Sharing Place: 2024/25 WEdesign Event Series

Sharing Place is our theme for The Glass-House 2024/25 WEdesign series.

Our planet is becoming increasingly crowded, with growing populations causing people, animals, and plant life to compete for space and resources. Historical factors and socio-economic disparities continue to affect access to and ownership of land.

In the UK, we are experiencing a housing crisis while over a quarter of a million homes remain vacant, and one-person households make up 30% of all residences (1). Despite being 5th on the National Net Wealth register (2), there are approximately 300,000 homeless people in England(3). If distributed evenly, there would be 30 square metres of green space per person in Great Britain, yet 6.1 million people do not have access to green space within a 10-minute walk (4).

We cannot change the past, but we can shape the future.

Sharing Place will bring people together to propose more equitable ways of sharing our places and spaces, as well as creating places to share experiences, skills and other things we value, through thoughtful placemaking.

What are the policies and practices we can put in place to enable development which focus on communal health and well-being rather than individual wealth and property?

We will also explore creating spaces for sharing. How can we develop infrastructure to support new approaches to sharing resources, goods, and skills? What spaces and programmes can we integrate into our communities to foster a sharing economy and bring people together?

WEdesign is The Glass-House’s annual series of free interactive public events, held online and in-person in cities across the UK, where we explore collaborative design in placemaking through discussion, debate and playful co-design activities.

Our online events create provocative spaces for conversation and are open to participants across the UK and further afield. Our Think Pieces bring together a series of blogs from a range of voices to explore the WEdesign series theme.

WEdesign in-person events are safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively to generate ideas and solutions, co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice through hands-on making activities, discussion and debate. These events are co-facilitated by students from our WEdesign Student Programme, in collaboration with our partner universities in cities across the UK.

To find out more about the WEdesign Programme, visit the WEdesign page on The Glass-House website.

WEdesign is kindly supported by the Ove Arup Foundation.

WEdesign events are free, but places are limited.