The Urban Listening Room: A Sound System Session at UCL East

There are many ways to survive in a city as relentless as London, but I never anticipated becoming a DJ and researcher to be one of them. I’m Dana Sousa-Limbu and I created DIVINE KIND, an independent creative platform, in 2024 as an exploration of how DJs take on multiple roles to make sense of a fast-moving, uneven city. Over time, this practice led me toward sound systems, as I increasingly encountered listening sessions, hi-fi bars, and public gatherings organised around high-end audio systems.

In November 2025, this exploration became more concrete through the co-production of The Urban Listening Room: A Sound System Session with Charlie Dark MBE at the East London campus of University College London. The free session brought together students, staff, and members of the public to listen to vinyl selections amplified through Dark’s Run Dem Sound system.

While the music traced histories of sound system culture in London, from reggae to jungle, what resonated most strongly were the stories, labour, and relationships that assembled this specific system in the space. Dark shared his journey of building a sound system through Afrobeat selections, while I drew from UK rap and Black British alternative and R&B artists. Participants revealed sound systems not simply as playback technologies, but as mediators of social relationships—spaces through which intergenerational knowledge, echoed in the analogue formats of vinyl records and turntables, was exchanged.

The session took place at a moment when questions of belonging felt particularly urgent. Many Black and African students speak openly about a lack of connection; moving through the institution, and many others like it, without fully feeling held there. This coincided with my own search for belonging, not only socially, but intellectually and creatively.

A turning point in this journey came when Charlie opened up his system to me. In doing so, he helped me realise that a sound system is represented not only by a set of audio playback equipment, but by a network of relationships built on trust and collaboration: box-boys, listeners, operators, selectors, and DJs, each responsible for sustaining the whole. I began to understand that survival in London can take many forms, and that listening, both carefully and collectively, could be one of them.

One of the great privileges of working in a university is the opportunity to push at the edges of what counts as knowledge, and to collaborate with people who operate both within and beyond the institution. I am deeply grateful to colleagues at the Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective and Black@UCL for the essential work they do. This project stands on their foundations.

Despite strong demand for subsequent sessions, The Urban Listening Room also raised difficult questions. Who felt welcomed as a creator and owner of knowledge within the institutional space of the university, and who did not? Did the centring of African voices risk softening or detaching sound system culture from its Caribbean roots and the histories of racialised struggle that made such spaces of conviviality possible? And how might initiatives like this unintentionally contribute to the gentrification and sanitisation of sound systems, increasingly visible in listening bars and cultural institutions across London?

These tensions foreground a broader absence. Despite their longevity, influence, and contemporary resurgence, sound systems remain marginal within dominant accounts of how the city works. Their labour, the expertise they cultivate, and the socio-technical arrangements they hold and inspire are rarely understood as fundamental to the makings of urban life, within urban scholarship or policymaking. This project begins from that absence.

As the work develops through its next iteration over 2026, supported by the UCL Grand Challenges x ChangeMakers project funding, and the UCL Community Engagement Seed Fund, it returns to a simple but demanding principle: check your sphere of influence, and use it with intention. The focus now is on listening and making. Not as passive acts, but as method for taking notice, for producing knowledge collectively, and for re-imagining how cities are held together by sound, care, and collaboration.