the pavement surgeon

Throughout his home city of Lyon, Ememem is known as “the pavement surgeon.” The artist repairs gouged sidewalks and splintered facades with colorful mosaics that he describes as “a poem that everybody can read.” Intricate geometric motifs laid with pristine tiles hug the cracks and create “a memory notebook of the city. It reveals what happened, the life in these public places,” he tells Colossal. “Here cobblestones have been picked up and thrown. There a truck from the vegetable market tore off a piece of asphalt…”

© Ememem, shared with permission

Ememem’s first mosaic dates back 10 years when he found himself in a damaged alley in Lyon. At that time, he already was working in ceramic and translated that practice to revitalizing the outdoor area. Since 2016, he’s been consistently filling potholes and other divots throughout France. “It’s a succession of a lot of places and reflections, experiments I did before. I had done similar things, with other techniques, other supports, and finally, when this one emerged, I knew I found something that I was going to keep doing for the rest of my life,” he says.

Ceramic Mosaics Mend Cracked Sidewalks, Potholes, and Buildings in Vibrant Interventions by Ememem | Colossal

More photos to be seen:

swag — Artist, Ememem, mends cracked sidewalks, potholes…

And more fabulous stuff here:

Street Artist Transforms Cracks in the Pavement Into Gorgeous Mosaics

Here are his social media:

Born on a damaged sidewalk in 2016, Ememem is one of those sons born out of the asphalt who has disorder running through his blood. His sidewalk’s plasters, now emblems of the cityofLyon, start spreading all over Europe, according to the wandering of his worn out shoes! In arts events or undercover by the light of the street lamps, Ememem patches up the broken asphalt and inserts doors toward wonderland.    His terrestrial works of art, called «flacking»  from the french word «flaque» (puddle) let a glimpse of light through our homogeneous pavements which entombed our cities. 

Ememem street art

Ememem | Facebook

.

.

.

the wfh-office hybrid is the future

It looks as though people will be working from home for at least part of the working week:

UBS lets two-thirds of staff combine working from home with the office

1/3 of telecommuters expect to continue WFH - BBJ (Hungary)

Future workplace will be WFH-office hybrid - Times of India

.

This is called 'hybrid' working - as the Telegraph explains:

Bosses face home working clash with staff as new divide emerges

Employees overwhelmingly back a hybrid approach to working but bosses appear set to burst the WFH dream

ByLucy Burton ; Tom Rees and Hannah Boland15 June 2021 • 12:28am

Bosses are on a collision course with staff over a shift to permanent home working as official figures indicate huge numbers of employees want to stay away from the office.

The Prime Minister's delay to the Covid-19 roadmap on Monday evening means hopes have been dashed for organisations seeking a return to normal from next Monday - with Goldman Sachs among a string of major employers expected to change their plans.

However, figures from the Office for National Statistics released on Monday suggested that many staff are hopeful that they will not have to return permanently at all. A total of 85 per cent of adults who are currently working from home want to adopt a “hybrid” approach after the pandemic by splitting their time between home and the office, data from the ONS revealed.

At the same time, almost two in five firms expect more than three-quarters of staff to be in their normal workplace post-Covid, indicating that businesses and employees could be at loggerheads when the Prime Minister’s work from home advice is lifted...

Joseph Lappin, head of employment at law firm Stewarts, warned workers are unlikely to have reasonable grounds to defy instructions to return to the office once restrictions are lifted. He said: “If employers instruct staff to come back, to go back to the office, in ordinary circumstances that would be a lawful and reasonable instruction.”

Some experts have warned of a resignation boom looming amid the biggest shift in working patterns for decades. Half of Britons are already at their place of work as of mid-May while a quarter remain at home and 11 per cent are hybrid working, the ONS said...

Mr Lappin said employers could face legal action if they fire staff who refuse to return to the office while work from home advice is in place. He said: “If the government guidance is that employees should only be working in the office if they cannot work from home, I think employees will have a legitimate basis for contesting an employer’s instruction to return to the office on health and safety grounds. We will see employees who believe that they have been unfairly dismissed for failing to follow an instruction to return to the office... I do think we will see Covid-19 related unfair dismissal claims over the next six to 12 months.”

