Yasmin Shariff was born in East Africa and trained at the Architectural Association and Bartlett School of Architecture, London. She is an architect-developer and director of Dennis Sharp Architects with experience of working in the public, private, and academic sectors at a senior level.

Yasmin champions environmental and sustainable design throughout her work. She won a major EU research award for sustainable design and collaborated with several leading universities and institutions across Europe to showcase best practice.  She was responsible for the first RIBA conference on the subject– Equinox 2000. As a non-executive director of the East of England Development Agency, she initiated sustainable regeneration projects including the award-winning Landmark East competition and First Sight Gallery.

Yasmin has significant experience in school design and community projects involving diverse stakeholders. Her project, AA-XX generated considerable global and national interest in the work of women architects from the Architectural Association.  Yasmin contributed to the UIA Congress in Copenhagen on sustainable design and is currently working on Climate-Streets – a manual on how to morph ailing town centers into dynamic cores for planet-friendly lifestyles.

Designer Lifestyles for Planet-Friendly Living

Now more than ever in the history of humankind we inhabit a man-made environment and now more than ever this man-made environment needs intelligent design to limit the destruction caused by our consumption. It would seem to be obvious that architects should lead the strategy for forging planet-friendly living but in most G20 countries (responsible for 78% of greenhouse gas emissions) city architects are non-existent and where they do exist their brief is limited.

Intelligent design can support lifestyle changes that reduce consumption and emissions but policymakers are stuck in the paradigm of starkitects and suburbia - a model that has little chance of tackling serious climate change challenges - in fact, they contribute to the problem. The benefits of cleaner and more energy-efficient environments are being scuppered by lifestyles that are not planet-friendly and according to the UN, lifestyles are responsible for an estimated two-thirds of global emissions.

Starting from a hands-on experience of building arcologies in Arizona this presentation will showcase examples of intelligent design that go beyond designing physical space - penetrating social, cultural and natural environments to reduce emissions and consumption.