Planetary Cities with Indy Johar

Ask a physicist, and they'll tell you: the universe is mostly made of something we can't see.Ordinary matter makes up less than 5% of reality. The rest is dark matter—unseen forces shaping galaxies, bending space, governing possibility.Now shift that lens to the city. What if the urban realm is also shaped by its own dark matter? Not cosmic, but economic, legal, and institutional—invisible forces that script the city before a single brick is laid. In this episode, we speak with Indy Johar—architect, systems thinker, and founder of Dark Matter Labs. A pioneer in reimaginingthe civic 'firmware' that underpins our lives, Indy works at the intersection of design, economics, and institutional reform. From co-founding Architecture00 to initiating open-sourceplatforms like WikiHouse and OpenDesk, his practice pushes architecture beyond the physical into the realm of civic and economic code. Together, we explore what it means to design new agents, new institutions, and new counter-infrastructures for a regenerative future. To face today's challenges—extractive geopolitics, corporate colonialism, economic weaponisation—we may need to move beyond the object andthink at the scale of infrastructures, institutions, and planetary systems. What happens when we try to make those forces visible? What if architecture wasn't just about buildings, but about redesigning the systems beneath them? Check out the references from this episode.