Disney World

Tuesday

Helen Barrett

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

Thursday

Melissa Kite

A visit to ye olde Ireland

The £80 million super-yacht with a helicopter on the upper deck sat in the harbour, and we sat outside the ice-cream parlour in an old banger that had broken down. Our dear next-door neighbour in Ireland had taken us to chi-chi Glengarriff in the Beara peninsula and had insisted on driving us, because she has her car crammed full of essential clobber, like her walking sticks and a shopping basket nicked from the local supermarket in which she stashes her supply of duty-free cigarettes. The sheep-shearing, diddly-dee Ireland they have, very cleverly, preserved for the Americans We made a motley crew, the builder boyfriend and me and this doughty Irish