In the name of cost savings, bean counters at the Department of the Interior are wondering whether states can oversee hundreds of lesser-known sites. Can Kentucky sweep the porch at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park and California sound the foghorns at Golden Gate National Recreation Area? The Trump administration signalled that the NPS will retain crown jewels such as Mount Rainier, Glacier and Zion – essentially, those with “National Park” in the name. The optics of a closed visitor centre overlooking the Grand Canyon or a shuttered ranger station in the shadows of mountainous Grand Teton were ruled an unthinkable embarrassment.

While superficially not a boneheaded idea, there are two problems with this proposal. The first is a corrosion of national identity at a time of deep political division. Red-state Americans should feel as entitled to traipse down Boston’s Freedom Trail as blue-state Americans are to imagine the shots that started the Civil War at Fort Sumter in south Carolina. If their respective states managed these historic sites, some of their heft as vignettes in the country’s story would be lost.

The park service was hailed by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns as “America’s best idea,” long acting as a soft-power arm of the US government, internally and abroad. Visitors from around the world flock to natural wonders, including Yosemite and Yellowstone, while the service has sent staff on multiyear international missions to advise on park planning over its century-long history. 

The second issue, and more disconcerting aspect, is the uncomfortable heritage that will fade without imprimatur of the government. Last summer I visited the Minidoka National Historic Site in southern Idaho, a barren, windswept desert where thousands of Japanese citizens and US citizens of Japanese descent were incarcerated during the Second World War. My tour was led by the great-granddaughter of those who were imprisoned, and she narrated the concentration camp’s history with aplomb – all while wearing NPS insignia. It was a powerful testament to a mature country; one willing to invest its resources in memorialising shameful chapters. As the ranger explained on the tour of threadbare barracks, Idaho’s then-governor was none too keen on hosting Japanese wartime prisoners – and, given the state’s political complexion today, it’s hard to imagine that Boise legislators would spend a dime on upkeep. 

Throughout the summer, the parsimonious tenants of the Department of the Interior are requiring the NPS to post signage asking for public feedback on anything that visitors feel portrays US history in a damaging light. It will lead to a long winter of whittling away nuance and complexity in the extraordinary and checkered heritage of my country. Come next summer, I fear, national parks will be a tarnished shrine to American greatness. 

Scruggs is Monocle’s Seattle correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

This story originally appeared in The Monocle Minute

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I’m not so sure that Antonio’s Law, as this theory might be called, is particularly watertight – plenty of things can quite objectively be judged better than others – but I have thought about it every time that I’ve begun the process of putting together Monocle’s annual Quality of Life Survey. The 18th iteration features in our July/August 2025 issue, out today. And so, at the risk of incurring yet another “pah”, how does one rank a thing so multifaceted and protean as a city? 

The index began as an antidote to the bloodless, data-driven liveability indexes then proliferating (this is the late 2000s we’re talking about). Tyler and Andrew’s contention was that cities weren’t a collection of statistics but living, breathing things. As such, they should be judged not just on GDP per capita and ambulance-waiting times but on aesthetic merit and whether or not you can have a good night out during the week.

Of course, these qualitative and quantitative measures produced a lot of data that had to be parsed and then melded into a sort of coefficient. This endeavour rewarded a particular kind of city, usually one with a population of around two million, blessed by nature and socioeconomics and, most often, Mitteleuropean. Places such as Geneva and Munich are lovely, liveable cities but this year we wanted to do something a little different. Rather than create a top-20 ranking of the world’s best overall metropolises, we have decided to award 10 cities across just as many categories, including one all-rounder. We considered healthcare, green spaces, security, transport, cleanliness, conviviality, nightlife, economic dynamism and housing – but spotlighting these criteria has allowed one or two lesser-exalted locales to sing. I hope that you enjoy reading it. If you have any questions about our method (or, as you might see it, our madness) then please do get in touch.

For our full line-up, including the city that offers the most favourable work/life balance, the locals that are never dull and the most convivial capital, click here.  

This story originally appeared in The Monocle Minute

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Ours is a time of great prosperity in which billions of people have flocked to the centres of commerce and industry. This has exacerbated housing shortages but also inspired ingenious solutions to problems such as overcrowding, transportation and poor design. Monocle spends a great deal of time speaking to those who aim to create better housing in different places across the globe through vision and imagination rather than bluster. Here are our two cents – or perhaps we should say 10.

1.
Bring back the lodger
Build a stepping stone to independence by opening up unused spare rooms

Whatever happened to the lodger? In the past, the gap between living at home with your folks and finding a place all of your own was often bridged by a period spent renting a spare bedroom in someone’s home – then suddenly everyone wanted to skip the middle bit. But being a lodger has much to recommend it. It can be affordable, prevents large houses from being occupied by a single person and often brings together a young renter with an older homeowner. Multigenerational living can be fun when it’s a choice.

The return of the lodger could also help to ease housing shortages and loneliness, as well as increase energy efficiency. Unlike major developments, opening up spare rooms requires no cranes, no concrete and no lengthy planning battles. It’s a nimble, low-impact way to help relieve urban housing stress.

2.
Build beautiful
Set rigorous design standards
and don’t be afraid to enforce them

As we race to build new homes in ever-more packed cities, beauty should not be sidelined. The places that we inhabit influence our emotions and the ways in which we interact with one another. While focus has rightly been placed on meeting environmental criteria, it’s time for cities to add stricter aesthetic requirements to their design codes too.

