Headford Town Team wants to create a serious conversation about the future of their Main Street – a conversation that includes everyone in the community. Their concern is that so much focus has been on traffic management rather than about living, about playing, about dwelling, about thriving businesses, and about simply enjoying their Main Street. This is a main street that should be appreciated and celebrated as an Architectural Conservation Area with most of its 18th and 19th Century street structure and sense of enclosure intact.
Reimagine Headford sees architect Deirdre Greaney paired with their active and creative community who are ready to try new ways of enjoying their main street, celebrating its qualities, and trialing solutions to its challenges. The aim is to work as a community to create a new vision for the street, allowing them to guide the future development of their town.
Deirdre Greaney is an Architect + Urban Designer working in architecture, urban design, place-making,
research and education.
Over the past 18 years she has worked independently and in award-winning small and large-scale multi-
disciplinary design and research practices in Ireland, Finland, New York and The Netherlands on projects that addressed place-making, the civic realm, housing and the development of social, community and cultural infrastructure. From active engagement in research and practice, Deirdre has experience delivering projects that transfer knowledge in support of economic, social and cultural development.
Her research focuses on: urban design and the contemporary Irish Town; urban renewal and extensions;
social space and collective territories. Irish in focus, framed in a European context, her research has
been disseminated and published in Ireland, France, Italy, Portugal, and The Netherlands.
Deirdre was a former Course Director of the Architecture Programmes at Ulster University, sat on The
Royal Society of Ulster Architects (RSUA) Council and was a Member of the Northern Ireland MinisterialAdvisory Group (MAG) for Architecture and the Built Environment 2014-2018. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA); Member of The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (MRIAI) and sits on the All Ireland Architectural Research Group (AIARG) Steering Committee.
A native of Galway, back living in the West of Ireland, Deirdre’s current work centres on developing the
first programme of Architecture in the ‘Creative West’ at IT Sligo Yeats Academy of Arts, Design and Architecture, where she lectures on Architecture and Urban Design since 2018. Her interests are in multi- and inter-disciplinary collaborative projects that engage the arts, design, architecture and the region; create conditions for openness and reimagine place and building on the Irish Atlantic Edge of Europe.
BSc. Arch, BArch, MSc. Urban Design, MRIAI, FHEA
