Audible Futures: Sound, Cities, and Spatial Justice

The Trembling City: Sound and Spatial Justice is a series of workshops and public programme conceptualised by sonic theorist Gascia Ouzounian with Ibraaz as part of the Sonorous Cities project.

The series explores diverse approaches to sound and spatial justice—from the sonic counter-mapping of cities to experimental scoring and recording practices to sonic refuge and staging sonic resistance.

Audible Futures is a roundtable bringing together architects, urbanists, and sonic practitioners to explore sound and listening as critical tools for advancing spatial justice. A dialogue between Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ain Bailey, Nathalie Harb, Mhamad Safa, and Sumayya Vally, moderated by Gascia Ouzounian, considers how listening might expose structural inequalities, recover marginalised voices and urban histories, and reorient design practices. The discussion engages with work that examines cities as sites of atmospheric occupation and vibrational warfare, traces the erasure of spaces of gathering, creativity, and belonging through gentrification and displacement, and explores the design of sonic refuge. Audible Futures proposes sonic practice not simply as a means of representing space, but as a method of spatial investigation, a form of political critique, and a catalyst for more just urban futures.

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.

Speaker details:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is the founding director of Earshot, the world's first organisation to use sound in defence of human and environmental rights. Built on over a decade of experience and a PhD on audio analysis in legal investigations, Abu Hamdan has established Earshot as the foremost voice in audio ballistics and earwitness testimony. Since 2023 Earshot has been cited in more than 50 stories from leading sources of news worldwide and has provided crucial evidence for advocacy campaigns by organisations such as Humans Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops considering the role of sound in the formation of identity, and the exploration of memory and sound. In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled Remember To Exhale for Studio Voltaire, London. Previous exhibitions include And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love, Cubitt Gallery, London (2019); Version, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2021); Atlantic Railton which was part of the Listening To The City sound installation programme in the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion; Untitled: Our Wedding for the Black Melancholia exhibition at CCS Bard (2022), New York, USA and Trioesque for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany (2022), the installation Four (2024) for FACT Liverpool’s Resolution research project. The most recent commission was The Jamaica Project (2026 )for Camden Art Centre, London. She was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Forthcoming in June 2026 with Elaine Mitchener is an Art On The Underground sound commission for Waterloo Station.

Nathalie Harb is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based between Paris and Beirut whose work rethinks public space from the perspective of everyday urban practitioners in conflict-affected cities. Through installations, public interventions, and scenographic projects, she explores questions of home, shelter, agency, and spatial justice, creating spaces for intimacy and rest within urban environments. Her work has been presented internationally through initiatives including UNESCO’s Week of Sound, the London Design Biennale, Dubai Design Week, Beirut Design Week, and the London Festival of Architecture.

Dr Mhamad Safa is a sound artist, architect, and researcher based between London and Beirut whose work explores the intersection of multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic formations. He is an Associate Lecturer in Architecture and Media Studies at the Royal College of Art, and his artistic practice has been presented internationally at venues including Bergen Assembly, Göteborg Biennial, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and the ICA London.

Sumayya Vally is the principal of Counterspace, an architecture and research practice exploring hybrid identities and spatial relationships, with a particular interest in the complex relationships between territories and places. A WEF Young Global Leader, TIME100 honoree and Art Basel Medallist, she is the youngest architect commissioned to design the Serpentine Pavilion in London. Vally is Resident Architect at Ibraaz, which she imagined as a living, evolving space shaped by the artists, collaborators, and communities that gather there. Her practice is in constant conversation with her teaching at leading architecture schools, including Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), and UCL’s The Bartlett School of Architecture.

Dr Gascia Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, where she leads the ERC-funded project Sonorous Cities. Her work explores the intersections of sound, architecture, urbanism, and spatial politics. She is the author of Stereophonica and the forthcoming The Trembling City, and has led numerous collaborative research and exhibition projects including Acoustic Cities: London & Beirut, Scoring the City, and Designing Vibrational Architectures.

This programme has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as part of the project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism (grant agreement No 865032).