Done well, attractive new developments can enhance their surroundings and lift the spirits of their inhabitants. Just look to the neighbourhoods of Vauban in Freiburg and Nordhavn in Copenhagen: both are celebrated not just for their green credentials but for being pleasing to the eye too.

3.
Get into prefab mode
Make modular housing part of the solution

“Prefab” and “modular” need not be dirty words in the world of domestic construction. Faced with a housing shortfall of 3.5 million homes over the next
five years, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has pledged ca$26bn (€16.5bn) in financing for prefabricated homebuilders to help solve the country’s housing crisis.

According to the country’s government, prefabricated and modular housing can reduce construction times by as much as 50 per cent, costs by up to 20 per cent and emissions by up to 22 per cent compared to traditional construction methods. Modular construction also allows homeowners with an empty roof or a garden to scale up as their families grow and their needs change.

4.
Legalise backyard homes
Support gentle density and the era of the mid-rise

Many urban areas suffer from a binary choice: leafy low-rise suburbs or high-density tower blocks. Cities should also be investing in the middle-ground option: mid-rise, context-sensitive developments. From backyard homes and duplexes to in-fill developments, these options can help to create community-minded mixed-used neighbourhoods. Strict regulations and zoning laws have limited housing supply so it’s time to allow for low-to-mid-rise housing that can slip in alongside terraces and detached homes. It works, as the city of Auckland can attest. Now a decade into its Unitary Plan, it has rezoned more than half of the city’s residential land to let homeowners build up to three extra dwellings per lot. Same pretty street, more nice neighbours.

5.
Use it or lose it
Name and shame the owners of long-term vacant units

If homes are primarily seen as an investment, it will be impossible to fix the housing shortage. For too long, many have viewed property as a means by which they can hold an appreciating asset, often in a currency other than their own. And these so-called assets are frequently left empty. Some cities are beginning to fight back, cleverly using data to identify the scale of the problem. In 2023, Melbourne’s government examined water consumption and calculated that 100,000 homes in the city were unoccupied or underused, while Paris monitored census data and electricity usage, and found 262,000 empty dwellings. Both cities have seen calls to increase taxes on the owners of such uninhabited properties.

6.
Make transit the first stop
Compel developers to invest in better public-transport links

A move to the suburbs is not a social death sentence if you can easily zip into town on public transport. The building of big developments should come with an obligation on the part of the developers to improve local transport connections. Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation’s Rail 1 Property model is a good template. It builds high-rise residential and commercial buildings above metro stations, funding the transit system while creating vibrant, car-free communities. Another example is London’s Battersea Power Station redevelopment, which required a contribution of £270m (€320m) on behalf of the developers towards the construction of two new Underground stations.

7.
Encourage community power
Bend a few small rules in order to make a lot of big changes

Macro interventions in the housing market by the relevant authorities – at both the local and national level – are important but these take time and tend towards the bureaucratic. Nobody knows what’s better for a place than the people who live there. While order and basic structures are necessary, citizens should know when to break (or, let’s say, “bend”) rules too. Excessive regulation can slow change to a crawl. So, if you see an abandoned green space that’s overgrown with weeds or drowning in litter, why not lobby to turn it into a garden or vegetable patch? The hubbub of outdoor socialising brings life to the streets and can make an area safer, as long as it’s done responsibly. The same can apply to allowing children to play outside.Yes, even if it is a dreaded ball game.

8.
Turn nimbys into yimbys
Help locals to buy into planning decisions by putting more power in their hands

Inside every Nimby (“not in my back yard”) is a Yimby straining to get out. There is growing evidence that many objectors simply resent not being involved in the planning process and feel that building decisions are being made without
due consideration towards the potential concerns of the area’s residents. One possible solution for transforming Nimbys intoYimbys is to give members of the neighbourhoods involved the ability to sign off on – or even propose – new buildings or building extensions. If people believe that new homes could be available to previously priced-out relatives or friends, then objections might melt away.

9.
Properly regulate short-term lets
Don’t let Airbnb-style rentals rip the heart out of cities

The laissez-faire attitude to short-term rentals has hollowed out many inner-city neighbourhoods across Europe and provoked an electoral backlash. Spain has ordered the platform to remove 66,000 property listings for unlicensed apartments, while Barcelona plans to ban all short-term rentals by 2028. Airbnb counters that it isn’t to blame for housing shortages but it’s clear that the market needs more regulation. Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, has proposed a novel solution. In the Dutch capital’s most rapidly gentrifying areas, the government will vote on whether to reduce the maximum number of nights for which properties can be rented out from 30 to 15.

10.
Train more builders
You can’t create more housing without enough construction workers

Countries suffering a housing crisis often announce ambitious building targets only to discover that they lack the required construction workers to achieve them. Importing foreign builders is often politically fraught so there has been a renewed focus on training young people, while making construction a more appealing and sustainable profession.

The UK’s Labour government recently unveiled a plan to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029. Faced with more than 35,000 unfilled vacancies in the building sector, it also announced a scheme to train as many as 60,000 construction workers. This £600m (€710m) investment will also include the establishment of new technical colleges, thousands of apprenticeships and more than 40,000 industry placements.

Illustrations: Jonny Glover

The post Ten building blocks to solve the housing crisis appeared first on Monocle.

