Former mayor of Reykjavik, Dagur B. Eggertsson, will tell a personal story of the transformation of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, were he was until recently one of the longest serving mayors in history. We will hear about how Reykjavik went from being the city with the most youth drinking, smoking and use of drugs during his years as a teenager, to having the lowest numbers in comparative studies and what lead to these results. And how that project and focus on city planning through the lens public health kept him in politics and out of medicine, his former profession. In short, we will get insight into the urban transformation of Reykjavik, the northern-most capital in the world, a key focus during his mayorship.
Dagur B. Eggertsson deputy mayor of Reykjavik
Dagur is a medical doctor and was one of the longest serving mayors of Reykjavik, 2014-2024. He has served as chairman of OECD Champion mayors for inclusive growth and has been active participant in numerous international projects and forums. Climate change, fair transition and climate adaption has been a strong focus in his work as mayor integrating climate issues with land use planning, transport and an inclusive housing strategy and public health in Reykjavik cities Masterplan and the Reykjavik Green Plan.
Dagur studied, trained and worked as a physician and also has a master’s degree in Human Rights and International Law from the University of Lund in Sweden. He is married to Arna Dogg Einarsdottir MD and they have four children.
hello everyone my name is Gil talosa and this is City for everyone the webinar where every the Tuesday I invite Fascinating People to share their stories on how to create cities that are more equal sustainable playful see experiences that all others can learn from not as on the computer that we copy and paste but yes to adapt and improve because every city is different I’ve been fortunate to have worked in over 350 cities all over the world small and large and in this one I have a special memory on the huge transformation today the topic is going to be the new rej the transformation of a young City and my guest is a fabulous person he’s a medical doctor who went into politics and fell in love with the possibility to actually improve people’s quality of life it’s Dr D Edon who as was mayor from 2014 to 2024 a period of huge transformations in the capital city of iseland so that was thank you very very much for having accepted the invitation and we have hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world from multiple backgrounds connected wanting to learn from you Mr the good egstone deputy mayor of R Welcome to our webinar thank you very much and uh it’s uh it’s an honor for me to be with you from Ravi and uh try and short time to to present the transformation of a young City well thank you and uh and thanks for the honor of of uh being with you uh you’re right I uh I was mayor from 2014 to uh January this year I’m now currently serving as Deputy Mayor but just to get the perspective this is re during night in the winter uh uh this is the capital of Iceland the northernmost capital in the world uh so we are Scandinavian country uh a welfare uh country uh but what’s peculiar is that uh the lion sheare of people live in or around raav around 82% of the population live within 1 hour’s driving distance in many Municipal municipalities but the Rik is the capital uh and you asked me to tell a little bit about myself well um I’m there in the front line in a white T-shirt quite proud uh because we had got some medals for soccer I’m the first uh mayor from the serbs in the history of uh reik and uh I actually think that you can just see from this picture the transformation that has uh been in the city of course my life started earlier uh I have a very smart mother and this is me uh she had this peculiar technique of holding me because the fact she was hiding is that I couldn’t raise my head H I was just too large or lazy uh but even that transformed so when I moved to my childhood neighborhood town uh I was like this and my parents brought the bicycles on the top of their car but at that time they were the odd ones out because nobody was biking in rikic but if this were were a lecture on Iceland I would uh show you the contrast uh Iceland went in 100 years from being one of the poorest nations in Europe to being one of the wealthiest that is because of a lot of things uh some natural resources good water and warm water in 1933 reik had smog because people were still using coal to heat up the houses but through that Century we hooked every house up to geothermal energy the gold that was under our feet that was uh A Century of developing and uh wealth didn’t come with it uh instantly uh but that has kept our Energy prices low all this time and 100% of electricity is produced in a Green Way in Iceland it has also brought T us quality of life and health even mental health you can see that in the neighborhood swimming pools every neighborhood has a public swimming pool and there icelanders meet not only to swim but to speak with each other we even have a geothermal Beach yes the rest water is partly used to uh heat up the beach uh but this is actually one of the best days uh of the year because we don’t have uh that uh extravagant heat in Iceland uh as you could realize from the name but my story yes I transformed these are teenagers that uh I grew