The Monocle Minute

Joe Biden’s decision to end his 2024 presidential re-election campaign is as unprecedented as it was inevitable. The US president had faced weeks of steadily growing and increasingly public pressure from his own Democratic Party to step down, after a halting television-debate performance against Donald Trump that focused questions on his advanced age and fitness for office. But even if Biden’s decision was to be expected, it has hurtled the Democrats into unprecedented and chaotic territory.

With the party’s official nominating convention taking place in less than a month, attention immediately turns to the president’s potential replacement as the Democratic candidate for November’s election. Biden’s running mate, and current vice-president, Kamala Harris is top of the list. Yesterday, Biden offered her his “full support and endorsement” while he gets on with the business of “fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term”. The question is whether others in the party will now rally around Harris or consider an open convention to solicit alternative candidates.

Democrats will face recriminations over how they got to this stage but that postmortem will have to wait until after their current predicament has been solved. Democratic strategist Marc Adelman tells Monocle that, “There will be a lot of longform pieces about Biden – but the press cycle is going to be driven by this moment and Kamala Harris.” The party’s one uniting factor at this stage is a deep-seated determination to beat Donald Trump in November. Questions over who is best placed to do that abound. Biden’s departure from the race is just the start.

Christopher Cermak is Monocle Radio’s senior news editor.

With regards to building usage, planning laws should be like your knickers – supportive in the right places but with enough elasticity to ensure that the structure can, ahem, change. For a great example, look to Seattle, which has introduced a new code that will streamline the process of converting offices into residential buildings. The regulation, which was signed into law last week by mayor Bruce Harrell, will allow developers working on conversions to skirt restrictive design-development requirements.

The bill should allow architects and designers more freedom to creatively adapt structures to new uses, making Seattle a benchmark for other cities across the globe. Not only will such a law reduce the likelihood of buildings sitting empty but it will also ensure that they’re less likely to be knocked down when demand for their prescribed usage dries up. By reducing red tape in this manner, it’s easier, faster and more affordable to repurpose properties to meet new needs (in the case of Seattle, housing) than to build from scratch. This, in turn, will help to make cities more sustainable; changing a building’s use and extending its lifespan, rather than bulldozing and replacing it, prevents the emission of thousands of tonnes of captured carbon into the atmosphere.

It’s a sentiment that was supported at a Monocle event hosted with Saint-Gobain last week (at about the same time Seattle was signing its new law into effect). Planning laws were central to the discussion about the future of cities at Tour Saint-Gobain, the French construction and development specialists’ Paris headquarters. Panellist Kelsea Crawford of development-and-design office Cutwork Studio led the charge. “So often, great projects are blocked before anything can get started because of building codes that were written before there were even cars in the city,” said Crawford. “We need to update regulations to match the way that society is today.”

In the same way that our underpants have evolved from drawstring pantaloons to elasticated briefs, our planning laws also need to advance – and Seattle might just be leading the way.

Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor. For more on the future of the city tune into Monocle Radio’s ‘The Urbanist’ or pick up a copy of ‘The Monocle Companion: Fifty Ideas for Building Better Cities’ today.

The biennial Farnborough International Airshow, one of the world’s top events for the global aerospace industry, opens today and runs until Friday. Some 75,000 visitors are expected to sample the wares of more than 1,200 exhibitors from 44 countries at this year’s edition of the fair, which serves to showcase both the civil and defence sectors of aviation.

Major manufacturers and airlines will all be in attendance, as well as aerospace companies such as Brazil’s Embraer, which will display its mid-sized E195-E2 passenger jet and debut a freighter variant of the same airframe. On the defence front, more than two years of war in Europe have shaped aircraft-procurement requirements. The US will remind visitors of its domination in the field when it conducts flypasts of its F-35A and F-15E aircraft later today.

Just two months after Switzerland’s Nemo won the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, the race is heating up to choose a host for the 2025 iteration. On Friday the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation broke the news that the country’s largest city, and Monocle’s home in the country, Zürich, had fallen out of the race along with its capital, Bern. The selection panel will now have until the end of August to crown either Basel or Geneva as the host.

Various criteria are assessed by the judges, including transport links, accommodation options, event venues and sustainability credentials. “We are a bit disappointed because Zürich is our base in Switzerland,” Monocle Radio’s senior correspondent, Fernando Augusto Pacheco, told The Briefing. “But in some ways it’s a positive thing. Eurovision has a tendency to shine a spotlight on smaller cities. And wherever it is held, Switzerland is the ideal choice – you can trust them with an event like this.”

When the athletes of Team France take a trip down the Seine this Friday for the opening ceremony of Olympic Games – and the Champs-Élysées on 28 August for that of the Paralympics – viewers will become more familiar with the Berluti brand. In Monocle’s bumper July/August issue, we explore how craft know-how and tireless tailoring made the LVMH maison ideally suited to outfit Team France on the biggest stage of all.

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We speak with cultural historian W David Marx about the appeal of Japanese magazines, from Popeye to Brutus. Plus Tempura, a French publication dedicated to exploring Japan’s cultural trends, and a book celebrating the cult movie zine Little Joe.