US bank Goldman Sachs, whose boss David Solomon has repeatedly argued that working from home will not become a permanent fixture after the Covid crisis, was among the firms to tell staff last month that their time at home was up. The company sent a memo around to staff in which it urged staff to complete a survey on their vaccination status, so it could plan how to map out the return to the office.

Some businesses are adapting to staff demands with remote work job postings soaring. Online job adverts related to home working are three times higher than pre-virus levels and are climbing far faster than other postings, the ONS said. Remote work job ads now account for 8 per cent of overall postings.

Abi Casey, co-head of strategic analysis at the ONS, said the data could show a divide between workers wanting a hybrid approach and businesses wanting more staff in the office. She said: “There are potential impacts in terms of the wider impacts on society and the economy if we have increased home working going forward. For example, commuting [and] city centres may be impacted with a smaller number of people going to work as well as shifts in regional populations and long-term business investment.”

Corporations have been urging for the Government to allow more people to return to offices in recent weeks, including Primera Corporation, which runs office areas including around Victoria, saying there needed to be "clear messages about how people can safely return to their places of work". Primera said: “Businesses have invested millions of pounds to create safe and welcoming offices, the transport system is cleaner than ever and London is ready to welcome people back.”

A Morgan Stanley survey of businesses across the UK and Europe suggests office workers want on average two days per week at home, double the pre-Covid level, with some 31pc of home workers keen to work remotely most of the week.

“My sense is that there will be an interesting generational shift,” says Nick O’Donnell, a partner at law firm Baker McKenzie. “The older generation of deal-doers has grown up knowing how to work in person meetings to their advantage and won’t want to give that up. However, the younger generation is learning new approaches and already spends so much of their life online that it is also their natural forum for business. It will take a few years to play out but I suspect that gritty face to face negotiations will largely go the way of the telex and fax machines and getting together will be reserved more for problem solving and relationship building.”

This tension is already starting to play out as some of the world’s biggest companies face staff campaigns against coming back in. Apple’s employees are pushing back on plans for a return to the office, according to a letter seen by The Verge, after workers were told they must be back at least three days a week from September.

Meanwhile Amazon, which told many of its workers in March that its future was going to be “office-centric”, has now said it will let staff work from home twice a week.

“There will certainly be flashpoints over the next weeks and months ahead as employers ask staff to return to their normal place of work,” says Joseph Lappin, head of employment at law firm Stewarts. “Employees who at the moment are very happy working from home will say, ‘well this has all gone very well over the last 18 months, why do I suddenly need to come back to the office?’”

It is not just bosses who want their teams to return. The economic consequences from a lasting shift to remote working are potentially huge if demand for services, housing, transport and office space shifts out of cities or dwindles. A delay to the lifting of the work from home advice will prolong the pressure facing Britain’s biggest city centres, which are still suffering from suppressed footfall. Spending and shopper traffic has failed to recover most in the likes of London, Manchester and Birmingham while high streets in small towns have bounced back far more rapidly...

“However, the benefits of remote working will be front of mind as we squeeze back into busy commuter trains in September.”

Read more: Your rights if your employer asks you to return to the office

Is there a working clash at your company? Let us know in the comments section below which side of the battle you're on.

Bosses face home working clash with staff as new divide emerges

.

It is a generation thing:

... a lot of young people like WFH so much that they would rather quit than go back to the office.

Morning Consult, a data research firm, conducted a poll for Bloomberg News in May that showed that 39% of Americans surveyed would definitely consider looking for a new job if their employer asked them to come back to the office. That percentage is even higher amongst young people. According to the report, a whopping 49% of Gen Z and millennials would quit if their bosses aren't flexible about remote work...

Controlling where people are can also be seen as a way that employers assert dominance over their employees. “They feel like we’re not working if they can’t see us,” Twidt told Bloomberg. Not only do young people like Twidt seem to be resisting that sort of authoritarian impulse, they also want to do what’s good for their mental health. And working from home, it turns out, may be better for many folks’ emotional wellbeing.