up with and became a medical doctor I was never going into politics actually I was and and had a wonderful position lined up in Stockholm where I was going to study infectious diseases and pandemics 20 years ago but life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans and uh when me and my wife who is a real doctor got married this picture was accidentally taken and on the signpost above us you see H an arrow pointing to the City Hall Rus as we call it and that was some kind of Faith because I was hijacked into politics so I decided to try it out because the first female mayor of ravik that broke many glass ceilings got me into it and and I was thrilled by the number and power of strong women in ravic politics this is some of them from where I was coming is this picture this is actually at 3 at night I was a teenager then and we the kids flocked out in the streets of the city center drinking and doing stuff I remember having taken care of one of my friends in an Alle close there was where he was puking yes these were the years when Icelandic teenagers were increasing their intake of uh alcohol they smoked and tried uh narcotics more and more every year and these powerful women in rikic politics decided to turn that around and to cut a long story short we did not just as politicians but as our society H so in 13 years Ric went from having the highest numbers of teenage drinking smoking and use of drugs to the lowest numbers in Europe and the interesting part of that story is that it was evidence-based so we know why we went from a policy that can be framed to tell teenagers to say no to drugs it turns out that the conventional method of sending in an old drug star that tells about their drug life and how they got out of it actually was an advertisement for drugs and another uh strategy was needed we analyzed the whole uh environment of the kids uh growing up and defined risk factors and protective factors and by strengthening the protective factors and working against the risk factors we got those numbers down time spent with parents the here group and participation in sports and uh leisure activities extracurricular activities were the keys and we did a lot to uh enforce this we identified a voucher system a Leisure card that gives uh families money to pay for sports or everything else and gives us data to know who’s participating and who’s not so we know what they’re doing in and in what field and in what what neighborhoods uh are lagging behind so this has been created in a consensus so we actually spend more on Sports and leisures than any other country I know per capita H and that is why we went uh through that successful journey of having the worst numbers to the bests in 15 years there are a lot of data and research on this so uh you can easily find out more but I would like to start in this short lecture on transformation to uh say that I think that we have transformed the environment for children this is my old class and we all look very sad or at least serious when I visit the schools now it’s something different and I think that we have been able to create uh a very Lively and more fun environment for the new generation uh if you look to the schools if you look to uh the leisure activities dance or arts or culture uh culture for children but my main story here today is really to try to describe in uh this short presentation how it was to uh govern the city first as deputy mayor from 2010 to 2014 and then for mayor in for 10 years it’s kind of governing from crisis to crisis the economic crisis in Iceland of 2008 was um I have to admit World known because of its magnitude and it was a big hit for a small country and its economy so the first years we were uh not least dealing with uh unemployment and the economic backlash the Side Story of this is that we lost trust in society not least to Conventional politics and the people that were governing the city at the time so they were moved aside and in came a well-known comedian and standup uh uh named yon Gnar he won the election and uh became a mayor because I and my party started working with this group of new people artists that had been active in other fields of society and they came in and took over uh in the majority with us the social Democrats this is actually a picture I love from uh the roof of one of the highest apartment buildings in rayek it’s not only a bad hair day I’m having there it’s actually ashes from a volcanic eruption AF y that stopped uh the flight over Europe for 10 days and made a lot of people angry this is a very gray picture this is a more picturess picture of AF had eruption from the site and why am I taking this into it because RAV and Iceland turned this very much public event uh published event the eruption to a marketing thing so one of the things that raan iseland did to get unemployment down and trans transforming the city was to Market rikic towards tourists and what actually happened was that banks that had been uh a big part of our economy collapsed and iname hotels instead and we have examples of this all over but the transformation was much deeper because we have a history of being based on fishing or based on aluminum smelters and then based on Bank but now we wanted to transform uh business and what we live from so we started developing the city to cater for that uh so these are before and after pictures from different sides of the city and there at