One day late last summer, in Frogner, a central neighbourhood of Oslo, Nils

Sandberg received a note. “It simply stated that shortly, parking spaces in these streets
would disappear and bicycle lanes would be built,” says Sandberg. He spoke to
neighbours, and learned they had all received the same note. “This came as a total
surprise and shock.”

More people own cars in Frogner than in most other parts of Oslo – 38%
household ownership, compared to roughly 30% in other central neighbourhoods – and
the idea of losing all their parking space to bike lanes did not appeal. “We are not against
cycling,” says Sandberg, who now leads a campaign to save the parking spaces. “We
do, however, believe that cycling is not the only reason for the chosen routes – it is
definitely also meant to force a maximum number of cars out.”

This was, in truth, exactly the plan. When a progressive political alliance took
power over Oslo’s city council in October 2015, they had made one of their first priorities
a greener and more liveable environment in the city. With an almost 30% increase in
population expected by 2040, the Norwegian capital was worried about its carbon
footprint. It wasted no time, selling off its coal investments, creating a renewable district
heating system and firmly committing to slashing greenhouse gas emissions (to 95%
of 1990 levels) by 2030.

The biggest bugbear, however, was transport, which accounts for 61% of the
city’s CO2 emissions – a full 39% of it coming from private cars. Yet the council presided
over a city that already boasted the world’s highest proportion of electric vehicles, and
ran a third of its bus fleet on fossil fuel alternatives. What more could be done? One big
idea: ban cars from the city centre. If pulled off, the plan would see Oslo become the
first major European city to have a permanent, complete no-car-zone, racing ahead of
a long list of cities seeking to do the same.

The proposed car-free zone seemed like a good place to start. It focused on Ring
1, the innermost ring road of Oslo’s three motorways, a 1.7km sq area that is home to
around 1,000 people of whom 88.1% do not own a car. Just 7% commute by car, with
64% doing so on public transport, 22% on foot and 7% by bike. Banning all cars – petrol,
diesel, hybrid or electric – seemed like an easy win. “The city becomes more enjoyable
and more accessible without car traffic,” read the coalition’s declaration in October 2015.

There was just one problem. “A Berlin Wall against motorists,” declared one
conservative party politician. “Car owners feel ‘bullied’ in Oslo”, blared an English-
language news site. The biggest backlash, however, came from the city’s trade
association, the Oslo Handelsstands Forening (OHF). It said it feared the plans would
create a “dead town”, and a “poorer city with less life”. “Many speciality shops depend
on people coming from far away, who may not bother to come if they have a complex
travel route,” says OHF communications manager Beathe Radby Schieldrop, explaining
their opposition. “People tend to shop where it is easy to shop.” The plan was simply too
revolutionary, the group maintains. “It’s too much and too soon,” Schieldrop says. “Shop
owners and visitors need time to adapt.”
 So, after almost a year of back and forth, Oslo’s council changed tack. “We
modified some of the plans after discussing things with shopkeepers,” says Lan Marie
Nguyen Berg, a Green party politician and the city’s vice mayor for environment and
transport. “Not because we think that more cars means more shoppers. But because we
need to ensure that the transport of goods to shops can be both good for city life and
shopkeepers. “We chose a gradual model, rather than one where you remove everything
and then fill it in [with alternatives] after.”

The council changed its stated ambition to have a car-free city centre. It now
wants the “fewest possible vehicles”. Drivers are by no means off the hook. “The goal
is that people with cars will feel like they’re visitors, rather than owning the streets,” says
Berg. “We’ll make it difficult for people to want to drive or get around by car.”

Even electric vehicles (previously allowed in bus lanes) will feel the heat, Berg
says. “The goal is that there should be no more space for cars, and an electric vehicle
still takes up space,” she says. “By 2030, I hope that all cars in the city will be electric –
[but] we won’t have space for them all.”

The council’s clever solution? Rather than banning cars, it would ban parking –
all 650 on-street parking spots. In their place, “we’ll put up installations and create public
spaces,” says Berg, referring to six pilot areas. “Some will be playgrounds or cultural
events, or [contain] benches or bike parking – or other things you can fill the space with
when you don’t have 1,200 kilograms of glass and steel.”

