The Monocle Minute

Can’t stand the heat? You’re not alone – after all, 21 July was the hottest day on Earth since records began. And it’s becoming particularly hard to bear for those who live in urban environments. Cities are full of hard surfaces, such as concrete, asphalt and steel that trap heat throughout the day. To make things worse, we pump extra heat into our cities by trying to cool ourselves with air conditioning and by driving around in cars with combustion engines. With cities heating up twice as quickly as non-urban areas across the globe, what’s to be done?

Some places are taking action. Seoul and Santa Fe, for example, have resurfaced buried rivers, lowering temperatures significantly. Medellín, Montréal and Milan have made efforts to connect their existing green spaces, creating a tree-canopy network that supports walkability. Greece, Qatar and Canada have been working closely with local municipalities and industries on labour-protection laws that will keep workers safe from the heat. More and more cities have been drawing up heat action plans and exposure maps to identify areas that need intervention when extreme weather strikes.

When it comes to infrastructure, there’s plenty that needs to be done. Most of the highways, bridges and railways built in the past 200 years were engineered for a climate that no longer exists. There have been efforts to modernise them, such as new materials being used to reflect heat from impermeable surfaces. But sometimes the best solution is also the most obvious. Not only would reintroducing nature into cities help to combat extreme heat but it would also offer beautiful additions to urban landscapes. Hundreds of thousands of trees are being planted in cities around the world, from Freetown in Sierra Leone to New York and Melbourne, with both public and private stakeholders participating in caring for them. It’s bringing people together and saving lives. A recent study of 93 European cities showed that increasing tree-canopy coverage by 30 per cent could prevent one in three deaths caused by extreme heat. We need to up our game – but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Eleni Myrivili is a global chief heat officer at UN Habitat and Athens’ chief resilience officer. Her work focuses on building heat resilience in cities across the globe. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Venezuela’s incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, has claimed victory following Sunday’s election, despite allegations of significant irregularities in the vote count. Opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was disqualified from standing by the judiciary, has pronounced her successor, Edmundo González, as the real winner. Though Maduro hailed his contested victory as a triumph of peace and stability, it remains to be seen whether it will be accepted quietly by his rivals. In 2018, the opposition – which, as now, disputed his election – set up a rival government under Juan Guaidó, who ultimately failed to unseat him.

“There was a level of energy generated by Machado not seen since Hugo Chávez’s election in 1999,” Christopher Hernandez-Roy, deputy director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Monocle Radio’s The Briefing. “She united the opposition in a way that made people think that this could be a second Independence Day for Venezuela. The opposition will gather as much evidence as possible about the results and see what the international reaction is. Then we’ll start to see what will develop in the country – whether there’ll be protests and how the army will react to them.”

For more on Venezuela’s results, tune in to Monday’s edition of ‘The Briefing’ on Monocle Radio.

Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe has opened its first Casa Loewe shop in Seoul’s Gangnam District, offering shoppers an enticing range of ready-to-wear pieces, accessories, eyewear and site-specific products. Blending fashion, art and craft, the three-storey outlet follows the vision of the brand’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson. The building’s scintillating façade features handmade emerald-green ceramic tiles from Spain, while the interior design juxtaposes concrete, marble, glass and wood. A smartly curated furniture collection with pieces by US woodworker and Dutch designer Gerrit Thomas Rietveld also elevates the overall retail experience.

To honour the brand’s championing of artisanal know-how, works from the annual Loewe Foundation Craft Prize are on display, including a ceramic sculpture by Japanese artist Erika Inazaki and South Korean weaver Dahye Jeong. The shop proves that, whether in fashion or furniture, a distinctive personality and an appreciation for good design can attract shoppers seeking to invest in a brand’s universe.

Bertrand Chauveau and Paul Henri are hoping to shake up Paris’s culinary scene with Le Cornichon, their recently opened contemporary French restaurant in the 11th arrondissement. Here, they tell our new radio show, Monocle in Paris, about their hopes and plans for this summer.

It’s exciting to see young Parisians going back to basics and celebrating French food. When it comes to your national cuisine, what approach do you take?
Paul Henri: The French cuisine baton has changed a lot of hands over the past 15 years – it isn’t a static thing. Abroad, however, it has a reputation for being quite formal and complicated, and not very welcoming. Our hope is to change that, one menu at a time, by mixing up French cuisine with a little US food culture.

The city is packed with tourists for the Olympics. Who are your customers right now?
Bertrand Chauveau: We’re still seeing our regular customers, locals from our neighbourhood. We serve simple food and that’s what they keep coming back for. Our menu serves residents and tourists alike, and we love the atmosphere that this creates. We have only been open for two months but we’re already very happy with our clientele.

What’s the atmosphere like in Paris for you at the moment?
PH: It’s very special. Paris is bringing the party to the people who have come here and those who have decided to stay are realising what an amazing place this can be. It is difficult to impress Parisians but, because of the Olympics, everyone has decided that this will be a beautiful couple of weeks. The opening ceremony set the tone for the crazy playground that this city has become.

You can listen to the full interview with Chauveau and Henri on our new programme,‘Monocle in Paris’, live every weekday at 09.00 Paris time during the Olympics.

In our summer books special, we sit down with two brilliant authors. We hear from Scottish author and screenwriter, John Niven, whose moving 2023 memoir O Brother, about his brother Gary, is now out in paperback. Plus: we meet first time novelist Mariel Franklin, whose debut, Bonding, is a smart, supremely current book about sex, technology and friendship.