The Planetary Compendium is an evolving ‘Wunderkammer’ of planetary governance. This living archive maps the shifting architectures, imaginaries, and experiments shaping how life on Earth may be organized, sustained, and represented.
Co-developed by Berggruen Institute (BI) and Dark Matter Labs (Dm), the Compendium brings together ten case studies—historic precedents, emerging experiments, and speculative futures—in a audio-visual multi-format knowledge repository.

Each case is a window into the infrastructures that shape our collective planetary future: from lunar governance and rights of nature to the ethics of geoengineering, transboundary risk mitigation, and interspecies communication. Together, the compendium gathers fragments of how we have tried, and might yet try, to inhabit a planet unfettered by the boundaries of nations, systems, and species.

Conceptualized, curated, and edited: Alexandra Bekker and Prateek Shankar
Visual concepts, creative direction, and experience design: Anahat Kaur and Arianna Smaron
Platform development: Andrea Zaccuri, Francesco Castrovilli and Alessandro Miracapillo with Gurden Batra and the DM Civic Tech Studio
Curatorial assistance and operational management: Liam Cohen
Operational support: Katherine Miller
Sound design: Nithin Shamsudhin and Meera Shenoy
Animation: Studio Kokaachi
Illustrations and visual storytelling: Blain van Rooyen, Hyojeong Lee, Sana Bansal, Shehzil Malik, and Zainab Zulfiqar, as well as Ben Pollock and John Cook at Climate Cartographics
Copyediting: Irina Wang.
It is informed by a series of enlightening conversations with Jonathan Blake, Emily Knapp, and Nils Gilman at the Berggruen Institute; Zehra Zaidi, Indy Johar, and Vlad Afanasiev at Dark Matter Labs; among other colleagues, practitioners, and thought partners in our extended ecosystems.
Funded by the Berggruen Institute. 

Anahat Kaur (IN) is a visual communication and UI designer at Dark Matter Labs. She creates beautiful and effective design solutions for digital and print platforms. She holds a Master's degree in Design from The Basel School of Design in Switzerland and has worked for a diverse range of clients and companies across Europe and India. Her creative process is non-linear and informed by a cross-pollination of ideas from different topics and personal experiences. With years of experience in brand design and development, she creates powerful narratives and believes in using her skills to bring important issues to light.

Arianna Smaron (PL) is an interdisciplinary designer working across visual research, art direction, product design, and storytelling. The practice focuses on visual sense-making and design infrastructures for cultural organisations, civic bodies, and research-led initiatives across Europe and North America, spanning digital platforms, physical materials, and research contexts. With experience across art museums, universities, and public institutions, Arianna was previously Director of the educational programme at La Scuola Open Source, an experimental school rooted in collaborative and non-linear learning processes.

The Planetary Compendium is an evolving, multi-sensory intellectual tool created to reimagine planetary governance. Arianna Smaron and Anahat Kaur have created a rich learning platform with a growing digital atlas of essays, artifacts, and case studies that explore how life on Earth can be organized and represented. Based on the framework of “planetary civics,” the key features of the Compendium are: (1) a living archive, which is an evolving resource that documents imaginaries and experiments related to planetary governance, and (2) a space for collaborative knowledge, that brings together thinkers, practitioners, and domain experts from around the world to identify new pathways for research and collaboration. The jury sees in it a scalable educational tool that can engage students in investigating systemic changes in finance, culture, technology, and policy needed to address the entangled crises of our time.