Written by:
Guest Author
by Lucy Natarajan and Martha Mingay
In this blog, Professor Lucy Natarajan and Lecturer Martha Mingay reflect on UCL Bartlett School of Planning‘s collaboration with The Glass-House on the 2025/26 WEdesign series, Multigenerational Places.
UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning has an established history of co-delivering teaching with The Glass-House to deliver creative and critical skills in participatory and community-led urban design, planning and placemaking, complemented by student engagement with their collaborative urban practice and public space projects in London. WEdesign offers students a complementary extra-curricular extended opportunity to develop facilitation skills and confidence for community engagement and consultation design with the public.
Sustained student enthusiasm in the programme is long evident in years of high interest from first year undergraduate to postgraduate students, culminating in thoughtful reflections on their training and perceptions of real-word challenges to participation and engagement. The programme has repeatedly supported students to develop their interests in participatory and co-productive planning for both independent research projects and careers enabling community-led planning practice.
It was a real pleasure to be part of the Glass-House’s WEdesign series in 2026, Multigenerational Places. This year’s theme really resonated as university life brings diverse age groups together. This angle is rarely discussed, but as students, educators, and researchers of the built environment, we encounter assumptions of roles and age. By contrast, as we saw at the event, people are often wearing different hats literally and metaphorically!
The discussions were a demonstration of how we support each other, as we change and the world changes around us. I was particularly struck by two points. First, how whimsy can help create human connections, and invigorate creativity in place-making and adaptable environments. Secondly, that while diverse age groups were represented and people made space for everyone to join in, there was no insistence on categorising people by age.
This event was welcoming and joyful, as ever. It was a real celebration of the skills and spirit of students at the Bartlett School of Planning. They brought strength to group interactions as well as insights, on the value of bringing diverse cohorts together.
You can read more about Multigenerational Places: London and the ideas that emerged here.
About the Authors
Dr Lucy Natarajan is an Associate Professor based at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. She has a background in quantitative and qualitative research, and conducted major research programmes for stakeholders in the public, private and charitable sectors. She founded the Place Alliance and Territoire Europe, and her reseearch helped establish the UK’s Low Income Diet & Nutrition Survey, the Habitat Professionals Forum’s International Participatory Charter, the Global Planners Network capacity studies and the ECTP-CEU’s Charter for Participatory Democracy via Spatial Planning. She is currently editor of the journal Built Environment and the European Journal of Spatial Development, as well as Collège Solidaire member of Territoire Europe and Steering Group member of the UK2070 Commission amongst other roles.
Martha Mingay is a Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. She has a background in London’s metropolitan politics and completed her PhD exploring community land trust activism in 2022 at the University of Sheffield. Her teaching focuses on urban politics, affordable housing delivery and participatory, inclusive and sustainable urban planning.