From this corner of western North Carolina the Appalachian Mountains begin their gentle descent towards northeastern Alabama. It’s a land of thickly forested hills that turn smoky blue in the twilight, which has long drawn people from all over the US for whom a life lived among nature is an ideal worth pursuing. Beside a more established Appalachian community that prides itself on rural self-sufficiency, these new residents have created a kind of redoubt against the ravages of modernity. This is a place where people can live outdoors, be creative and still have access to excellent food, culture and healthcare. But on 27 September 2024, a much less welcome newcomer barrelled into town.

“At around 22.00 I started getting phone alerts from the NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and it was alarming,” says Balcken. “They were saying that this would be a historic event, like nothing else we had ever seen. Every colour indicator was in the red for severity and impact.”

Down in the Gulf of Mexico, Tropical Storm Helene was gathering steam. And as it sped toward the Florida coast, whipping up winds of 220km/h, within 24 hours meteorologists upgraded its severity from a category-1 storm to a category-4 hurricane. Due to record-hot sea temperatures, Helene was able to hold an extraordinary amount of atmospheric moisture, which it unleashed as torrential rain in places at its peripheries, such as Asheville.

At the Grand Bohemian Hotel in the city’s Biltmore Village neighbourhood, general manager Matthew Lehman and his staff were holed up in the reception area. “We just watched the water rise and rise and rise,” he says. “By 10.30 it was two feet deep and we were leaving to go upstairs.” Some areas saw 700mm of rainfall in 24 hours, well above the 420mm threshold that constitutes a once-in-a-thousand-years flood. Both the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers, which converge in Asheville, burst their banks, toppling buildings, uprooting trees and carrying cars and other detritus miles downstream. The city lost running water and power, and telecommunications were knocked out in much of western North Carolina, leading to an information blackout. Whole communities were destroyed. An announcement from Black Mountain police chief Steve Parker reported: “Neighbourhoods are gone from flooding or mudslides. They’re having to leave bodies behind, houses are on fire.” A few days later, the then-governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, said that “the devastation brought by Hurricane Helene is beyond belief… Communities were wiped off the map.” The state’s final death toll was 107, more than a third of which were in Buncombe County, the county that contains Asheville.

Monocle visits the city in mid-April, when spring is rearing its leafy head. Though evidence of flooding isn’t difficult to find, downtown Asheville went largely unscathed and Main Street’s bars and restaurants are abuzz. Over the past 20 years or so, the city’s hospitality and tourism-related businesses have come to represent an ever-greater proportion of its economy. According to Explore Asheville, a tourism marketing agency (with which Monocle has collaborated in the past), visitors spent $3bn (€2.6bn) in Buncombe County in 2023, contributing 20 per cent of its total GDP. For these businesses, Helene couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Western North Carolina contains some of the most abundant deciduous forests in the US and come October the hills around Asheville burst into a riot of fiery yellows, oranges and reds. “Most restaurants here, because of how dead January, February and March are, use these [autumn] months to kind of bank up, put cash aside to get through the winter,” says Meherwan Irani, chef-proprietor of Chai Pani, an Indian restaurant group that has helped to put Asheville on the culinary map. Visitor numbers were down 74 per cent in October 2024 compared to the previous year and 57 per cent in November. Six months after the hurricane, Asheville had an unemployment rate of 6 per cent (13,000 people) – the highest in North Carolina, according to the state’s Department of Commerce. “At last count, 21 independent restaurants had either closed or not yet reopened,” says Irani.

And yet, along with the river mud, Helene stirred up that particularly Appalachian spirit of can-do and compassion. Stories of strangers helping strangers are countless, as are those of the hospitality industry directing its resources towards those in need. “For two days after Helene hit, there was no communication – no internet, no cell phone,” says Irani. “So, a group of us was drawn almost magnetically downtown.” Irani was due to open Botiwalla, a small sister restaurant to Chai Pani, the day after the hurricane made landfall. Its downtown building was one of very few places not to lose power. “We looked at everything in the walk-in and our first instinct was… Well, I’m sure there’s a lot of hungry people around Asheville,” says Irani. “The co-owner of another restaurant comes in carrying a big tub of lamb and says, ‘What can you do with this?’”

Soon chefs and other hospitality staff were working in the Botiwalla kitchen in what Irani describes as “a kind of triage but with lamb”. When World Central Kitchen, a charity that helps distribute food to people in disaster areas, arrived on the scene days later, they flew a helicopter that would land and take off 10 times a day, bringing hot meals, many of which were prepared at Botiwalla, to people cut off by the flooding. A more traditional triage was established at Double Crown, a West Asheville bar owned by Chris Bower, who also runs the Eda Rhyne Distillery in Biltmore Village. “The bartenders created an emergency medical centre inside and outside of the bar,” says Bower, who, at two-metres-tall and with shoulder-length hair and a long beard, looks like a bluegrass banjo player. “The fire department was sending people there to get emergency care and prescriptions.” And just outside Marshall (a small riverside town about 30km from Asheville that was hit hard by Helene), Kevin Ward and Jeramy Stauffer, who together run the prefabricated home company Nanostead, decided that their hillside location would be a suitable stage for the relief effort. “We showed up a couple of days after the storm with our grill and some hot dogs,” says Ward, who is also heavily bearded. “Within a couple of days we had a kitchen set-up serving 1,500 meals a day.” The Marshall Relief Alliance, as Ward and Stauffer’s group came to be known, hosted dinners and musical evenings throughout the cold Appalachian winter and became a hub both for people seeking help and those looking to assist others.

