Who Shapes Our Cities?

AJ Haastrup is a social designer, cultural producer, and community builder based in Barking & Dagenham, East London. His work sits at the intersection of culture, place, and participation, exploring how communities shape, claim, and reimagine the spaces they inhabit.

With a background in participatory design and grassroots cultural programming, AJ has spent the past eight years building platforms that connect people through music, events, and shared creative practice. He is Co-Founder of One Room Live, a creative studio and events platform, and has been leading on borough-wide cultural strategy through the Cultural Partnership Group for the last 3 years. 

His work is particularly interested in how cultural expression, especially through music,  acts as both a tool for spatial imagination and a form of agency within rapidly changing urban environments. Through research, facilitation, and live programming, he explores how cities “speak” to communities, and how communities, in turn, speak back.

Shawn Adams is an architect, writer, and lecturer whose work operates at the intersection of architecture, design, and social impact. He has taught at leading institutions, including Central Saint Martins (UAL) and the Architectural Association, where his focus is on critical spatial practice.

He is also a co-founder of Power Out of Restriction (POoR), a socially driven design studio that was awarded the London Design Festival Emerging Design Medal in 2023. Shawn is a well published writer who has written for Financial Times, Wallpaper*, Hypebeast, FRAME, and The World of Interiors. He also sits on the Advisory Board of Open City’s Accelerate Programme and has been recognised as a RIBAJ Rising Star. 

Alongside his academic and studio work, Shawn is Outreach Lead at housing specialist practice HTA Design LLP, where he develops programmes that connect underrepresented communities with pathways into architecture and construction.

Christian Cassiel is a British-Jamaican visual artist whose practice is grounded in archival research, material culture, and the study of how people inhabit and transform space. His work examines the relationship between communities and their environments, focusing on the objects, structures, and spatial practices that reveal cultural identity and historical continuity.

This practice finds its home in Seed, a living library and cultural space celebrating African and Caribbean heritage through art, design, and material culture. Seed's growing collection connects diaspora communities with their histories through free access to books and traditional objects, housed within an intentionally curated home environment. More than an archive, it is a space for cultural reconnection, learning, and community dialogue.

Dr Joy White is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire. She is the author of Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture during Covid and Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City.

Joy has presented her work at a number of UK and international institutions including: The Post-Windrush Generation: Black British Voices of Resistance, University of Cambridge; Subcultures Network Conference Panel, University of Reading; The Place of Music, Loughborough University; Annual Black Studies Lecture, University of Nottingham;  Stanford University Forum for African Studies; Urban Culture and Political Engagement, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; 3rd International Research Conference on Cultural and Creative Industries University of Antwerp; Eastern Sociological Society; 5th International Digital Storytelling Conference, Hacettepe University.

Her previous work includes Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise, one of the first books to foreground the socio-economic significance of grime music. Recent publications include Growing up under the influence: A sonic genealogy of Grime, and (with Jonathan Ilan) Ethnographer Soundclash: A UK rap and grime story. Joy has also written for The Quietus, The Conversation, Trench, Google Arts + Culture, Red Pepper and Prospect.