These strange paintings depict still scenes of calm, opulent civic centres. With little human life pictured, they show architecture dominating largely empty spaces. They are ordered, geometric and sparse. The three paintings are housed in Italy, Germany and the USA. All are referred to as the Ideal City paintings.

So what is a Renaissance Ideal City? 

Livia Lupi, a historian and author, joins to discuss why the paintings are so important. We talk about what it perhaps shows us about urban planning ideals of the time, how ‘the architect’ was born and why our popular understanding of the time period is built (at some level) on art historians' mythologising the past.

Livia’s website: www.Livialupi.com

The Ideal City paintings: 

Urbino:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ideal_City_-_Urbino.jpg

Berlin: 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Francesco_di_Giorgio_Martini_(attributed)_-_Architectural_Veduta_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Baltimore:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fra_Carnevale_-_The_Ideal_City_-_Walters_37677.jpg

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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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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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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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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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