Multigenerational Places: Newcastle

What role can the buildings, spaces, homes, neighbourhoods and high streets of the city of Newcastle play in creating opportunities for connection and collaboration across ages and generations? What role can communities play in shaping and curating these spaces, and how can we bring people of all ages into the design of our built environment in order to create more multigenerational spaces for connection?

Multigenerational Places: Newcastle will create a dynamic space to explore these questions through both an interactive student exhibition and a talk from The Glass-House Chief Executive Sophia de Sousa.

The interactive exhibition will showcase a student design competition co-curated by The Glass-House and Newcastle University. Students will share and invite you to test their co-designed ideas for activities to engage members of the community (of all ages) in design and placemaking projects. You, the participating public, will help us assess their ideas and judge the competition. The best ideas and projects will be shared by The Glass-House and partners through the Multigenerational Places Manifesto, which will capture voices, ideas and recommendations from across the series.

Sophia de Sousa will then explore with the audience how we can best activate citizens of all ages as contributors and collaborators in designing and enlivening more multigenerational cities, towns and neighbourhoods. This will be an active space for you to contribute to The Glass-House’s national conversation aimed at informing and innovating culture, education, policy and practice.

Multigenerational Places: Newcastle is a collaboration between The Glass-House Community Led Design, Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Landscape and Planning and The Farrell Centre.

All are welcome at this event. No specific experience or expertise is required to join in. We believe that our events only benefit from a wide mix of voices, interests and experiences.

This is a free event but places are limited.

About WEdesign 2025/26: Contributing to a National Conversation

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 other ages, and how this might benefit us as a society.

Through a series of free 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.

Find out more about the full 2025/26 Multigenerational Places programme here.

Multigenerational Places is a collaboration between The Glass-House Community Led Design and: Glasgow School of Art & Missing in Architecture (Glasgow); University of Sheffield, Live Works & Israac Somali Community Association(Sheffield); UCL Bartlett (London), Newcastle University & The Farrell Centre (Newcastle); Arup (Practice); and Intergenerational National Network (Think Pieces).