WFH is working and young people don't want to go back to an office

.

As the World Economic Forum says:

Working from home (WFH) is here to stay. A new study suggests 20% of full work days will be completed from home in the future – compared to just 5% before the pandemic.

But despite initial challenges, the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) predicts the WFH trend will stick thanks to benefits for both employees and employers.

Here are five reasons why the shift to home working will be a long-lasting trend, according to the NBER’s survey of more than 30,000 people in the US...

Working from home is here to stay, reports NBER | World Economic Forum

.

.

.

kickstarting elt in the uk

There's been a collapse in student numbers in UK language schools:

Facts and figures for the UK ELT industry

The lobby group for the industry has been speaking to parliament:

English UK members tell parliamentarians what help they need to survive

And has been pushing for more financial help for schools:

Business rates relief campaign update

This is what they're asking for:

English UK's Covid-19 position paper: calling on the government to help kickstart UK ELT 

English UK's Covid-19 position paper, updated in March 2021, calls on the government to help kickstart the UK ELT sector after Covid-19. 

The document outlines the help we believe crucial for our sector's survival through 2021 and beyond. 

• Read our Covid-19 position paper (published March 2021)

English language teaching was one of the first UK industries to be hit by Covid-19, and may be one of the last to recover.

Hopes for any significant business recovery in summer 2021 seem increasingly unlikely, despite the success of the UK vaccine programme, as new variants extend travel restrictions. The sector relies on an international market. We cannot replace our customers with domestic ones.

 

---

English UK is asking the government for:

Targeted support for ELT centres:

• Provide ongoing support for ELT, including extended furlough for staff until spring 2022 if necessary. ELT is dependent on seasonal student tourism. The sector faces a standstill until spring 2022 if there is no meaningful recovery this summer.
• Extend the business rates holiday and associated grants, already offered to the retail, leisure and hospitality sectors, to specifically include the ELT sector. We estimate this would cost no more than £15m. 

Tailored visas, immigration and travel:

• Retain ID-card travel for under-18 EU/ EEA/ Swiss group travel after 1 October 2021.
• Continue to recognise the List of Travellers scheme.
• Enable students already studying in the UK on any visa to apply for a new visa for further study (e.g. in higher education) without leaving the country.
• Require all UK English language providers to be accredited and extend educational oversight to Accreditation UK so that it is valid for all visa routes.
• Create a youth mobility scheme, helping ELT to recruit staff for seasonal peaks.
• Restore work rights of up to 20 hours a week for adult students on ELT courses with accredited providers on the government's register of sponsors, in line with major English language competitor nations.
• Clarify when and how international travel will resume, with reassurance on safety for travellers and the public and due consideration for the needs of sectors relying on short-term inbound tourism.

Marketing on a national scale:

• Drive and measure success by setting a national growth target for ELT students in the UK within the framework of the International Education Strategy
• Support a targeted campaign to communicate the UK ELT offer and rebuild the international market.
• Make GREAT funding available in key source markets for UK ELT
• Increase financial support available for education exporters
• Offer innovation and enterprise grants to UK ELT
• Negotiate bilateral agreements to allow English teachers and students on certain vocational courses to train in the UK, replacing £7m of lost Erasmus+ revenue

• Read the English UK Covid-19 position paper (March 2021 edition)

Covid-19 position paper: kickstarting UK ELT

.

.

.

anthroposcenery

Singapore’s refurbished Changi Airport now features the world’s tallest indoor waterfall… Known as the ‘City in a Garden’, Singapore is already famous for its Gardens by the Bay, which contain a grove of human-made ‘super trees’ that actually mimic the processes of photosynthesis and rainwater collection through the use of photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight into energy. In this sense such innovations fit more broadly into what is known as ‘biomimicry’, or the process by which scientists, architects and others imitate natural processes as a solution to human-centred dilemmas or inventions. Architecture is at the forefront of this movement.

