Interview with Sophie Dyring and Samantha Donnelly on A Design Guide for Older Women’s Housing

ABSTRACT

In 2022 Sophie Dyring and Samantha Donnelly published A Design Guide for Older Women’s Housing.¹ The guide addresses older women’s housing needs through the lens of design and architecture and places women and their needs at the heart of the design process. It is based on conversations with women about different housing types and their experiences of space, safety, belonging and connection. Sophia Maalsen and Cathy Smith met with the authors to talk about women, housing, design, and architecture.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• home
• homelessness
• gender
• design
• older women

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A Design Guide for Older Women’s Housing formed part of the project, ‘Unequivocal Women’s Housing: A post-occupancy study of housing types for women over 45 at risk of homelessness in suburban Melbourne,’ that was funded by the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation. The work was completed under the auspices of Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, and the Monash University XYX Lab, in association with Schored Projects.

2 In March 1974 members of Sydney Women's Liberation, led by Anne Summers with Jennifer Dakers and Bessie Guthrie, took over two adjoining vacant houses in the Sydney suburb of Glebe and established the Elsie Women's Refuge Night Shelter as Australia's first emergency safe haven for women and children subject to domestic violence. For further detail, see Summers (1999).

3 The report is entitled Housing For Women Over 45: A best practice report on housing types for women at risk of homelessness in Melbourne and is available is available from: https://www.lmcf.org.au/getmedia/36d31c32-1eb4-4402-b2b8-605fd70aff10/Housing-for-women-over-45-a-best-practice-report.pdf.aspx.

4 AHURI is the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. https://www.ahuri.edu.au/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophia Maalsen

Sophia Maalsen is a senior lecturer and former ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She is interested in the way digital technologies mediate and reconfigure home, housing, and the urban, with a particular emphasis on how this is experienced across gender and other intersectional identities.

Cathy Smith

Cathy Smith is an Australian registered architect, interior designer, and Senior Lecturer in Interior Architecture at UNSW. Operating at the nexus of industry and academia, she is a passionate advocate for policies and practices promoting inclusion in the built environment. Her research and teaching focuses on creative placemaking, meanwhile property use, DIY procurement and urban inequality.