Oslo’s transformation will be rolled out in three phases. In stage one, all on-street
parking within Ring 1 will be removed, as well as some parking in surrounding areas
deemed to be “in conflict with bike development”. Car parks in and around the central
zone will stay, but many other on-street parking spaces will be freed up for alternative
uses. Stage two, in 2018, will see the pedestrian network extended, and close several
streets to private traffic; shared space will be introduced, and 40 miles of bike lanes built.

The council’s final year will be one of reflection. “We’ll see if the removal of
parking and the restrictions on driving through the city centre will be enough,” says Berg.
“If it’s necessary to get to our goal, then we’ll create a car ban. But, until 2019, we’ll see
if we can do it through more gentle and natural initiatives.”

The opposition from car owners, like Sandberg in Frogner – which is not itself in
the city centre but is nevertheless seeing its parking spaces reduced – has thrown a
wrench into the plans, but the idea of extending the cycle network is not actually new.
In 1977, the council planned a fully connected cycle grid. Little has materialised,
however: from 2005-2015, just one mile of bike lane was constructed on average every
year. The number of cyclists has grown, but in the absence of dedicated cycling
infrastructure, serious injuries are becoming more common. “There are lots of nice bike
paths to get to the centre, but as soon as you reach it, pfff, gone,” says Liv Jorun
Andenes, an information officer for the City of Oslo bicycle office. “But that’s where all
the traffic, the tram tracks and trucks are. So that’s where you really need good
solutions.”
How New Yorkers are fighting for food justice

For the past three summers, Tanya Fields produced a veritable cornucopia of
fruits and vegetables at the Libertad Urban Farm in the South Bronx. But then disaster
struck: “We got burglarized three times by a crackhead. He took everything. The pears,
the grill – anything he thought had value. He knocked down the shed, destroyed the
tomato vines and stole the eggplant.” These difficulties are surely a setback, but they
have not dulled Fields’ commitment to the issues of food justice and food equality, an
emerging aim of community-focused activism across the US sometimes described as
“communities exercising their right to grow, sell, and eat healthy food”.

The terminology of food justice may help to draw attention to the striking parallels
between poor nutrition, discrimination and reduced life expectancy. According to a 2011
study by the Food Research and Action Center, low-income families are 30% more likely
to be overweight or obese due to lack of access to quality fruits and vegetables.

Fields, who has worked as a community activist in the Bronx for more than a
decade since being squeezed out of a rapidly gentrifying Harlem, says the concept isn’t
new, just the term. “We didn’t call it food justice before – we called it survival. We
attached some fancy vernacular, but really it’s just the same shit we’ve been talking
about for years.” The Bronx, she says, isn’t so much a food desert as it is a food swamp.
Hunts Point, the nation’s largest food distribution center, is a few minutes’ walk away
from her kitchen garden, yet the neighborhood stores betray the signs of a low-income
neighborhood. “There’s the cake spot, the McDonald’s spot, the Burger King spot, the
cuchifritos spot. But you go into the one grocery store and the food there will cost you
disproportionately more as a poor person, and that’s a function of a globalized and
commodified food system we want to change.”

Fields, a mother of six in her mid-thirties, founded the garden project under the
umbrella organization, the BLK ProjeK, a group she founded eight years ago as a
response to what she calls “structurally reinforced cycles of poverty, and harsh inequities
that result in far too many women being unable to rise out of poverty and sustain their
families.”

Fields, like her counterparts in Brooklyn, are looking to create micro-hubs. Fields
calls it “a mash-up of social entrepreneurship and philanthropy”. The Bronx project
might not be strictly self-sustaining, but neither is agriculture itself, which relies on vast
government subsidies for a system of food production “that has only made us sicker”.
Fields’ group is just one of dozens springing up, among them the National Black Food
& Justice Alliance, Rooted in Community, Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger, as well
as other organising groups and publications. In New York, GreenThumb, a division of
NYC Parks Department and the largest community gardening program in the nation,
estimates that 87,000lbs of food is produced in the 553 community gardens it oversees.