the harbor you have uh a new hotel we worked with the universities to build up knowledge-based Industries uh with Pharmaceuticals and and we started building up the university hospital to also support uh the buildup of live sciences and we took an old uh uh fertilizer plant and turned into uh a studio uh an International Film Studio but we had uh freezing housing and in investment market and I remember the first year we were governing ravic in 2010 only 10 Apartments uh started in building for a whole year that’s not enough not uh even then but what we were capable of was to uh get that going on a wide scale and we have had increasing population uh on a large scale ever since so the build up in Rik has been H A Lot in numbers and I’m not going into that I want to tell you uh that we felt we needed to transform how we were developing the city as well my old icons were doctors 100 years ago that had been introducing concepts of good city and town planning in Iceland they were inspired by the uh knowledge of that time of the importance of clean air and light and they were studying how the Sun falls on houses in Iceland and uh embrace the ideas of a Garden City and actually a lot of neighborhoods from that time bear the uh influence of these medical doctors but Physicians had totally disappeared from the uh discussion on cities and planning for the time but actually planning is what has kept me in City politics for all this time one of the big Inspirations were research coming out um in the 2003 and four of Larry Frank of British Columbia the University of British Columbia Vancouver that did some of the biggest uh research uh that had been taken there then on the uh effects of the built environment on health and wrote several books and many articles about that and what fascinated me was that there is actually a linear uh relationship according to his and other studies on the probability of obesity and how you plan the land use mix so if there is a school near you or uh uh a local grocery store there is increasing um likelihood that you move and walk and bike uh and do not sit in the car all day uh it’s of course uh something we could talk about all day how we plan healthy cities but this inspired me and others on densifying raav a city that had been sprawling since the 60s so we went from uh kind of developing to the outside about 70 to 80% last two decades to a goal of 90% of the development should be in boards and in densification and so we did we densified uh the city of Rik with all the building projects needed and we are still doing it and actually in surprisingly short time 10 years we saw density increasing from 42 uh individuals per hectar to 51 individual per hectare and I’m going to show you some pictures some of the places we built up uh have been around the Inner City Airport uh and uh we are continuing to build there we had a lot of uh spaces around buildings that were going to be extended later uh but when people have Chang the minds we use them to develop housing instead and areas around the harbor were uh in special Focus not only for our uh concert and musical but also for housing hotels and mixed use uh old uh plots uh and underused car Parks turned also into development and uh the areas that had been kept unbuilt because because of the fertilizer uh Factory were also built up but also Brownfield in the city that we densified with uh housing and Brownfield uh in very nice places uh and you can see uh those to two squares also in the new picture but we have a whole neighborhood that we have added but we have to think about not only where to put the houses but for whom so we tried to transform the housing system that has been that had been uh wrecked to a large extent when it comes to social housing uh around 2000 were inspired by things happening under thater in England a lot of social housing was sold out so we had to start with scratch so a considerable part of what we have been building has been with the uh unions that have been kind of re uh resurrecting social housing uh on a large scale and other nonprofits as well uh and we have tried to have that uh a mix use so we have made agreements with all developers that have been Tred building in recent years in rikic that part of every project is social housing the students uh were very good in shuffling so we uh doubl the number of student Apartments the last uh 7 years and they even look nice we try to uh keep in mind to cater also for people with special needs uh needs for example uh people with disability so we have had a special focus on that and that is some of the most beautiful events that you can uh go to is to give uh people independent living after having waited for a long time uh but most of these projects are actually just mixed in uh in the uh developments uh and and this is uh single units for homeless it’s a housing part of the housing first policy and now they’re focusing more and more on the kind of generation that is becoming Elder uh because we see a demog graphic shift coming up but we have talked about where to put the housing and what housing mix but we have to think the transformation of Transport uh into this because we have a huge challenge when it comes to a different model split because raik was planned in the’ 60s as the perfect car dependent City it was to be based on the private car and industries and this was the Brave New World and everybody was supporting