Our planet is becoming increasingly crowded, with growing populations causing people, animals, and plant life to compete for space and resources. Historical factors and socio-economic disparities continue to affect access to and ownership of land.
Sharing Place: The Debate will bring people together to propose more equitable ways of sharing our places and spaces, as well as creating places to share experiences, skills and other things we value through thoughtful placemaking.
This is the first event in our 2024/25 WEdesign programme, Sharing Place, which will kick-start our national conversation on the series theme.
Using the theme of Sharing Place as our starting point, our panel of speakers will offer their thoughts and provocations on our series theme. Discussion will then open up to the whole virtual room.
Our speakers for this event are:
Nana Biamah-Ofosu
Director, Yaa Projects
Nana is an architect, writer, educator and curator. She is the director of YAA Projects, an architecture practice exploring counter-histories, material and diasporic culture through making, speaking, and writing architecture. Nana is an experienced educator; she is a Unit Tutor at the Architectural Association and a lecturer at Kingston School of Art and has also lectured widely in the UK and internationally. She has served in the juries of several awards, including the RIBA Silver Medal, and is a member of the RIBA Awards Working Group and the Soane Medal Committee. As a writer, she explores the social, political, and cultural impact of design and architecture, engaging with contemporary practitioners to define new paths towards a more critical, expansive, and inclusive discourse on the built environment.
Yashmin Harun BEM
Founder & Chair, Muslimah Sports Association
Yashmin is a British sports advocate and the founder of the Muslimah Sports Association (MSA). With a Master’s degree in Global Public Policy, Yashmin is dedicated to empowering Muslim women through sport by creating inclusive opportunities and breaking cultural barriers. Under her leadership, the MSA has become a key organisation for promoting female participation in sports. Yashmin holds several Board Director positions at other sport organisations and is a Non-Executive Director at Charity Bank. In recognition of her impactful work, Yashmin was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) for ‘Services to Increasing BAME Female Representation in Sports‘. She is also a strong advocate for women’s leadership and representation in the sporting world and has recently started a podcast: EmpowerHer Play, to discuss the issues of representation and diversity in sport and the community.
Pat Scrutton
Co-ordinator, Intergenerational National Network
Pat Scrutton has a background in community development. She retired in 2009, but continues to co-ordinate the Intergenerational National Network in Scotland. In recent years, she has also become involved in a number of research projects related to active ageing and ageing in place, always from an intergenerational perspective, with the Universities of Dundee, Stirling and Glasgow, and Heriot-Watt University.
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Zac Tudor
Associate Director for Place Resilience, Arup
Zac’s creative work has been founded around 26 years of leading the practical application of beautiful and multifunctional urban landscapes. As a leading Landscape Architect his focus is on designing healthy resilient towns and cities, which includes the award-winning Grey to Green schemes that build sustainability and climate change resilience into the streets and spaces of Sheffield. He uses research based urban greening, blue infrastructure, and multifunctional design approaches to create adaptive urban centres that help benefit and bring together people and nature. His design leadership embraces a collaborative and practical approach between disciplines that helps balance the benefits for a water sensitive landscape that fully considers the value of place and embraces nature recovery.
The event will be chaired by The Glass-House Chief Executive, Sophia de Sousa.
Join us for this free online debate open to all audiences, which aims to create a safe space for discussion and debate and to challenge the status quo of how we shape our places and spaces.
This is a free event but places are limited. To secure your place, follow the ‘Book now’ button.
About WEdesign
WEdesign is The Glass-House’s annual series of free interactive public events, held online and in-person in cities across the UK, where we explore collaborative design in placemaking through discussion, debate and playful co-design activities.
Our online events create provocative spaces for conversation and are open to participants across the UK and further afield. Our Think Pieces bring together a series of blogs from a range of voices to explore the WEdesign series theme.
WEdesign in-person events are safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively to generate ideas and solutions, co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice through hands-on making activities, discussion and debate. These events are co-facilitated by students from our WEdesign Student Programme, in collaboration with our partner universities in cities across the UK.
WEdesign is supported by the Ove Arup Foundation.
Find out more and book a place at one of our WEdesign Sharing Place events here.
Visit our WEdesign page to find out more about the WEdesign Programme and how we work with partner universities, students and external contributors here.
