The writer and cultural thinker John Berger once wrote: “The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.” For Berger, the ancient relationship between humans and animals had been broken.

But what if we tried to fix that?

In the mid-1970s, the architecture and media collective Ant Farm envisioned a floating research base called Dolphin Embassy. On this base, researchers would live side by side with dolphins, learning to communicate with them and even copiloting the vessel together. Conceived as a reaction against consumerism and capitalism, Dolphin Embassy was a hopeful vision of how humanity might repair its broken bond with nature.

My guest today is Paul Dobraszczyk, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He’s the author of books such as Botanical Architecture: Plants, Buildings and Us (Reaktion, 2024) and Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us (Reaktion, 2023). His forthcoming book, The Matter of Architecture, will be published by Reaktion next year.

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The industrial revolution saw Britain turn into the ‘workshop of the world’. Productivity and wealth for those in the upper echelons soared. But this came at a very human cost, with many of the working class people that powered the revolution facing awful conditions, poor pay and a grim future. And without the ability to vote, there was little hope that things could get better. 

But in the 1830s a huge working class political movement took over Britain - the Chartist movement.

From that movement, a new and intriguing idea for how the working class could live and engage in politics was born. These were rural settlements, places like Snig’s End, Charterville and O’Connorville. 

I spoke to the brilliant Katrina Navickas, professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire, about this overlooked area of history. 

Katrina’s new book, Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England is out in September.

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Magnitogorsk is a factory city in Russia. It has often been considered one of the most polluted cities in the world, with health problems rife. But there were some who dreamed of a different Magnitogorsk. 

In the late 1920s and 1930s a number of Western architects were employed by the Soviet Union to realise what a socialist city could be. At a time of great change in Russia, they were tasked with building the future. One of these first experiments was Magnitogorsk. 

To learn more, I talked to Alec Luhn, a formidable climate journalist that went to Magnitogorsk in 2016 for a Guardian story. Alec has reported for The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, Scientific American, TIME, and VICE News.

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In 1959, a British landscape designer, town planner and architect named Geoffrey Jellicoe dreamed up a town of tomorrow. He called it Motopia.

It imagined a radically different version of the British town. His big idea: a city built of glass where roads travelled across the tops of buildings.

Artist, writer, curator and educator Will Jennings joins to discuss Jellicoe's design. We talk about why it was never built, the New Towns Movement and whether Britain has lost the ability to think creatively about town planning.

head to www.recessed.space, a really great project edited by Will.

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