Multigenerational Places: WEDesign event
This co-design event took place on Tuesday 10 March with The Glass-house community led design and our second year students
18 March 2026
Multigenerational Places: Newcastle is part of the 2025/26 Glass-House WEdesign programme, which brings people together across communities, ages, sectors and disciplines to explore how we can create more spaces to connect with people of different ages, and how this might benefit us as a society.
Through a series of public co-design events, think pieces and a student design competition, this year’s WEdesign series will be a space to co-produce a national Multigenerational Places Manifesto, collecting voices, ideas and recommendations for shaping more multigenerational places across the UK. How does this play out in the buildings, spaces, homes, neighbourhoods and high streets that we inhabit?
This co-design event was held on Tuesday 10 March at the Boiler House, followed by a talk from Sophia de Sousa, Glasshouse chief executive, on Engaging Communities in Shaping Multigenerational Places.
For the co-design event, students designed engagement prompts and activities that were aimed at stimulating conversations about outdoor spaces for teenage girls, young people’s safety travelling to school as well as walking, wheeling, and cycling space for all bodies.
The WEdesign events are linked to the second year "participation" module which students on the BA Architeture and Urban Planning and BA Urban Planning can opt to study. The module sees students working on local matters of concern with people and groups they refer to as “city actors” within the community. As part of this module, students work in groups to co-design engagement activities to spark conversations with local people.
In February, The Glass-House did a workshop with the students on design engagement and created a design competition to help inspire and activate the students to co-design engagement activities. The shared aim is that, as well as contributing to the students’ learning journey, the challenge will generate ideas and approaches that can also be shared beyond Newcastle with both practitioners and communities.
Multigenerational Places: Newcastle became a forum and a safe space, for students to both showcase and test their engagement ideas, and the associated props and prompts, with the public. Following the event, the student engagement activities were exhibited at the Farrell Centre for four days, so that people could drop in and interact with them at different times of the day and week. Following the event and exhibition, students will have the opportunity to further refine and test these engagement activities before submitting them for their module and for The Glass-House design competition.
