About us
We are a purpose-not-profit driven company that emerged from an EU funded research project focused on understanding what urban resilience means in practice.
Space Engagers was founded by Dr Aoife Corcoran and Dr Philip Crowe in 2016. That same year we started work on our first online participatory mapping platform with support from Social Innovation Fund Ireland.
The work of the Space Engagers collective is inspired by Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a founding father of the town planning movement. Like Geddes, we understand that towns and cities are made up of multiple interdependent social and ecological systems, and that to make them more resilient and sustainable we need quality data, joined up thinking, new ways of doing things, and the support and input of communities at all stages. This informs the approach to all our work.
TEAM
Dr Philip Crowe
Dr Philip Crowe is a practitioner, researcher, educator and entrepreneur in architecture, urbanism and citizen engagement, always seeking to make a tangible and positive impact in addressing critical and systemic challenges. Philip has a masters’ degree in applied carbon management and a PhD that explored Patrick Geddes’ work in Dublin between 1911 and 1914 as a precedent for the application of urban resilience thinking to the city. Philip is a Lecturer and Assistant Professor in Climate Responsive Design in UCD.
Dr Aoife Corcoran
Dr Aoife Corcoran is a geographer who is fascinated by the potential for geospatial technology to engage citizens with their place and local issues. This interest has evolved through a masters’ in Coastal Zone Management and GIS and a PhD that explored the role of geospatial information and communications technology in the context of urban resilience and sustainability. Aoife currently works at The Housing Agency in the area of sustainability and sustainable communities.
Dr Alan Mee
Dr Alan Mee is an experienced practitioner, researcher, critic and educator in all fields related to architecture and urbanism. Alan is a Fellow of the RIAI and has a PhD that explored, evaluated and visualised spatial complexity of urban sites for description, prescription and design.
Alan splits his time between teaching and research in urban design in UCD and working on the EU +CityxChange project with Space Engagers.
Dr Madeleine Lyes
Dr Madeleine Lyes specialises in policy-oriented research and community engagement. She has a background in critical urbanism, with a PhD focused on the development of urbanity in New York City at mid-century. She has worked on worldwide diaspora engagement, developing recommendations which fed into government policy, and was founder of City Intersections, an urban forum for public engagement around issues facing Dublin city. She is based in Limerick.
Orla Murphy
Orla Murphy is an architect, educator and collaborative designer, motivated by the transformative potential of spatial design. She co-curated Free Market, an international exhibition exploring the public space of market towns, which represented Ireland at La Biennale di Venezia 2018 and subsequently toured nationally in 2019. Dividing her time between Westport and Dublin, Orla is an Assistant Professor in Architecture in UCD and collaborates on research and design projects through her practice, Custom. She is a member of the UCD Earth Institute, a board member of the Edible Landscape Project, and co-presenter of the RTÉ documentary series, Building Ireland.