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A Place to Live

Supersized Earth

Episode 1 of 3

Documentary exploring how humans have transformed our world in a generation. Dallas Campbell climbs the world's tallest building and dives beneath Mexico City.

Supersized Earth traces the spectacular story of how humans have transformed our world in a generation. In this awe-inspiring three-part series, Dallas Campbell travels the globe, visiting the world's largest and most ambitious engineering projects, exploring the power of human ingenuity and the making of the modern world.

In this episode, Dallas explores how we have been redesigning the planet as we build ever more astonishing places to live. In Dubai, he climbs to the very top of the world's tallest building - over half a mile above the desert sand - to help clean the highest windows in the world; and he explores how desert wastelands have been transformed into bristling forests of skyscrapers as we've conquered the sky and turned it into a place we can call home.

In China, the rate of change is accelerating as millions move into the cities; to keep pace, they have learned to erect 30-storey buildings in under three weeks. The world is changing underneath our feet too; Dallas dives beneath Mexico City with one of the two-man team whose unenviable job it is to keep the city sewers flowing, before examining a very new-world solution to this age-old problem.

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58 minutes