TEDxWakefield: Living within our means?
Sustainability, Skills and Behaviour Change

According to Defra we currently consume 30% more natural resources across Europe than the Earth can replenish -- but whilst some of us actively make sustainable lifestyle choices, how do we encourage everyone to adopt more sustainable behaviours?

How can we effectively inspire the environmental behavioural and cultural changes that we urgently need? Is it through a combination of skills development, policy, cultural changes and behavioural factors? If so how do we find the right balance and how can we make this happen?

The latest TEDxWakefield event will explore how culture, institutional frameworks and infrastructure, as well as behavioural factors including knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes all contribute to and influence how we currently live. Our ultimate challenge in this age of environmental crisis and economic austerity is to foster lifestyles and behaviours that ensure we can 'live within our means'.


Greg Keeffe
Professor of Sustainable Architecture, Leeds School of Architecture, Landscape + Design Greg Keeffe is an academic and designer who originally trained as an engineer and has 25 years experience in sustainability, energy use and its impact on the design of built form and urban space. He currently holds the prestigious Downing Chair of Sustainable Architecture at the Leeds School of Architecture. Previously he was the Head of Design at the Manchester School of Architecture, and founder of the bioclimatic architecture labs. Over the past 20 years he has sought to develop a series of theoretical hypotheses about sustainability. Most of his work comes out of a free-thinking open-ended discussion about how things should be. Greg has extensive experience of working closely with architects and planners to develop exciting ways of re-invigorating the city through innovative sustainable interventions, informing his work on the sustainable city as synergistic super-organism. He is author of the book 'Means Means Means'; which develops a model of a new city, as a econose, of mutually compatible functional elements. http://www.gregkeeffe.co.uk/gregkeeffe/Intro.html

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