Alastair is an urban designer currently undertaking postgraduate research at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge. He previously worked in construction, regeneration and urban policy.

He co-founded mantownhuman who published Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture.  He co-edited The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated (Pluto Press, 2008), and writes for the journal Urban Design, and magazines including Blueprint, World Architecture, Building Design and the Big Issue.

Alastair was convener of the mantownhuman debates Challenging the Orthodoxies, the London architecture debates. At University of Cambridge he devised and convened the conference Minimum… or Maximum Cities?

Current projects include the edited collection Better City, Better Life: The Challenges of an Urban World for publication in 2011, and Critical Subjects, the national Architecture and Design Winter School taking place in London in November 2010.