Ireland's population is ageing at more than twice the EU average rate, yet over 80% of older adults live in privately-owned homes that public policy has largely failed to address. This paper presents findings from an MPhil research study examining how older homeowners in suburban Dublin can be empowered to adapt and re-use their existing homes — to metamorphose them — to meet their evolving needs, in line with Ireland's stated ageing-in-place policy.

Central to the paper is an evaluation of the Ava Housing model, a pilot scheme supported under Ireland's Housing for All strategy for innovative housing redesign for older persons. The Ava model reconfigures family-sized, suburban homes so that the homeowner relocates to a self-contained ground-floor living unit while creating a rental unit on the upper floor. This "downsizing-in-situ" approach enables older homeowners to remain in their home and community, reduce maintenance burdens, generate rental income, and gain companionship — without displacement.

Drawing on mixed-methods research including cross-sectoral policy analysis and semi-structured interviews with older homeowners — including a participant in the Ava pilot — the paper argues that Ireland's housing policy remains constrained by a "right-sizing" narrative that ignores the deep emotional, financial, and place-based attachments of older persons to their homes. Structural barriers including fragmented grant eligibility, absent financing mechanisms, and inadequate advisory support undermine agency, particularly for low-income homeowners.

The paper's contribution is to demonstrate how a replicable, scalable adaptation model, grounded in lived experience, can reframe planning and housing policy debates — moving from passive care narratives towards enabling genuine choice and dignity in later life.

Neighbourhood environments play an important role in shaping health, wellbeing, and opportunities for social connection in later life. A key challenge for policymakers, planners, and service providers is designing age-friendly environments that respond to older people’s diverse social and mobility needs, while recognising the health and spatial inequalities that make participation easier for some groups than others. Although planning has an important role to play in supporting ageing well in place, policy frameworks often rely on standardised indicators and age-friendly checklists that can overlook the uneven, lived geographies of later life.

This paper presents findings from ENOLA (Enhancing Neighbourhood Environments for Older Adult Social Connectedness), a UK-based research project funded by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and undertaken in collaboration with Re-engage, a charity working to reduce social isolation among older people. The study combined creative, qualitative and spatial methods, including interviews, social world mapping, and go-along interviews, to explore how older adults experience and navigate their local neighbourhoods.

Findings are presented through a series of spatial stories that overlay participants’ existing and ideal social worlds, revealing how everyday environmental conditions enable or constrain opportunities for social connection. The analysis highlights the relational and emotional dimensions of place that are often absent from conventional planning evidence. The paper argues that spatial storytelling offers a valuable approach for incorporating lived experience into planning for ageing, moving beyond deficit-based narratives and supporting more responsive, place-based interventions to reduce inequalities and enhance social connectedness in later life.

Place-based knowledge, which is rooted in informal spaces and their users’ experiences, is essential for co-envisioning planning alternatives and translating them into action beyond formal planning systems. This paper examines the Saving Pang Jai Campaign, a self-mobilised, community-led initiative in mid-2010s Hong Kong that sought to preserve and reimagine the Yen Chow Street Temporary Hawker Bazaar (Pang Jai), a 44-year-old fabric market facing demolition for public housing. The case turns on two competing ways of knowing the same place. To the government, Pang Jai was a public space temporarily designated for a hawker bazaar, subject to the state’s overriding right to resume the land for redevelopment without acknowledging the place-based values; to its hawkers, users and the wider community, Pang Jai was a lived ‘community commons’ where decades of hawking had built social capital and linked fabric industries to the neighbourhood. Through participatory workshops, advocacy and hawkers’ attempts, hawkers — many unlicensed and excluded from formal decision-making — empowered themselves with the community to co-develop an alternative vision for the bazaar as a commons, which also became an ‘intellectual commons’ within the hawker community and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Drawing on interviews in 2019 and 2025 and ongoing observations, this paper argues that community-led planning enabled hawkers to assert their rights through place-based knowledge and to shape community-apsired planning futures beyond government-defined planning frameworks and decisions. Although the market was forcibly relocated in January 2023 and some elements of the community plan ‘tactically’ executed by the government, Pang Jai’s planning process shows how international cases can reshape what counts as legitimate planning knowledge — offering UK and Irish community-led planning an insurgent counterpart to statutory models and a way of seeing the ‘informal’ and ‘temporary’ spaces as a valuable resource that planners may overlook.