Multigenerational Places: Practice

Designing multigenerational places requires design and development teams to draw on the knowledge, creativity and experience of multiple age groups. Yet when it comes to working in practice and with communities, built environment practitioners often find themselves locked into working both within and with particular age demographics.

This special edition WEdesign breakfast event will bring together different generations of built environment professionals to reimagine how practices can structure their staff teams, shape internal research and development programmes, and ultimately develop more engaged processes to work with communities across generations.

Through this interactive co-design workshop, we’ll look at the theme of Multigenerational Practice through discussion, debate and hands-on making activities. Using the lenses of strategic insight, specialist knowledge, efficient delivery and knowledge transfer, we’ll work together to co-design recommendations for getting the most from multigenerational practice and better engaging with multigenerational communities.

This free event is open to practitioners working within design, development and regeneration, across sectors and roles. We encourage you to attend with a colleague who represents a different age group (and ideally also team) within your organisation.

The workshop will start promptly at 9:00am, with arrivals & breakfast from 8:30. Guests are welcome to stay for networking and refreshments after the workshop until 11:00.

Multigenerational Places: Practice is a collaboration between The Glass-House Community Led Design and Arup.

This is a free event but places are limited.

About WEdesign 2025/26: Contributing to a National Conversation

Multigenerational Places: Practice 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 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).