Meeting of the Minds Conference: The Innovations We Need for More Sustainable Cities
Welcome and Keynote
Welcome by
Gordon Feller, Urban Age Institute. Setting the Agenda by Irv Miller, Group VP, Toyota Motor Sales USA. Lastly, Harrison S. Fraker begins the conference with a presentation on Urban Design: The Key to Sustainable Transport.
Bio
Gordon Feller
For more than 25 years Gordon Feller has been building partnerships around urban environmental and urban transport issues that link private sector, public sector, independent sector and academia.
As CEO of Urban Age Institute he advises governments, foundations and multinational companies on urban sustainability issues. "Urban Age Magazine" was founded inside the World Bank in 1992; an international non-profit - with program activities in Asia, Africa and Europe - was spun off nearly 10 years later.
More than 400 of Gordon's articles, commentaries and editorials have appeared in 100+ magazines and newspapers. In periodicals ranging From the Financial Times of London to TIME and Fortune, Gordon has been arguing for a new and more holistic to seemingly intractable environmental, transport and energy issues.
Feller holds a Bachelors Degree, cum-laude, from Columbia University and a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, also cum-laude. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was the recipient of numerous fellowships and scholarships, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, including: Dean's Fellow at Columbia; NY State Governor Lehman Fellow at Columbia; Ripon Society Fellowship honoring US Senator Mark Hatfield (R: Oregon); Club of Rome Fellowship; German Marshall Fund Fellowship; and Wallach Fellowship at Columbia.
Harrison S. Fraker
Chosen as the fifth Dean of the College of Environmental Design, Harrison Fraker was educated as an architect and urban designer at Princeton and Cambridge Universities and is recognized as a pioneer in passive solar, daylighting and sustainable design research and teaching. He has pursued a career bridging innovative architecture and urban design education with an award-winning practice. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for creating a new College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota and was appointed the founding Dean. He was granted Fellowship in the AIA College of Fellows for his distinguished career of bridging education and practice.
He has published seminal articles on the design potential of sustainable systems and urban design principles for transit oriented neighborhoods. He teaches design studio and believes in integrating pragmatic and theoretical analysis to create new knowledge about the most critical environmental design challenges facing society. He is currently pursuing his beliefs through a whole systems design approach for entirely resource-self-sufficient, transit-oriented neighborhoods of 100,000 people in China.
Irving A. Miller
Irving A. Miller is group vice president of corporate communications Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), U.S.A., Inc. TMS is the marketing, sales, distribution and customer service arm of Toyota in America.
Miller is responsible for all TMS public relations activities in the United States, including Toyota, Lexus and Scion product news, media relations and publications. He also oversees TMS corporate contributions, video communications and the Toyota USA archives.
Miller began his career with Toyota in 1980 as merchandising manager in the San Francisco Region. Since then, he has held several regional management positions, including field operations manager of the Denver Region, assistant general manager of the Cincinnati Region and general manager of the Kansas City Region. Miller also served as market representation manager for Toyota and Lexus division, corporate manager of advertising-merchandising for the Toyota Division, vice president, field operations, Customer Services and vice president of sales for Lexus.
Most recently, Miller was vice president of the Office of the Web, a group of top marketing and technology professionals organized to unify Toyota's electronic commerce programs. Prior to joining Toyota, Miller worked for Chrysler Corp. and American Motors Corp.
Active in community affairs, Miller is a director and president of the Los Angeles Urban League Automotive Training Center, a joint venture of Toyota and the Urban League launched in 1993. He also serves as chairman on the Board of Directors for the Los Angeles Urban League and on the Board of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, Operation Hope, the Toyota Foundation, the Long Beach Symphony Association and Automotive Hall of Fame. In addition, he is a member of the A.W. Page Society, an organization of public relations professionals.
Miller attended Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, Pa., where he earned a bachelor's degree in finance, and Nova University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he earned an MBA.