As part of New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s Building Healthy Communities

initiative, the city recently upped the number of GreenThumb gardens in underserved
neighborhoods with limited access to healthy food. The new grants include gardens in
East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and the H.E.A.L.T.H for Youths garden on police
 department property. But even as community food production programs gain in
number, the overall picture is darkening. The Trump administration recently threatened
cuts to a program aimed at improving nutrition among low-income women and children
and to roll back the healthy school lunch program championed by Michelle Obama.
Earlier this month, the former first lady responded forcefully to the new administration’s
effort “Think about why someone is OK with your kids eating crap,” Obama offered
bluntly. Fields says the president has created more noise around the subject of food
justice but also more fear. “This wasn’t as partisan an issue, yet he’s come in and started
talking about ways you can continue to starve poor kids.”

According to community organizer Beatriz Beckford of the National Black Food

& Justice Alliance, the disparity in access is often down to food producers assuming
lower income people wouldn’t buy fresh food if it were available their communities. At
the same time, community gardens are often harbingers of gentrification. They are
created to assist the very disadvantage groups that end up being pushed out of those
areas.

“It’s a very political space rooted in a narrative that goes beyond the issues of
food,” Beckford observes. Her work in this sphere was once focused on appealing to
local businesses, elected officials and school boards to change the way systems of
distribution worked. But over the years she began to see the issues differently.

“The food system is working the way its supposed to work. It was largely build
on the exploitation. We need to think about food justice in terms of building local and
national systems that deconstruct the old system and build a new, less elitist and
exploitative one.”

For Tanya Fields’ Libertad Urban Farm, the current focus is to replant and secure
the garden so that last year’s damage is not repeated. She is balancing reaching out to
New York Women’s Foundation and Ford Foundation about grants and assistance with
an underlying belief that community projects should be lead by the community. Fields
surveys her garden. It’s going to take renewed time and effort to get it back into shape.
“Food injustice is a symptom of a larger disease which happens to be economic
exclusion. It’s about how we build our communities without ready social, educational or
financial capital.” A delivery of soil, expected soon, will be a good place to start.
Gadheim – the Bavarian hamlet set to become the centre of a post-Brexit EU

When Karin Keßler harvested her winter oilseed rape (aceite de canola) last
summer, she was vexed by the sudden slump in the market price and put the crop into
storage to wait for its value to rise. “The Brexit referendum had rattled the markets,”
Keßler, the 51-year old farmer recalled. “I ended up selling in December instead.”

In the run-up to this year’s harvest in mid-July, her main concern will be quite
different: how to manoeuvre her combine harvester around the wooden post in the field
marking the future geographical centre of the European Union. “It was a bit of a surprise
to wake up to the news,” Keßler said. “You could say Brexit has rattled us again, but in
a good way, if that’s possible.”

Keßler was in the village shop in Gadheim, home to just 78 souls, last
Wednesday when she was told the news by the baker, who had herself just heard it on
the radio. The hamlet she had grown up in and where her family has farmed for 150
years will officially become the geographical heart of the EU after Britain leaves.

The ruling, which filtered through to Gadheim on the day that Theresa May
triggered article 50 and started the process of quitting the bloc, has come from French
cartographers at the geographic information engineering institute (IGN) in Paris. They
have decreed that the EU’s eastward shift following Britain’s exit will mean the village of
Westerngrund, about 50 miles (80km) away, relinquishes the title to Gadheim, just
north of Würzburg in Bavaria. The precise coordinates are 9º 54’ 07” E and 49º 50’ 35”
N. It was not until Keßler’s 25-year-old son, Michael, a software engineer, put them into
his mobile phone that she realised the location was not only in Gadheim, but right in the
middle of her 55-hectare farm, placing it as she put it, “at the belly button of the EU”.

Bernard Bèzes, of the IGN, said the calculation had been made after people
contacted the institute following the EU referendum “asking to know precise
measurements for the centre of a post-Brexit EU”. The calculation, he explained, was
made by digitally flattening out the entire EU terrain, then in effect lifting it up like a piece
of cloth to find its precise middle. His institute has also calculated the centre of the
continent of Europe to be in Lithuania, much to the delight of the village of Purnuškės. .