it and we were even going to take the downtown RAV and place highways through it on four ways tear all the old houses down and build something new we turn that totally around and now we have uh a green plan a master plan for break a first to 2030 and then 40 and a regional plan that supports this that has cut through all politics we have uh managed to work with uh all party groups mostly not all of them based on like in the prevention work on evidence where we uh go through scenarios of how we can develop the rikic area how many people we have to uh cater for in the future we have looked at how that went the last time we added 70,000 people to the area and the effects that had on uh traffic and we now we know and have reached uh a consensus almost a consensus I would say that we need to boost public transport no price for people that follow this but it’s a huge political task to get support for that so now we’re planning a City Line which is Transit based development integrated in transport planning and housing and this would mean the transformation of public transport being built up uh in the next few years uh so we are going from a situation where 19% of the inhabitants have uh good public transport Within Reach uh to 66% of uh the population we are building up for biking as well we are with a comprehensive net all over and we have reached an agreement with the government in a package for the Rik Capital Area of how we provide money for this it is a huge task uh but it’s very important and it’s uh important that we think long-term and get good uh political support from many so uh it will keep in times to come but what also gives nutrition is to think about the transformation of public space while you’re doing this project we talked about the’ 60s that envisioned a second level uh Highway uh at the harbor and then in the ’90s it became a car park and now it’s a new part of downtown ravik we’ve seen all kinds of old houses get their original look through this and we have actually loved building on car Parks uh if not housing then squares for people and here is the loved hot dog stand in ravik that has got uh nicer uh environment we have also been investing heavily in making the cups and neighborhood in the outskirts nice and Investing For Children Play and sports while we’re doing that uh and of course kept the tradition of adding a new swimming pool when we add a new neighborhood one of the Innovations of raik has actually been a new layer of planning so we have the master plan and then detailed plans but in between we analyze each of the old neighborhoods and add in infills or green spaces or other things needed based on that analysis but what I love my staff for is that they also have had ey for detail so they have added a lot of flowers and green to the city uh even uh in spaces that were only for cars but then we have taken cars away and left them for children and their parents uh both in the city center but also been developing some projects in the suburbs uh in Co we realized that all the bike infrastructure that we had set up were catering now for new groups that hadn’t used them and we are now exploring how to use the close ESS of the sea to play more and live more and although it’s extremely cold it’s refreshing and has be gaining popularity uh for all generations uh children are in a special focus and we’ve gone from Banning uh biking to schools in many instances 15 years ago to setting up infrastructure and having up to 40 and 50% of kids coming by bikes in the months where we don’t have snow we are taking over the streets uh in a large extent both uh temporary but also with new design we be taking away parking and put something for people instead and we are going to continue to do that in new projects in central Rik with the transformation that comes with the city line and it bus stops we’ve transformed our old bus stops to food halls and places to meet and old roads to pedestrian streets old squares for cars to squares with people and we are using that tone when we are adding to the city with new neighborhoods on older Brown fields that we are planning and building up in the years to come I see in the next year the big transformation will be uh connected to the introduction of the City Line and and the infrastructure that comes with it we are sinking uh two highways in the process and creating spaces uh on ground for people we are building a new bridge for the City Line and walking and biking and as you hear uh I’m uh catching my breath here uh and when I quit as mayor uh I kind of felt like this boxer that um um this cartoon that made fun of me of one of the newspapers after the 10y year run uh I actually caught arthritis while serving but what gives you energy and makes it all worth it is of course the good people around you your colleagues the children you meet at schools they start every morning in learn SCH by singing wonderful songs the infrastructure for kids that you see the people you work with the colors of the city the energy on living in an open a free City for all and the partying that follows it it’s yes all about the people thank you and this has been fascinating we could go for another hour but last question and I think it has been very useful because sometimes people think that the guest are from large cities no this is also a mediumsized city and also sometimes people think the the proximity the 20 minute City the 15 minute