Autumn 2024 wasn’t only an inopportune time for Helene to hit from an economic perspective. The hurricane arrived towards the end of a particularly venomous US presidential election campaign and the disaster became a focal point for the forces feeding nationwide polarisation. On 2 October the then-president, Joe Biden, flew in a helicopter over the flood-hit areas. On 21 October the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, visited the town of Swannanoa, which was badly affected by Helene and is home to a poorer, more rural population than Asheville. Trump sought to amplify grievances related to the perceived ineffectiveness of the federal government and particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which deals with natural disasters and their aftermath.

Rumours circulated online that Fema was intentionally withholding aid or diverting resources towards illegal immigrants at the Mexican border, and even that the Biden government had engineered the storm in order to seize the region’s lithium deposits. After Fema had to pause relief work in certain areas due to threats from local militia, Chuck Edwards, a Republican congressman who represents many of the worst-hit areas, penned an open letter intended to dispel the rumours. It included the line, “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock… Nobody can control the weather.” Weeks later, Edwards stood behind Trump in Swannanoa as he repeated the falsehood that Fema was spending money meant for Helene on illegal immigrants.

Swannanoa town is still a site of devastation in April: roofs caved in, cars overturned and riverbanks strewn with debris. We meet Regae Eager and her husband, John Barnes, outside their home. They are replacing two rosebushes uprooted by the floods that were planted in memory of Eager’s mother and Barnes’s son. “We’re the only ones on this side that made it,” says Eager, her voice hoarse as she gestures towards what remains of her neighbours’ homes. Most of the people we have spoken to have been either positive or ambivalent about Fema’s response to the disaster but Eager heaps scorn on the agency. “We had no rescue, no warning,” she says. “The dam broke at the same time the reservoir stopped doing its job, so it was coming from up there and down there.” She points up the side of the valley and down towards the river.

Whether or not Fema is responsible for the fact that some areas were cut off with no water or power for months and have still to receive much in the way of financial assistance, the situation hasn’t improved since Trump re-entered the White House. Indeed, many feel that it has got worse, with the new president’s threats to disband the agency hindering both its ability to continue working and the faith that people have in soliciting its help. Comments made by Trump and others have likely discouraged many from seeking federal assistance, which, experts say, could undermine the whole region’s recovery. Months after the storm, just 15 per cent of eligible North Carolina households had applied. The newly appointed Democratic governor of North Carolina, Josh Stein, announced on 23 May that the Trump administration had denied the state’s request for Fema to honour a Biden-era commitment to fund all debris removal.

The total cost of the damage in North Carolina is estimated at $60bn (€53bn), which is nearly double the state’s annual budget. But despite the work that still needs to be done, the overwhelming impression is that of a community brought together by the disaster, rather than torn apart. Appalachia is often characterised as an insular place, wary of outsiders, but everyone Monocle meets strongly hopes that visitors will start filling the region’s forests, rivers and bars again as soon as possible. “I have come across so many people who have intentionally visited this city to support us after the storm and that’s been really cool,” says Bower. “You know, so much of the messaging we get is so jaded and cynical but people care about people.”

A large part of downtown Asheville’s charm comes from its mix of independent businesses. Indeed, it seems unlikely that there would have been the same amount of cross-community support if huge corporations dominated the local commercial inventory. “Asheville has always been anti-national chains,” says Irani. “There isn’t a McDonald’s, there isn’t a Subway, there isn’t even a Starbucks…The first chain restaurant that came to downtown, in my memory, was a Baskin-Robbins. And you should have heard the hullaballoo around that.” Locals fear that the price of rebuilding quickly will be a compromise on some of the values that make Asheville so distinctive. “The biggest threat is gentrification by disaster,” says Ward. “There’s a culture of capitalising on situations like this, where people will come in and buy up the land.” But Irani is bullish on the city’s long-term prospects and believes that the reception spring tourists received bodes 1 well for the summer months. “Tourists coming into town now are being welcomed with open arms and treated as heroes,” he says, smiling.

Down at the RAD, the area of Asheville worst hit by Hurricane Helene, the mood too is one of dogged defiance. The skaters, who see themselves as four-wheeled pioneers of the neighbourhood’s reinvention from warehouse district into creative community in the late 1990s, are still here, coolly gliding back and forth across the concrete. And inside a large inflatable tent, the sound of serrated metal on wood cuts through the eerie calm. Mark Joseph Oliver runs Foundation Woodworks, an art gallery and community workshop that once occupied one of the large warehouse buildings devastated by Helene. “We had 18ft of water [in the studio],” he says. “I had about $40,000 (€35,189) worth of personal projects lost.” But as he surveys an assemblage of new machinery, some donated and some bought with grants, he smiles. “We’re still here doing it and we’ll be here for a while, because we love this place and we don’t know any other way.”

A few metres from where we’re standing, workers are beginning to rewire and paint a large building called the Marquee, which served as a covered market for local makers and artists. By the end of summer, it should be filled once again with the laughter and chatter of buyers and vendors. We notice some wooden sculptures on a table by Oliver’s workstation. “Those are some works that we rescued from the flood,” he says. They look remarkably intact, with perhaps a richer, more characterful patina for their time spent weathering the storm.

The post After the storm: Asheville’s road to recovery after Hurricane Helene appeared first on Monocle.