Brigitte Heim was happy to explain why being the centre of the EU matters so
much. She is the mayor of Westerngrund, which became the new centre after Croatia
joined the club in 2013 and kept the crown a year later when the French island group of
Mayotte in the Indian Ocean joined, moving the centre 500 metres east. “We have about
10,000 visitors who come here every year just because of this,” Heim said. The village
has marked the spot, on a field on the edge of the village, with an EU flag and some
picnic tables. The official inauguration of the spot was accompanied by a brass band. A
hiking route between Westerngrund and the village of Gelnhausen Meerholz – the title-
holder from 2007 after Romania and Bulgaria joined – was also instigated.
 Heim said she had no hard feelings towards Gadheim for stealing
Westerngrund’s thunder. “We always knew it was a gift lent to us for a limited amount of
time,” she said. “We just set about making the most of it. But we’re shocked and
saddened by Brexit. When we earned the title it was because a country had joined, now
we’re losing it because for the first time a country is leaving the EU – we just hope the
negotiations might take a little longer than two years so we can hang on to it a little
longer.”

In the 1950s when the EU was still a small community of six, the centre was
located close to the Franco-Swiss border just outside the city of Besançon. By 1987,
with 12 members, it had shifted to the central French village of Puy de Dôme and in
2004 to Germany, where it has been ever since.

Kurt Adelmann said he was mystified as to why anyone would want to leave the
EU. Adelmann, 81, a retired telecommunications technician, drove from his home in
nearby Veitshöchheim and along the dirt track at the foot of the Franconian hills to
photograph the spot for himself when the news reached him. “I was a nine-year-old boy
when war ended,” he said. “But I remember all the bombing raids in and around this
area, and being haunted by the grave of a German soldier in the woods where we
played. I can appreciate the fact we’ve enjoyed 70 years of peace and the EU, I think,
has been the best way of guaranteeing that. “Still, I can’t say it’s not nice that we’re being
put on the map. If there’s a Brexit winner, then maybe it’s Gadheim.”

Jürgen Götz, the mayor with responsibility for Gadheim, said he hoped the news
would encourage more investment and tourism to the area, which boasts one of the
finest rococo gardens in Germany and a medieval pilgrimage site. “Of course we have
mixed feelings about all this,” he said, standing by an EU flag that has been hoisted in
the centre of the village. “We’re still discussing what we’ll do: put up a proper flag pole,
erect a sausage kiosk, a hiking route with Westerngrund, that sort of thing. But we’ll
enjoy it while it lasts. We can also wish that the talks might collapse and it’ll never
happen. Then again, if Scotland or Serbia were to join, everything will shift once more.”
Nuns Offer Clues to Alzheimer's and Aging

A spiraling road slopes gently up to Good Counsel Hill, where the convent of the
School Sisters of Notre Dame perches peacefully. Within its thick red brick walls are
bright paintings of nuns and children. Organ hymns waft from a circular chapel, and
nuns attend Mass and murmur rosaries under a white vaulted dome. But this crucible
of faith is also the site of an extraordinary scientific experiment. For 15 years, elderly
Catholic nuns here have had their genes analyzed and balance and strength measured.
They have been tested on how many words they can remember minutes after reading
them on flashcards, how many animals they can name in a minute and whether they can
count coins correctly.

The autobiographical essays they wrote for their order in their 20's, when they
took their vows, have been scrutinized, their words plumbed for meaning. And as they
have died, their brains have been removed and shipped in plastic tubs to a laboratory
where they are analyzed and stored in jars. The experiment, called the Nun Study, is
considered by experts on aging to be one of the most innovative efforts to answer
questions about who gets Alzheimer's disease and why. And now in a new report it is
offering insight on a different subject -- whether a positive emotional outlook early in
life can help people live longer. ''The Nun Study has certainly been pioneering,'' said Dr.
Richard Suzman, chief of demography and population epidemiology at the National
Institute on Aging. ''It's helped change the paradigm about how people think about
aging and Alzheimer's disease.''

By studying 678 nuns -- at this convent and six others in the order, in Connecticut,
Maryland, Texas, Wisconsin, Missouri and Illinois -- Dr. David A. Snowdon, an
epidemiologist at the University of Kentucky, and colleagues have come up with
tantalizing clues and provocative theories over the years. Their research has shown that
folic acid may help stave off Alzheimer's disease; that small, barely perceptible strokes
may trigger some dementia; and, in an especially striking finding, that early language
ability may be linked to lower risk of Alzheimer's because nuns who packed more ideas
into the sentences of their early autobiographies were less likely to get Alzheimer's
disease six decades later.

