Festival Keynote - Daze Aghaji

I was born in North London in Tottenham and my story is not that uncommon - like many in the UK I was living in poverty. had two brothers, a mum, and a dad, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. I remember when my mum drove over the A406, she would tell us to wind our windows up. I didn’t really understand why, until I got older - then realised that the urban environment we were living in was not safe.

Flash forward to around 2008. My mum had a dream about starting her own restaurant - for an immigrant woman who didn’t have her own bank account, this was a dream that felt far-fetched. But she made it happen, and by 2008 we went from living in relative poverty to being middle class in the span of around a year. We moved from Tottenham to Enfield and started experiencing a different type of life. It made me think that if this one financial shift changed my life so rapidly, it made me think what it might look like if we changed other systems as well.

Around 2011, my mum sent me to a slightly quirky boarding school attached to a state grammar, led by an amazing couple, Mr. and Mrs. Nuttall who taught me how to love nature. had a transformation of learning how to love really deeply and about the safety nature can bring to someone from quite an unstable childhood.

In 2016, aged 16, I moved back to London for college and that’s when I started getting very ill, having a lot of breathing issues. I found out about air pollution and I recognised that a lot of the health issues I faced were caused by the incinerator burning only a mile and a half from my home. And then I learnt that the issue of air pollution did not just affect my community, but many working class, black, and brown people globally. Then, I found that air pollution was only the beginning and that there’s a larger climate crisis that’s affecting people already on the margins of society.

When I went to university started thinking about what I had lived through in my youth, recognising that the issue is systemic and about how we change systems to prioritise life. Then I had an awakening by accident. One Wednesday evening my friend took me to an Extinction Rebellion meeting. There were around 40 people - people who cared, people who understood the climate crisis in the same way that I saw the reality of it, but then also people who had a level of hope that if we gave our best efforts everything could change.

In 2019 I remember going to a shop and buying an array of strange things - from piping to hazmat suits. The cashier asked what we were doing, and answered that we were starting a rebellion to take over London. He laughed.

One of the most beautiful things about that 2019 rebellion across London was a recognition that it wasn’t solely about the climate - it was about people and all living life, it was about helping everybody understand what the world could be like on the streets that we took over, it was about free food, community spaces, and yoga classes. It was creating the community a lot of us longed for, and this has been a narrative throughout all the work I do.

The work I’m most proud of at the moment is my design work to help us imagine what Utopia might look like for urban settings. We’re in a time that if societal collapse happens, those of us in cities would find it very difficult to live. In the countryside there is an understanding of where food comes from, of how communities are built, but in cities we lack this - but this needn’t be the case. So how do we get designers to work with Utopia in mind of creating, for example, council housing that aims to connect people with nature, or to help people with their health, and to fight an urban setting that’s not compatible with human flourishing.

This brings me on to my final point and the work I now do Phytology nature reserve in London. I went from working with big governments and international NGOs to working in local nature. It was quite a shift, but one of the most important shifts I’ve experienced because it reminded me how to really design something for community and of service to the people who live around, and to learn what a space like that can do for everyone.

We need regenerative cultures that are caring, that are loving, that have a duty not just to ourselves but to our communities and to Earth. When things feel tough, there are these systemic changes that are needed and can happen - and that will happen if we have the hearts to dream big enough.

Daze Aghaji, Climate Justice Activist

Daze Aghaji is a London based Youth Climate Justice Activist who centres on regenerative cultures, intersectionality, radical social justice, and youth political engagement in her work. Described by The Guardian as “a ball of energy, conviction and warmth”, Daze’s advocacy for racial systemic change has led her to work with charities, institutions, governments, and grassroots change-makers globally. In 2019, she became the youngest candidate to stand in a European Parliamentary election and ran under the banner of a Climate and Ecological Emergency Independent to bring awareness to the need for political will in addressing the climate crisis. She has strong ties with the climate movement Extinction Rebellion since its early days and she was a founding member of the movement’s youth branch. Daze is a Creative Director at 1Earthrise Studio, a creative agency dedicated to communicating the climate crisis as well as an Artist in Residence at 2