Following on from last year’s event, Bealtaine, Create and the Irish Architecture Foundation are delighted to deliver the third and final conference in this series which explores how collaborative and interdisciplinary arts practice engages with key issues impacting on our rights to adequate housing, public space and cultural lives as we get older. This is not my Beautiful House III takes the concept of hospitality as its philosophical point of departure. It could be said that the purest form of hospitality hinges on an attempt to create equal status for both the host and hosted. If we take the host to mean societies and the hosted to mean citizens, in particular older citizens, we can understand the need to create hospitable spaces that adapt to our needs as we age, as opposed to inhospitable ones.

Speakers include Equality & Human Rights Expert Niall Crowley; Senior Architect, Limerick City and County Council, Rosie Webb; Choreographer and Director Coisceim BROADREACH, Phillipa Donnellan; Lecturer Irish Centre for Social Gerontology, NUI Galway, Professor Eamon O Shea; artist and the founder of Asylum Archive Vukasin Nedelijkovic; architect and co-director of The Abhaile Project Ciarán Ferrie; and founder and former chair of Age & Opportunity and former president of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, Mamo McDonald. The conference will be chaired by Social Gerontologist and Lecturer School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, Queens University, Belfast, Dr. Gemma Carney.

The event is aimed at policy makers, researchers, architects, artists, planners, community workers and older people active in housing issues as well as the general public.