We came to Caleb’s writing through Poor. The book has been somewhat of a revelation, as it documents and catalogues the black boyhood experience of growing up on a London estate and situates these experiences in direct dialogue within the shape of the spaces, objects and materials where this growing up takes place. The political theorist Langdon Winner asked the question, “Do artifacts have politics?” In his work, he exposes how the infrastructure of roads and bridges, buses and bus timetables in parts of the US have been purposefully designed to enable racial segregation. In focusing in and on the spaces, estates and roads, staircases and rooms, concrete and detergent, smell and temperature, tracksuits and trainers and weaving these into lived experience, Caleb’s book answers this question with an emphatic, Yes! And, given our times and what we see and experience around us, how can our public spaces, buildings, objects, materials, sounds and smells not be political? They are what power is both materialised and exercised through.

As such, Poor provides an alternative template for writing and reading about our built environments. It shows that our designed environments can be expressed, and subsequently thought differently, through the engagement of broader experiences, voices and formats. We would suggest that Poor also situates a larger, more critical question of how and where these voices can be heard and genuinely influence the shaping of better, more equitable environments. As Caleb has outlined, “too many public futures are decided in private rooms”. And as we cruelly witnessed with the Grenfell Tower (West London) fire tragedy on 14 June 2017, in which 72 people died because of the “value engineering” of a building’s cladding, this is not just a question of taste, but about who literally gets to live and die. Poor is a generous book; it provides a valuable contribution by testing ideas in public, and even though it is pocket-sized it urgently asks us to think about how our living environments are designed and who they are built for. If we had a book to recommend to designers, architects, city planners and policy-makers right now, Poor would be it.

To coincide with the event, a summer study and reading circle was organised through an open call and invitations to spoken-word and poetry groups in Gothenburg. The study circle was led brilliantly by writer and editor Meri Alarcon, with Caleb Femi joining the circle for the final discussion session.