STRUCTURE magazine | Engineering an Icon

But while such imitation is generally viewed favourably, it also suggests that for nature to be viable and appreciated in our digital age it must merge with the technical worlds of machinery and architecture. What we are witnessing is a fusion of the Anthropocene, a new geological era defined by human actions, and scenery, an anthroposcenery, in which nature, ever more unpredictable in the wake of human-driven climate change, is transformed and repackaged as heavily choreographed scenery for the ‘well-being’ of humans inhabiting the cityscape.

The New Anthroposcenery – Arena

“At the apex of Jewel’s glass roof is an oculus that showers water down to the center of the building. The Rain Vortex will be the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, transforming into a light and sound show in the evening. Additionally, rainwater is funneled into the waterfall and harvested for building services and landscape irrigation systems. At peak conditions, water will flow through the oculus at more than 10,000 gallons per minute.”

Safdie Architects

Solarpunk architecture at the Singapore airport : solarpunk

Jewel Changi Airport – YouTube

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Jewel Changi Airport – Buro Happold

The current surge in ‘green buildings’ grows out of the solarpunk movement, whose vision promotes a nature interwoven through metallic cityscapes, endorsing a chimerical city that brings the best of nature to the city and gives the metropolis a green makeover. Solarpunks are much more optimistic (if not dangerously utopian) about the future than, say, cyberpunks. One of the aims of the solarpunk movement, it seems, is to keep the dystopian cityscapes of Blade Runner and The Fifth Element at bay. The worlds depicted in those films were unapologetic in their abandonment of wilderness in favour of unending metallic fortresses, bleak yet visually striking. In Cinema and Landscape, Christina Kennedy and colleagues write that The Fifth Element was ‘an extension of the stereotypical city of today: a thoroughly complex and artificial environment, that maybe even despite all of its problems, can be stunningly beautiful’. Both films feature characters cut off from nature, a feature that we, the audience, are to view with concern. An antidote to this abundance of steel is now given in the form of the ‘sustainable city’, or the ‘green city’, a hybrid creation that is meant to function as a well-oiled ecosystem.

Tim Beatley envisions what he calls ‘biophilic cities’, arguing that in the endeavour to green our cities, planners focus on everything but nature. His view emphasises nature: ‘Biophilic Cities acknowledge the importance of daily contact with nature as an element of a meaningful urban life, as well as the ethical responsibility that cities have to conserve global nature as shared habitat for non-human life and people’. Beatley’s sentiments carry a distinctly Romantic feel in their plea to humans to harness a ‘meaningful’ relationship with nature. He writes that because humans ‘coevolved with the natural world’, cities need to make room for green spaces and make daily interactions with nature possible, but while we may have coevolved with the natural world and other animals, that evolutionary trajectory has long since deviated into destruction and self-idolatry.

The New Anthroposcenery – Arena

.

.

.

fast fashion no longer fashionable

From Serina Sandhuthe writing in the i-newspaper from two years ago:

Whenever I received pocket money as a teenager, I would challenge myself to see how many new things I could buy with £40. I had the nose of a bloodhound for sales and savings, coming home with bags full of gems. In retrospect, they were bags full of crap but it didn’t matter, because it was all new crap. 

In the last year I have shortened a dress which never suited me at its original length and hung in my wardrobe for a shamefully long time, unworn. I had it done professionally, which of course cost more than threading a needle myself, but the dress hasn’t gone to waste. It’s just like having something new.

Why I'm turning my back on fast fashion

From the same writer this weekend:

“During the lockdown periods, people couldn’t actually get rid of anything,” says Dr Tracy Cassidy, a reader in fashion and textiles at the University of Huddersfield.“The charity shops were closed, the local tips were closed. I think it was a bit of a wake-up call in how much we’re actually throwing away. People have been aware of sustainability for a long time but not blaming themselves for being part of that [throwaway culture]… so I think that’s starting to change.”

Dr Cassidy believes we are now “waking up”. “Everybody has been re-evaluating their lives throughout these past 12 months.”

A grassroots movement is also encouraging shoppers to treat their purchases with respect by repairing and updating the items, rather than replacing them. As reported in i, craftivist Suzi Warren organised 14 UK-wide street stitching events this week, with 26 people turning up at Bromley High Street in London to demonstrate how to fix old fashion.

