The Final Day of The President's Conference

October 23rd 2009
So the deal that KIVUNIM made with us was as follows. They wanted us to experience the conference but also to attend classes. So, if you went Wednesday morning and missed language classes then you were not allowed to go on Thursday morning. I had gone Wednesday morning so I couldn't go until the afternoon panels on Thursday.
I went to a panel entitled "Tomorrow's Cities: How can We Build Sustainable and Functioning Cities". It was absolutely fantastic. A lot of talk about sustainable living, and how to achieve it, and what steps are being taken around the world. Plus we met the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, her name is Naomi Tzur, and she is hopefully going to come talk to KIVUNIM at some point this year.
Nir Barkat- The mayor of Jerusalem was the moderator for this panel.
Shai Agassi- The founder of Better Place and the main man in the Electric Car idea in Israel. He gave us the statistic that more people are killed from problems relating to the emissions from cars than car accidents. Thus it is imperative that transportation be revolutionized to not have emissions. Vibrant cities get congested, because the more popular a place becomes the more people drive into see it, thus creating more traffic, and more pollution.
Beto Richa- Current Mayor of Curitiba, the pioneer city of Sustainable living in the world (Curitiba is in Brazil). Richa mainly was advertising tourism for his country and spoke very little about what strides he had made, and what strides his city had made.
Jamie Lerner- Former mayor of Curitiba and former Governor of the Parana region, which is the state that Curitiba is in. This man was easily the most interesting and accomplished man on the panel. He was one of the pioneers in achieving the level of sustainability in Curitiba. Some of what he had done; a complex and widespread bus system that had three qualities. The first was its accessibility, bus stops were everywhere and everyone was able to get on the bus, able bodied and disabled alike. The second was its size, each bus held about 300 people, making public transportation much more admirable. The third quality was that no matter where you wanted to go, and what time you got to a bus stop a bus would be there in under a minute. The transportation system was so vast that you never had to wait longer than a minute to get on a bus. Lerner also mentioned the possible implementation of these cars or rather carts in the city. Similar to bike rentals in Montreal a person could go and rent one of these cars and drive it around, then simply drop it off at another rental area. Public transportation again. These cars were very small, smaller than a Smart car, about 6 of them could fit in the space of a Volkswagen Passat. There was also talk of a future more vast subway system than the already existing bus system. There's a lot more that he said, this is merely of a sample of the kind of things that can be done.
Jeanne Mulgrav- Social Planning of Youth and Community Development Commission in NYC which provides money to youth themed NGOs. Unfortunately she really didn't talk about anything that had to deal with Sustainability, just what her job entailed and about how much they help kids. Which is great and all, but this panel was not the place for it.
Bob Watson- Spoke yesterday at the environmental panel. Today he talked about the importance of asking the right question. Figuring out what needs to be done, how to get from point A to point B and how to do in the most effective way possible.