I recently walked around Copenhagen’s new Opera Park with its architect, Maj Wiwe. Since opening in 2023, Opera Park has become my favourite public space in the city but I had never really thought about why until Wiwe drew my attention to the absence of children. There’s no programming for them. There are no playgrounds or areas for ball games; no climbing walls, basketball courts or shallow boating ponds; no signs with cartoon characters on them; no cuddly mascots encouraging you to pick up your litter.

Wiwe said that she had designed the park for adult pursuits, such as gazing at spring blossoms, reading a book in a shady corner or getting mildly drunk on a summer’s evening. Seeing my children grow up in Copenhagen has made me realise that Danish children are cosseted in many ways. The country’s one-size-fits-all state-school system has a laudable emphasis on supporting lower-achieving pupils but it often comes at the cost of the academically ambitious. Competitiveness is generally discouraged and the limelight is meant to be shared. I once sat, bewildered, at a school production of Treasure Island, until it was pointed out to me during the interval that every child in my son’s class was being given the chance to play one of the main characters through scene-by-scene rotation. It’s a strange paradox: Danish children are extraordinarily free, except to succeed or fail.

Visiting the Opera Park with its designer made me realise the extent to which most other public spaces in the Danish capital are sacrificed in order to keep children amused or distracted. Perhaps the adults have gone along with it because we ourselves have become so infantilised. We dress like children in sportswear and trainers. We play computer games, read Harry Potter and wait patiently outside multiplexes for the latest Marvel film. Instagram encourages us to eat under-10s’ birthday-party food. We drive cartoonish cars and play padel instead of tennis. And don’t get me started on grown men on skateboards.

Copenhagen’s Opera Park offers a compelling alternative approach to urban spaces, with fewer swings and rubberised safety surfaces, and more contemplative oases – quiet corners of the city in which to read a book or flirt. Who knows? If we show our children more mature ways in which to live in the city, we might begin to raise more robust grown-ups.

Michael Booth is Monocle’s Copenhagen correspondent.

Illustrator: Pete Ryan

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“I want to show how power can be empathetic and sensitive in a country where violence persists,” she says from her desk in Guadalajara’s city hall, which looks out onto the distinctive, richly decorated cathedral of the capital of Jalisco state. Behind her is a sign that reads “Limpia Guadalajara” (“Clean Guadalajara”). “I want us to have the cleanest streets in the country,” she says. The first phase includes graffiti removal and the maintenance of green spaces, a project that has already cost some MX$226m (€12m).

Delgadillo García cut her teeth in politics as a student. As president of the university body at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, she had big ideas. “Back then I knew nothing about politics but my sense of conviction opened a lot of doors.” In 2012 she became deputy at the Union Congress Chamber of Deputies after a solo door-to-door campaign. “For as long as I can remember, I have been intent on improving Guadalajara’s quality of life,” she says. 

Delgadillo García’s three-year term will be punctuated by political, social and economic challenges, one of which will be jointly hosting the 2026 Fifa World Cup with 15 other cities across Mexico, the US and Canada. It’s fitting, then, that Delgadillo García’s government acquired 160 rubbish trucks to establish a reliable waste-management system and is creating faster road links with Mexico City.

But the mayor also hopes to consolidate her city’s position as Mexico’s emerging epicentre of arts and culture. “I want to make this place a global reference point for architecture, gastronomy and audiovisual production,” she tells Monocle. 

The foundations for this are well established. Every year, Guadalajara hosts the most important book fair in Latin America, Fil. The city is also home to the world’s largest mariachi festival and hosts PreMaco, the warm-up act to ZonaMaco, Latin America’s most important contemporary-art fair, which is held in Mexico City. 

The Tapatíos – as the city’s residents are known – are feeling optimistic. When we join the mayor at popular Guadalajara watering hole De La O, we sip on tejuino, a fermented corn tipple, while members of the public greet her with enthusiasm.

Delgadillo García’s battle cry is La ciudad que te cuida, which means “The city that looks after you”. “Guadalajara can be a demanding place but it’s also resilient,” she says. Like its mayor, who has had to overcome difficult challenges over the years as a young woman in politics, Guadalajara is a city with steely determination and a desire to present its best face while the world watches. 

The post Matters of the art: Verónica Delgadillo García plans to position Guadalajara as a culture hub appeared first on Monocle.

This is a significant achievement considering the legacy of Baltimore’s heavy industry, which left high levels of toxic pollutants in the water. “The perception was that the water in the harbour would melt the skin off your hand,” says Adam Lindquist, vice-president of the Waterfront Partnership, an organisation founded in 2010 by a group of business, non-profit and government leaders with the goal of making the harbour swimmable. The group has revived aquatic habitats with floating wetlands and oyster farming, providing natural filters for pollutants, while city government has repaired pipes and built storage tanks to prevent sewage entering the waterways.

The amount of sewage discharged into the harbour fell by 97 per cent between 2018 and 2022. The water is tested five days a week and people are advised against swimming outside of organised events due to boat traffic. “It’s early days but we think that a permanent swim spot is the future for Baltimore,” says Lindquist.

Politics: UK
Q&A

Sadiq Khan
Mayor of London

Sadiq Khan believes that his city is poised for a pivotal moment of opportunity and growth. He is urging the world to take note.

Why is this year important for London?
We’ve got a new national government whose number-one mission is growth. The stars have aligned in terms of certainty and stability, which is what stakeholders and contractors are looking for.

There’s a tension now between liveability and economic viability. Do you think that people are wary of rapid urbanism?
We need to grow sustainable, green, human-oriented cities. Our plan for London prioritises public transport, cycling, walkability, no car parks near stations, green roofs and walls, and rewilding urban spaces. We’ve brought back bats, bees and beavers to the city – Justin and Sigourney Beaver, to be precise – and we’ll clean up the Thames so that residents can swim safely.

