What will the cities of the future look like?

At the Pacific Design Center Gallery in Los Angeles, artists have created an imaginary enormo-conurbation into which humanity’s billions have been herded, surrendering what’s left of the planet to wilderness. Views of Planet City, the resulting temporary exhibition, is all Blade Runner-esque, purple-neon cityscapes in miniature, VR games and costumes melding world cultures into one. The show riffs on Edward O. Wilson’s Half Earth hypothesis, the biologist’s 2016 proposal to remove humanity from half the planet to allow ecosystems to recover. It is an entertaining, clever and provocative exhibition, but it is fiction: it does not offer a set of instructions.

David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky’s Cities Made Differently is a related exercise, billing itself as ‘a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them’. It presents 29 ideas for cities rather than one, and is printed to suggest a blueprint, in cobalt, black and white.