingly crucial for collective survival in the Anthropocene; it is an embodied testament to adaptive ways of life that draw upon deeply rooted traditions of being in the world. Such ways of life enact visions for communities for whom the future lacks protection from further economic and environmental intrusions but is nevertheless grounded in place specificity and material presence.

Urban Life beyond the Planetary Scale

In her commentary on environmental remote-sensing imagery, Jennifer Gabrys notes that “the planetary is configured, rather than assumed and given” (Gabrys, 2018). The technological view of the planetary imposes the perspective of a scaled model onto the world that is often presented as objective reality. In the urban context, this frequently translates into large-scale infrastructure projects and associated planetary imaginaries that are overlaid onto reality and that seek to continuously expand capital’s spatial boundaries and property values. However, design’s capacity to treat environments in totalizing ways is countered by everyday life’s propensity to challenge and exceed its constructions.

Today, the coordinates of ‘Planetary Urbanism’ extend to the exosphere, with the grandiose ambitions of Silicon Valley tech moguls invoking outer space as a fantasy biospheric frontier for colonization. Far from innovative, these astronomical desires revisit the planetary imaginaries of the 1960s and 70s: a time period that was also marked by dreams of development in various postcolonial nations in the Global South, especially with respect to the design and construction of new cities for nascent sovereign populations. The plethora of planetary urbanisms encountered here reminds us that urban futures circle back to the past in the form of their formulas and plans; some circle back to the more recent past, and others to much older times. In their various stages, from projection to materialization, urban futures demonstrate the dominance of (neo)colonial and capitalist ideologies in shaping the built environment, even if as unfulfilled aspirations. They also illustrate the diversity of futures that emerge from the multiple visions and models of living, which are continuously reconfigured by experiences of being in a changing world.

Literature

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May Ee Wong is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer whose work engages the intersections of contemporary architectural and design history and theory, critical geography, feminist Science Technology and Society (STS) studies, environmental media and humanities, and visual and media culture and aesthetics. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies in Utrecht University and was a postdoctoral researcher in the “Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data” project at Aarhus University, and in the Asian Urbanisms cluster at the Asia Research Institute. Her research questions center on how notions and forms of technology, the 'environment', the past and the future are co-constituted and transformed through modes of design and media as well as projective and speculative logics, narrative and discourse. She has contributed to Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, Architecture_MPSand Words of Weather: A Glossary. She is working on a book project tentatively titled Planetary Urban Futures as Infrastructural Frontier.

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