Our presenters ranged from community participants to local commissioning partners, as well as architects and special specialists. We would like to invite you to listen back to three of our guest presenters, via recordings from these online sessions.
Alan Mee will speak about building capacity for placemaking. Orla Murphy will speak about placemaking and the Irish Town. Emma Geoghegan will speak about accessibility and inclusion in Placemaking.
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Alan Mee is a built environment consultant, researcher, urban designer and architect working in urbanism, architecture, and education. He has published and spoken widely on spatial aspects of dramatic change in the Irish designed environment, and is a part-time Senior Lecturer in urban design at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, at University College Dublin. In 2017 he completed a PhD entitled: ‘Exploring, evaluating and visualising spatial complexity of urban sites’.
Emma Geoghegan is an architect, urban designer and educator engaged in the design of beautiful, purposeful and resilient places for people. Since 2007 her practice has focused on the design and delivery of residential, social care and educational buildings for people with a broad range of abilities and needs. In parallel, her research and teaching practice has been driven by a commitment to the social purpose of architecture and inclusive design principles and embedding this in architectural education.
From 2007-2017 Emma was a partner in MEME Architecture a collaborative design practice working on projects in the UK and Ireland. Since 2017 Emma has continued to work in collaborative private practice and consultancy work in the areas of social inclusion and accessibility alongside her role as Chair of the Bachelor of Architecture programme at TU Dublin. She was Chairperson of Carlow Arts Festival from 2016-2020 and is a board member of Arts and Disability Ireland.
Orla Murphy is an architect, lecturer in UCD School of Architecture Planning and Environmental Policy and co-director (with Philip Crowe) of UCD Centre for Irish Towns (CfIT). Orla’s practice and research is focused on rural Irish towns, their cultural identity and morphology, and the relationship between people and place. As a former recipient of the Arts Council’s Kevin Kieran Award, Orla published her research on towns in TOWN: Origins, Morphology and Future in 2012.
In 2018, Orla along with five colleagues co-curated Free Market, the Irish Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, with an exhibition that explored the past, present and future of public space in Irish towns. The exhibition toured to four towns: Castleblayney, Macroom, Mountmellick and Killmallock in 2019. Orla co-presents the RTÉ documentary series Building Ireland, now in its third series. She lives in Westport Co. Mayo and continues to advocate for towns as thriving people-centred urban places