The new report, being published on Monday in The Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, says nuns who expressed more positive emotions in their
autobiographies lived significantly longer -- in some cases 10 years longer -- than those
expressing fewer positive emotions. ''It's an important finding,'' Dr. Suzman said, ''and I
think it will lead to lots of additional studies.''
 The nuns are ideal for scientific study because their stable, relatively similar lives
preclude certain factors from contributing to illness. They do not smoke, hardly drink
and do not experience physical changes related to pregnancy. The School Sisters are
white and eat in convent cafeterias, and most were teachers in Catholic schools. The
study is also considered powerful because it has information from several stages in its
subjects' lives, including when they were too young to manifest Alzheimer's or other
diseases related to aging. ''I think the Nun Study is very important because it uses
information obtained about people before the period of illness,'' said Dr. Robert P.
Friedland, professor of neurology at Case Western Reserve University and author of a
study showing that people with Alzheimer's were, as young adults, less mentally and
physically active outside their jobs than people without the disease. ''So we know from
the Nun Study and others that Alzheimer's disease takes several decades to develop,
and the disease has many important effects on all aspects of a person's life.''

At 93, Sister Nicolette Welter still reads avidly, recently finishing a biography of
Bishop James Patrick Shannon. She knits, crochets, plays rousing card games and, until
a recent fall, was walking several miles a day with no cane or walker. But a younger
sibling, Sister Mary Ursula, 92, shows clear Alzheimer's symptoms, Dr. Snowdon said.
Several times a day, Sister Nicolette feeds and reads prayers to Sister Mary Ursula, who
uses a wheelchair and can hardly lift her head or gnarled hands. ''I wouldn't have any
idea why this happened to Mary Ursula,'' said Sister Nicolette, ''but I just feel like I'll keep
my mental faculties.''

Some of Dr. Snowdon's research suggests she might be right. Sister Nicolette's
autobiography, written when she was 20, was full of what Dr. Snowdon calls ''idea
density,'' many thoughts woven into a small number of words, a trait correlating closely
with nuns who later escaped Alzheimer's. One sentence in Sister Nicolette's essay, for
example, reads, ''After I finished the eighth grade in 1921 I desired to become an aspirant
at Mankato but I myself did not have the courage to ask the permission of my parents
so Sister Agreda did it in my stead and they readily gave their consent.'' Compare that
to the essay of another Mankato nun, who is in her late 90's and has performed steadily
worse on the memory tests. The nun, who sat quietly by a window the other day, wrote
in her essay, ''After I left school, I worked in the post-office.''

The Nun Study's latest published findings offer similarly provocative ideas about
how positive emotional state in early life may contribute to living longer. Experts say
linking positive emotions in the autobiographies to longer life echoes other studies
showing that depression increases risk of cardiovascular disease and that people rated
as optimists on personality tests were more likely than pessimists to be alive 30 years
later.
 The findings also raise questions like, What underlies the positive emotions?
''How much of this is temperament?'' Dr. Suzman said. ''How much of it is affected by
life events and critical relationships with parents, friends, teachers, peers?'' Overall, Dr.
Snowdon says, the nuns live significantly longer than other women. Of the 678 in the
study, 295 are alive and are all 85 or older. In the Mankato convent alone, there have
been seven centenarians, many free of dementia.

Dr. Snowdon's condition that nuns donate their brains was a stumbling block for
some of the sisters. ''I had a hard time with it,'' said Sister Claverine, who delayed signing
up. ''I had an image of myself being buried intact.'' But Sister Rita Schwalbe, the convent's
health administrator when the study began, said she had told them that as nuns they
had made ''the difficult decision not to have children. This is another way of giving life.''
Many nuns now see brain donation through a liturgical lens -- or a humorous one. After
completing the cognitive and physical tests -- including identifying everyday objects and
opening small doors with different latches -- the nuns get summaries of their results
and can see if their performance has changed.

Dr. Snowdon hopes his study will encourage people to do things to ward off the
disease, like quit smoking and other stroke-causing behaviors, and read to children to
stimulate language development. His current project involves analyzing old
photographs of nuns for personality clues in their face muscles to see if personality
correlates to Alzheimer's or longevity. And, although he cannot prove it scientifically, he
contends the nuns' spirituality and community living helps them too. ''You don't
necessarily have to join a church or join a convent,'' Dr. Snowdon said. ''But that love of
other people, that caring, how good they are to each other and patient, that's something
all of us can do.''