Reykjavík Grapevine - 26.09.2014, Blaðsíða 15

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Minke Whale with cranberry & malt-sauce
White chocolate "Skyr" mousse with passion
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establish a better rental market. I think
we will put an emphasis on that.
Right, you talk about increasing the
number of rental flats by 2,500 to 3,000
in the next three to five years. That’s a lot.
How do you plan to do that?
With good planning, providing building
areas and plots in mid- and central Reyk-
javik and co-operation with student-
housing organisation, non-profit build-
ing companies and private developing
companies.
After housing, what are your second and
third most pressing tasks?
I would say housing, housing and hous-
ing.
Of course, we are doing a lot of other
important things that you see in the co-
alition’s joint platform. My focus will be
on housing and running the city’s financ-
es. We have a plan for the continued res-
cue of Reykjavík Energy that we will en-
act through 2016. We want to take green
steps in how the city develops. There are
always a lot of things on a city’s agenda,
a lot of issues, but we will try to focus on
these.
Reading through the coalition’s joint
platform [‘samstarfssáttmáli’], there’s a
lot of great stuff there, but it also seems
pretty abstract. There’s stuff like, “elimi-
nate the gender wage gap.” Do you have
concrete plans for all these things?
Yes. We didn’t put anything in there that
we don’t plan to deliver on.
Okay, so how about closing the gender
wage gap?
We have an extensive plan for this issue.
It has a lot to do with the extra payments
for working overtime and driving, for in-
stance, which seems to make up much of
the difference in salaries. We have anal-
ysed that, have a plan in place, and want
to do our utmost to execute it.
I read in the coalition’s platform that you
want to build a bike rental system. How
realistic is that?
A lot of cities are doing it very well. We
want to plug into that. We see BSÍ as a
hub. Big bus lines could come in there
from the suburbs, there you have the bike
rental, hubs at the universities and big
work places. You could even connect it to
the big hubs in the suburbs. Picture your-
self living in the suburb, taking your bike
to the hub, leaving it there, taking the
bus, then picking up a bike that you share
with thousands of other people, taking it
to the university, leaving it there, picking
up another one back to the bus or even
biking home and leaving it there at the
hub where you pick up your own bike.
This is the vision.
It’s a great vision.
Yeah, if you think about it, this area
around BSÍ and downtown Reykjavík,
this is our own Denmark. Here you have
all of the biggest work places in Iceland
and most of the tourists. And it's flat. So it
should work out.
What about bike paths?
We have been building them up and we
say in the platform that we want to con-
tinue doing that. We want to be a first-
class city for bikes.
People seemed to be really unhappy with
the bike path on Hofsvallagata.
Well, the birds liked it. [Laughs]
Is it here to stay?
No, it was just thought of as an experi-
mental thing. We have to have space to
do things that are seen as wild, kind of to
get the debate going. We can even allow
ourselves to make mistakes, when we
are finding out the right spots, squares,
and the right design. That is actually a
method used by a lot of cities called ”The
Meanwhile Strategy.” That is, you do
something inexpensive temporarily, to
try out public spaces. Will it work? What
elements of it worked?
What worked on Hofsvallagata is that
we managed to slow down traffic, which
was the main goal actually. But did we
make people happy? I’m not really sure
about that, and of course we also want
people to be happy. We want slow traffic
on Hofsvallagata and happy people.
15
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 15 — 2014