What keeps you up at night?
Street crime remains a concern but we have made progress. We currently have the lowest rate of teenage homicides in 13 years. Burglary is also down and we’re tackling phone theft by working with police and phone companies to make second-hand phones worthless, just as car stereos once were. We’re also working with the private sector to create a better city.

Click here to read the full, extended interview.

The Foreign Desk
Andrew Mueller on: Earning respect

The funeral of former Uruguayan president José Mujica was a grand affair, certainly relative to the man that it commemorated: a flag-draped coffin on a horse-drawn gun carriage, mourning dignitaries, weeping crowds and a lying in state at the Legislative Palace in Montevideo. But Mujica’s final interring was more like what he would probably have wanted: he was buried under a sequoia tree on his modest farm, alongside his dog Manuela, who died in 2018.

Mujica’s schtick while serving as Uruguay’s head of state between 2010 and 2015 was that he was the world’s poorest president. On arriving in office at the age of 74, he declared a net worth of $1,800 (€1,600). The farm belonged to his wife. Other presidents, he once said, considered him a weirdo. But what if he wasn’t? Whatever lessons Mujica learned about the follies of avarice, he learned the hard way. As a young man, he committed himself to the dangerous and austere life of a guerilla in the ranks of Marxist insurgents, the Tupamaros. He was eventually arrested – being shot six times in the process – and spent more than a decade in prison. By the time material possessions were a possibility, he had little interest in them. He once harrumphed that his three and a half million fellow Uruguayans annually imported 27 million pairs of shoes: “Are we centipedes?” he demanded of his people.

But he seemed content and led an engaged, interesting and eventually admired life. “I dedicated myself to changing the world and didn’t change a damn thing but I was entertained,” he said. The lesson here applies as much to countries and cities as individuals: think a bit more about what we need, a bit less about what we want. In recent months, another president, who gets two Boeing 747s with the job and already has a Boeing 757 of his own, has grumpily defended his right to accept the gift of still another Boeing 747 from a royal. But does that president, or the country he governs, seem happy?

Andrew Mueller presents ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio

Urbanism: Czechia
Squaring up

Staré Brno, the oldest district of Czechia’s second city Brno, seems like the kind of place that should have a town square. Until recently, however, it did not. What it had was Mendel Square, an unprepossessing bus and tram station which, with bleak irony, bore the name of a botanist. But over the past few years, Mendel Square has been reimagined and reinvigorated. You can still catch a bus or a tram there but the idea is that you can now do much more, including complaining about the city authorities that funded the refurbishment.

“We’re not French – we don’t protest constantly,” says Brno-born Ondrej Chybik of Chybik + Kristof, which undertook the redesign along with Brno architecture firm Dílna and landscape architect Zdenek Sendler. “But in Central Europe we do consider squares as very important for civic society because all the revolutions and big changes within our country happened in those squares.” Chybik is of the generation of Czechs who grew up in a country transformed by people gathering in town squares; he recalls, as a four-year-old, sitting on his father’s shoulders among the crowds urging on the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

“There’s a place where you can put a stage, for instance, not just for protests but also cultural performances,” says Chybik. “There’s shade given by trees so you can stay a while, whether you’re protesting or enjoying an exhibition. The goal was to create a good square to accommodate as many functions as possible.”

Nightlife: Ukraine
Dancing in the face of danger

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv was fast becoming Eastern Europe’s hedonism hotspot. Wartime Ukraine’s nightlife, however, has far from disappeared and has even evolved to meet the moment head on.

The techno festivals and all-night raves might be gone but they’ve been replaced by a rich scene of day parties and evening gigs that frequently double as fundraisers for those fighting on the frontline.

Legendary Kyiv nightclub K41, designed by the architects behind Berlin’s Berghain and housed in a former brewery, has raised more than €700,000 to fund the purchase of everything from energy generators to bulletproof vests for the army. In the Black Sea resort city of Odesa, sometimes dubbed the Ibiza of the East, Ukrainians continue to party at the bars and clubs that line the seaside, even as drones hover overhead and missiles pummel the surrounding oblast.

In a time of blackouts, bombardments and daily uncertainty, the partygoers cutting shapes on the country’s dancefloors demonstrate how Ukrainians have refused to be flattened by a narrative of war and definitely still know how to have a good time.

For both civilians and soldiers on leave, these venues provide otherwise hard-to-come-by opportunities for conviviality and kicking back. Dancing the night or afternoon – away in a nation at war promises fleeting yet welcome moments of respite and an all-important morale boost.

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Israel’s strikes on Iran, Operation Rising Lion, are nevertheless something new, enabled by the accelerating development of drone technology. A significant cohort of Iran’s military leadership – including the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the chief of staff for Iran’s armed forces – are dead, with inevitably disruptive effects upon the country’s capacities. All things considered, it also has to be imagined that persuading anyone to replace them will be a challenge

News of Israel’s strikes arrived on the second day of this year’s Globsec Forum, held in Prague late last week. Nobody was exactly astonished. There was much discussion on the first day of reports that the US was evacuating non-essential personnel from embassies in the Middle East. I suggested to one former European national leader that this could be theatrical stakes-raising posturing ahead of the next round of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme: “I’d be very surprised,” they replied. “You don’t do that if you’re not very serious.” 

