For Between Us, the second season of the Architectures of Planetary Well-Being podcast, we partnered with KoozArch, a research-driven studio and digital magazine exploring architecture and design beyond their built forms. The phrase “between us” implies a secret, something kept safe, reserved just for those present. The concepts explored in Between Us are, alternatively, meant to be shared, but they’re indeed explored in intimate dialogues between practitioners who might not have known each other previously and then found commonality—and even collaboration—through these conversations.

In exchanges guided by Federica Zambeletti and Shumi Bose (KoozArch's founder and chief editor, respectively), fourteen cultural practitioners, meeting each other across generational and geographical distances, discussed architecture, storytelling, language, material, science fiction, landscapes, tenderness, and memory. A common thread emerged: the need for collaboration, friendship, accessibility, and imagination in the reimagining of a more just world. In working toward a state of planetary well-being, we must cross boundaries between artistic mediums and territorial borders alike—and reach for each other.

For our introductory season of Architectures of Planetary Well-Being, writer and Atmos Editor-At-Large Yessenia Funes speaks to eight visionaries and spatial practitioners about environmental knowledge, collective responsibility, and the urgent need for both in building a more equitable world.

Over seven intimate and interdisciplinary conversations, our guests—among them activists, strategists, educators, and environmentalists—discuss the ongoing climate crisis, the accessibility (and inaccessibility) of resources in our built environment, science fiction as a tool for imagining the future, and the care we must share with each other as we swiftly move toward it. Together with Funes, they introduce and explore the concept of planetary well-being—what it means to both envision and enact it as designers, architects, thinkers, and dreamers on an increasingly vulnerable planet.