Nicholas You
Nicholas You is Senior Advisor, Policy & Strategic Planning, at the Office of the Executive Director of UN-HABITAT - Best Practices and Local Leadership, Kenya. He is an architect and economist by training. After working in design in Europe in the 1970s he participated in implementing housing and urban development projects in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He joined UN-Habitat in 1982 to help establish municipal training and leadership development programs worldwide, with a particular focus on public-private partnerships, financial management and environmental planning and management.
In 1994 he joined the Secretariat for the Habitat II Conference which resulted in 1996 in the Habitat Agenda - the global plan of action for sustainable human settlement development. As a follow-up to the Conference, he established the Best Practices and Local Leadership Program, a global network of advocacy and capacity-building institutions dedicated to the transfer of lessons learned from best practices in improving the living environment.
After running the program for ten years, he was appointed in 2005 as the Special Advisor for Strategic Planning for UN-HABITAT and in 2007 as Senior Policy and Planning Advisor. During this time he led the preparation of a six-year medium-term Strategic and Institutional Plan for the organization. He is the author/editor of 5 books and numerous articles on housing, urban management and sustainable development and from 2000 to 2004 a visiting professor at the University Federico II in Naples. In 2004 he was commissioned by the Universal Forum on Cultures (Barcelona) to serve as the curator and chief designer of a major exhibition entitled the “Best Practices City and Water Exhibit” that formed the flagship exhibit of the 141-day Forum.
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Meeting of the Minds is carbon neutral. The carbon emissions from building energy use, printed materials, and waste have been balanced out using ISO 14064-part 2 carbon offsets.