city is something new no most cities I mean Jan Jac 50 years ago young girl we’re talking about this uh break in the last 20 years has been dealing with proximity but you are a medical doctor you have a very different view you have been mayor or break for the last 10 years so you have people here from over 30 countries what is your call to action what are the things that you have learned as a medical doctor what what is the role that you think Public Health can play what what has it played in R but also how can it play in the future how can we engage more Public Health what is the impact of all of these actions that you mentioned on Mental Health on physical health of people of all backgrounds you mention children and elderly so this is as a summary as a closing and as a call to action yeah I remember when I was asked to enter politics and I wasn’t sure because I was going to learn more medicine but it was interesting and I sat down and pointed out kind of the things I found interesting and important if I would do this if I would enter politics I think that none of these points were directly on planning but only after one or two years years of doing City politics I realized that planning is not just the heart of how a city develops if it is uh a city for all through mixed use and also social mixu when you’re planning for housing it also has fundamental effects on how you feel how you live what the quality of life is or what lack of quality there is the in the life that the city uh so so it’s it’s probably speaking to the choir to say this to the group that is listening here but uh but planning has been what has been driving me uh and and kind of the instruments of planning both knowing what you should not do and and what to do and how to do it and kind of to find political ways to gain support for the right things my call to action is then that planners Transportation planners um and people that know how important climate issues are use Health more as a central argument to get people listening and get people kind of on board in doing the right thing because I my experience is that health is so important to all of us and all families so if you realize that some of the habits or planning or citycape that the 20th century served us is bad for our health and that we actually know a lot about what it is good for our health and what we should do to develop our cities to be more healthier more interesting and more fun remember Health remember Health as a a a goal a part of a vision but also as a tool of communication remember evidence because there is a lot of it and try to link that that that means also that when you’re densifying when you’re putting in an infill that you have to take into account uh where the next Green area is how that kind of whole area is still going to be great for people living there so Health in all arguments and health at the core of what you’re doing saying and and develop as a mayor or as a planner or uh Specialist or a politician thank you very very much what what a wonderful call to action and people re have been lucky to have you as mayor the last 10 years and the you’re call to action of having health because health is a unifier once you come to an agreement on health then you can really say okay what’s best what what action on this is best for mental and physical and social health so I want to thank you that very very much it has been fascinating and everyone I want to thank the hundreds of people that were connected please in two days you will have the recording and share it with decision makers with Advocates and I thank you very much for everyone for showing up every other week and two weeks from now we’re going to be talking about Playgrounds green playgrounds made out of War and the impact that it has having children plane in nature and we’ll obviously talk about the impact on health thank you very much everyone have a wonderful day thank you what a great presentation oh so much to learn from as an example the fact that the youth only 10 years ago almost half of the young people 44% to be exact had been consuming alcohol and most have been drunk over the last 30 days today is less than 5% huge and it was not through more policing why the opposite it was it was about empowerment it was about sports and recreation activities for everyone and also all the how you densify the the city center in in order to have people with proximity to get everything and how you work throughout the year in the outdoor and the public places in the summer in the winter great cities have to be good throughout the year thank you thank you very much for a fabulous presentation and the hundreds of people that connected live thanks for watching and please tell others to connect every other Tuesday and this recording please share it with decision makers with the media with Advocates with anybody that you think could benefit from these fabulous experiences that we just learned from right ja in iseland and how it was transformed and continues to to be transformed and how actually they are now sharing many of their experiences in other cities around the world because this is something that good cities should do be generous share what works for others to adapt and improve and also what does not work in order for others to avoid thanks you very very much everyone and I’ll see you in two weeks every other Tuesday at 11:00 Eastern Standard Time thank you