On the second day of Globsec, I asked a current European minister, not notable for their political sympathies to either US president Donald Trump or Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for their thoughts: “The reality,” they said, “is that nobody likes Iran.” In these circumstances, however, it is generally assessed to be unlikely that Iran would respond favourably to Trump’s renewed offer of a deal. It would be perceived as capitulation – because that’s exactly what it would be. 

“Iran is not going to give up all chances of [uranium] enrichment,” Steve Erlanger, The New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent for Europe, told Monocle. “They’ve made it very clear that to do so would be to surrender, and that would be harder to do now. But Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, has been trying to be imaginative, despite the pressure from the MAGA people around the president, to phase out Iranian enrichment – this idea of a consortium building a whole new enrichment facility on an island that Iran would share with Qatar, so that Iran can say they’re still enriching and the Americans can say no, there’s no enrichment going on. But now all this seems to be, if I can use the phrase, blown out of the water.”

Though Operation Rising Lion is new in some respects (the scale and the means of Israel’s strikes against Iran), it is not a departure from Israel’s doctrine of several decades’ standing where the nuclear ambitions of its potential antagonists are concerned. It has been 44 years since the Israeli Air Force (IAF) bombed the reactor that Iraq was building near Baghdad. It has been 18 years since the IAF bombed the reactor that Syria was assembling, with North Korean assistance, in Deir ez-Zor. And the prospect of such action has always been the unacknowledged backstop to all negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran, like a bewildering number of Israel’s nemeses across the decades, seems to have underestimated Jerusalem’s resolve.

Mueller is a contributing editor at Monocle and host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

This story originally appeared in The Monocle Minute

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Israel’s initial attack triggered a wave of condemnation from regional neighbours. Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Muscat have all issued carefully worded statements calling for restraint and warning of the dangers of escalation. On the surface, these reactions appear to be standard diplomatic protocol but beneath the language of international law and peacebuilding lies a more pragmatic aim: self-preservation. “The Gulf is scrambling to avoid a war between Israel and Iran,” says Mahdi Jasim Ghuloom, a junior fellow in geopolitics at the Observer Research Foundation. “These public condemnations are not just about principle. They’re about protection, distancing Gulf interests from Israeli actions in the hope of avoiding retaliation from Iran.”

The concern is well-founded. Israel’s campaign, which prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as “ongoing,” has already claimed the lives of high-ranking Iranian military officials, including the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the chief of staff for Iran’s armed forces. While the intent might be clear, the consequences are anything but predictable. “If Israel is serious about this being a longer-term operation, then the Gulf is right to worry,” Ghuloom warns. “There’s always the risk that Iran, feeling cornered, shifts into a regime-survival mindset. That’s when things become dangerous, when you start seeing unconventional retaliation, proxy activation or even nuclear miscalculations.”

In this increasingly volatile landscape, the UAE’s approach stands out. As one of the only countries in the world that is maintaining diplomatic relations with both Israel and Iran, the UAE occupies a rare position – not as a passive observer but as a potential bridge. While no formal mediation has been announced, diplomatic sources suggest that the Emiratis have been quietly keeping communication channels open with both sides, even during the peak of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

This balancing act has not been without friction. Israel’s recent decision to temporarily shutter several of its embassies in the Gulf, including in the UAE, to prevent Iranian retaliation, has raised eyebrows in the region. “It’s frustrating for Gulf leaders,” Ghuloom says. “Closing embassies signals a lack of trust in Gulf security and risks alienating countries that could be vital conduits for dialogue. If Israel wants de-escalation, the Abraham Accords can’t just be economic – they have to function diplomatically too.”

Signed in 2020 with great fanfare, the Abraham Accords promised peace dividends: trade, tourism, technology. But their true test is now. Can they deliver stability in a moment of rising danger? “The accords were never just about flights and free-trade zones,” says Ghuloom. “This is when they have to work, to channel frustration, to communicate red lines and to quietly nudge both parties toward restraint.”

Beyond the UAE, Oman condemned the strikes as “reckless” even as it remains a vital interlocutor in US-Iran nuclear talks. Should Muscat’s influence wane, Washington might turn to Abu Dhabi. “If Iran becomes unresponsive,” Ghuloom says, “the UAE could be the next best bet.” Saudi Arabia, too, is treading a thin line. Having restored diplomatic ties with Tehran in 2023, it has issued strong condemnations of Israel’s actions while signalling a more pragmatic posture – one grounded in a desire to reduce regional tensions rather than inflame them. This isn’t just diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake. The Gulf’s proximity to potential conflict zones (and its enmeshment with global markets) makes it particularly vulnerable. The largest US base in the Middle East is in Qatar, while thousands of US troops are stationed just outside Abu Dhabi. Any escalation risks pulling the Gulf directly into the fray.

Then there are the economic stakes. “Even without a full-blown war, the perception of instability will spook investors,” warns Ghuloom. The Gulf’s financial and aviation sectors depend on global confidence. If the region is seen as unstable, that flows straight through to currency pressures, trade dips and nervousness in the markets.” Airlines such as Emirates and Etihad rely on calm skies. Dubai’s booming property market is fuelled by foreign capital that thrives on certainty. Sovereign wealth funds from Abu Dhabi to Riyadh are now deeply exposed across global markets. For the Gulf, even a whiff of instability is bad for business.

