Author name: Steven Edwards

Last year, the studio of the Lyon-based artist known as Ememem received an urgent call from an architectural firm close to the city’s Place Sathonay. Someone was in the process of dismantling a mosaic he had installed on the pavement in front of their offices. By the time he arrived, the culprit had fled with half of it

The climate crisis has driven the world to the brink of multiple “disastrous” tipping points, according to a major study.
It shows five dangerous tipping points may already have been passed due to the 1.1C of global heating caused by humanity to date.
These include the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, eventually producing a huge sea level rise, the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rain upon which billions of people depend for food, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.

International trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan is new transport secretary, following the sacking of Grant Shapps by newly appointed prime minister Liz Truss.

Shapps, who became transport secretary in 2019, had backed Truss’s rival Rishi Sunak in the Conservative Party’s leadership election.
On Twitter Shapps said: “It has been a privilege to serve as transport secretary; a job I loved. Now I look forward to being a strong, independent voice on the backbenches, developing policies that will further the Conservative cause and the interests of my constituents in Welwyn Hatfield.”

In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.

“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”

Suggestion of activities to help improve mental and physical health part of wider movement of ‘social prescribing’

Nicola Davis
GPs around England are to prescribe patients activities such as walking or cycling in a bid to ease the burden on the NHS by improving mental and physical health.
The £12.7m trial, which was announced by the Department for Transport and will begin this year, is part of a wider movement of “social prescribing”, an approach already used in the NHS, in which patients are referred for non-medical activities.

Ryan Mallon Fri, Sep 02, 2022
The British government should banish cars from urban roads and instead aspire to the Netherlands’ cyclist-friendly cities, according to the chief executive of the Go-Ahead Group, one of the UK’s largest public transport companies.
Christian Schreyer, who took over the reins at the Newcastle-based bus firm in November last year, has argued that cycling and public transport should be prioritised if the UK is to effectively tackle the climate crisis and clean the air in its cities.

Damian Carrington

Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight.
The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a multi-metre sea-level rise appears likely.
Billions of people live in coastal regions, making flooding due to rising sea levels one of the greatest long-term impacts of the climate crisis. 

When we block traffic from a street, like for a sports event or a street party, we say that the street is “closed”. But who is it closed for? For motorists. But really, that street is now open to people.

We say this because we’ve become accustomed to thinking about the street in “traffic logic”. For centuries, streets used to be a place with a multiplicity of purposes: talk, trade, play, work and moving around. It’s only in the past century that it has become a space for traffic to drive through as quickly and efficiently as possible. This idea is so pervasive that it has colonised our thinking.
• This is an edited extract from Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet, translated by Fiona Graham