Fast fashion is a trend that could be on its way out as shoppers seek sustainability after Covid pandemic

File: Sonderausstellung Fast Fashion 5.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Fast fashion - Wikipedia

Sustainable fashion - Wikipedia

Slow fashion - Wikipedia

Environmental impact of fashion - Wikipedia

.

.

. 

learn english through cooking

Talking food is always a good way into language:

Jay Doubleyou: favourite christmas food

Jay Doubleyou: lesson stream: great lessons using video clips

.

There's a free app which will talk to you as you cook!

.

.

As it says: 

Learn-by-doing! Associate new words with smells and tastes, and then best of all you get to enjoy eating the delicious meal you’ve cooked.

Linguacuisine – Combining technology, languages, culture and cuisine

.

Here's a great review from Liz Granirer, writing in the E L Gazette:

We all know that learning a new skill, whether it’s cooking or a foreign language, is easier if it’s put in context, so the Linguacuisine app is on to a delicious winner.

Choose from 13 languages to cook in, including English, Greek and Japanese; pick a recipe, then follow along, associating the actions, ingredients and tastes to the new words you’re learning. Plus, if you think it’s a good idea, you can record and upload your own recipes to share with other users.

The app was developed by a collaboration between Newcastle University, Action Foundation (UK), Hellenic Open University (Greece), Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (Italy) and the Workers’ Educational Association (UK) and funded by an Erasmus+ KA2 Strategic Partnership grant. It’s been chosen by HundrED as ‘one of the world’s most inspiring innovations in bilingual education’.

Linguacuisine has been such a success – with no fewer than six studies finding it’s an effective language learning tool – that Newcastle University is now looking for more projects that teach languages within contexts that it can turn into an app.

Cook up a language lesson | E L Gazette

.

.

.

small island or global britain

The BBC has commissioned a survey on attitudes towards Britain's role in the world:

Ipsos MORI has conducted a poll for Nick Robinson’s new programme on Radio 4 considering Britain’s place in the world. The research reveals that two in five (40%) Britons are optimistic about the future, believing in twenty years’ time that Britain will be “Global Britain” and a country that plays an important role in the world. However, not everyone is convinced with a sizeable one in four (26%) saying the opposite – “Britain will be a small island that very few other countries pay attention to”.

Overall, the British still want to matter globally. By two to one we want to punch above our weight in world affairs. The young are more willing to accept a smaller role for Britain, but overall only 26% think we will be a small island no one listens to. Matching our ambition to our resources remains a central challenge.

Small Island or Global Britain? | Ipsos MORI

Here is the Radio series on the BBC: 

Nick Robinson considers our place in the world in the run up to the G7 summit in Cornwall.

BBC Radio 4 - Small Island or Global Britain? - Episode guide

And here is a clip:

Former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt reflected on Brexit Britain's ability to connect organise nations of the world and promote cooperation. While speaking to Nick Robinson on his BBC programme Small Island or Global Britain, she claimed the UK has been unsure of its global position for 60 years. She also argued the UK was creating enemies in Europe and that a less close relationship with the European Union would shrink its reach on the global platform.

Mr Robinson said: "Britain should use its diplomatic strength, our membership of all those global clubs to show, in the words of the Government's review of our place in the world, we are problem solvers. There is just one problem with that, many of our traditional allies have come to see Britain as a creator of problems rather than a solver."

Boris Johnson issued warning over Brexit Britain’s global role– ‘Making enemies in Europe’ | Politics | News | Express.co.uk

With some more ideas over the last couple of years:

Hong Kong exposes the impotence of so-called ‘Global Britain’ | The National

Myths from a small island: the dangers of a buccaneering view of British history

Brexit fury as French Senator dubs Boris Johnson's vision 'very 19th century' | Politics | News | Express.co.uk

Britain's place in the world: small island blues | Editorial | The Guardian

Global Britain: an old idea, but is it ripe for a comeback? - Friends of Europe

.

.

.