In other words, it is pragmatism, not ideology, that is the guiding force behind Gulf diplomacy today. And as the region teeters on the edge of wider conflict, it might fall to the UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia to keep it from tipping over. Not because they are neutral but because they are interconnected – and because, in a fractured region, they are among the few voices that are still speaking to both sides. For now, diplomacy remains discreet. But the stakes are anything but subtle.

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“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” 

Who wouldn’t keep reading? For the unfamiliar, High-Rise is a grizzly but brilliantly built tale of the moral and psychological descent of a group of middle-class professionals into the worst imaginable versions of themselves. The cause of their fall? Cohabitation in a vertiginous apartment block of the sort that was flying up across London at the time. Fifty years on, the issues at the story’s heart – community, placemaking, urbanism and what it means to live well – are as relevant as ever.

Nudged by subtle differences and barely perceptible social gradations (gleaned by floor, profession or proximity to services), the residents of Ballard’s nameless high-rise slowly swap community for chaos and civility for savagery in a way that clearly reflects the novelist’s suspicion that such architecture plays a macabre part. Though the principles of the high-rise were born through improved engineering and construction techniques, and couched in optimistic modernism (Swiss architect Le Corbusier called them “streets in the sky” and demanded dignity for all), it didn’t take long for the cheer to curdle. 

Spurred by housing demands after the Second World War – and aided by craters left by Luftwaffe bombs – a new genre of hastily thrown-up residential buildings began to attract suspicion. Were these good places to house the many, or rangy receptacles for the sad and lonely masses? It’s no coincidence that James Bond creator and author Ian Fleming named his villain Goldfinger after the British-Hungarian architect responsible for several famous London high-rises erected in the 1960s and 1970s. Tall towers have always cast a long shadow.

High-Rise itself is a work of fiction but at its core lies the fact that the author, and many others, saw the new carbuncular modernism that defined mid-century building as atomising, oppressive, inhumane and anti-social. What’s more, many long-running issues and concerns with vertical living are becoming more relevant than ever. Cities today – especially London, where the novel is set – are struggling to find housing density to meet demands. 

I mention all this because my circumstances recently changed to offer me a new perspective. Things began, well, looking up when renovations on my modest terraced home drove me – my wife, my young son and our cat Alfie – into the charity of a friend’s vacant, soon-to-be-sold apartment umpteen floors up overlooking east London. It was to be my first taste of an elevated existence.

Like the tentative early chapters of the novel (before things truly begin to unravel), our initial feelings were a breezy fondness for the fresh perspective. The lift, the mod cons, the gym, the big windows, the breeze and the maze of streets far below were intoxicating novelties. As time passed, this most artificial of platforms offered a glimpse of nature as I’d never seen before in the city. The sun rose and fell in a place where I’ve lived for 15 years yet rarely seen it. The city took on a thrilling new light: daylight, liberated from the shade most people experience between buildings, beamed brightly onto church spires, slate roofs, offices and landmarks, and trees budded and blossomed among the edifices. (Light, you realise, is the price the rest of us pay for the shadows cast by these tall towers).

Ballard’s book is a dramatic, twisted and preposterously dark but real version of what I – and more than a few snooty architecture critics – have long thought life at height must look like: a bit sad, insular and isolated. But as weeks passed, my concerns lifted too. Time was measured not by the feeling of being trapped but by a sense of freedom: in lemony-hued sunrises of early spring and dramatic sunsets of deep-red and bruise-purple over a city I saw anew with each change of weather. Over time, the rhythms of the street, commuters, partygoers, buses and taxis – although Lilliputian – seemed all the more poignant and pretty when experienced from above. By the time we came to abandon our experiment with altitude, even some of the initially unfriendly, eye-contact-avoiding lift-dwellers and neighbours warmed up and began exchanging pleasantries. It was a lot more Corbusian cheer than Ballardian bleakness. People, I can confirm, are mercifully much the same in the sky as on the street.

So, could building more high-rises still be a viable solution to London’s housing shortage? Today, more than at any time since Ballard’s book was published, cities are redrawing our relationship with our lofty neighbours. While taller buildings should be appealing (if only for the number of units they can offer in a smaller space) there’s fresh backlash against the housing blocks that have been part of planning orthodoxy for the past half century. In the UK this is partly due to the unnerving prevalence of flammable cladding that was exposed after the Grenfell fire tragedy that cost 72 lives in 2017 and commemorates its eight-year anniversary this weekend. Not to mention the many well-built, well-intentioned blocks that have succumbed to neglect, decay and ghettoisation, and the newer ones being thrown up by corner-cutting developers. To top it off, the UK’s unnecessarily complicated and often unfair system of leaseholds and service charges doesn’t make ownership appealing either. Lastly, there’s the post-pandemic pushback against small flats without green space as a response to shifting expectations of homes in the busy city. Challenges aside, this need not be the death knell for urban density.

Designed well with careful consideration for the proportions, neighbours, services and connection to the street, tall buildings can be beautiful and do not necessarily presage a collapse in community. The water did go off in the block once (for an hour or two) but I’m happy to report that this was the extent of the blight and there was no further descent into a Hobbesian hell. We didn’t once consider barbecuing the cat. 

High-rises can be exciting, elevating and an integral part of the city’s texture and should be big and bold enough for more than one genre of family, home and lifestyle. Of course, there are downsides but perhaps it’s time to drop the snobbery, lower our guard a little and give the high life another chance.

Josh Fehnert is Monocle’s editor. For more on global affairs to business, culture and design, subscribe to Monocle today.

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