Monday 30 January 2023 - The Monocle Minute

I was taking myself on a tour of New York’s design highlights when I first visited The High Line (pictured). While the Guggenheim, the Seagram Building and the UN headquarters were all impressive, landscape architect James Corner’s transformation (alongside Diller Scofidio + Renfro) of a stretch of abandoned railway track on Manhattan’s west flank into a verdant park struck me the most. It was a work of design so dramatically different to anything I had seen before – and the reason why the newly granted planning approval for the Camden Highline in London is particularly exciting. By 2025, north London will hopefully have a new park running along a 1.2km stretch of former railroad track.

Camden isn’t the first linear park to draw from the New York original: there’s The 606 on the old Bloomingdale line in Chicago, completed in 2015; Seoul’s Seoullo 7017, which was built on an unused overpass in 2017; and then there’s The Underline in Miami, the first stretch of which opened in 2021. The presence of these High Line tributes in cities across the globe shows the power of a singular, iconic work to spawn similar projects elsewhere. All of which begs the question: what’s the next big urbanism project set to inspire a host of copycats? Danish architecture firm Big’s skyscraper The Spiral – also in New York – seems the obvious candidate. The visual greenwashing of the super-tall skyscraper, with plants spiralling up its facade, is likely to be appealing to ambitious developers and architects looking to make a mark and grab headlines, just as The High Line did.

The difference between the two projects is the fact that, while the visual appeal of it was great, what has made The High Line an enduring success, and ultimately spawned so many similar projects, is the simple fact that it improved city dwellers’ lives. The residents of Chicago, Seoul and Miami have all benefited from the added greenspace brought on by The High Line effect – as Londoners will do soon too. The next big project to come along will need to realise that the real magic comes when people, not aesthetics, are put first.

Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor.

In a fast-changing world, Neste can adapt to the evolving needs of people and societies. This agility has seen the Finnish refiner become a world-leading producer of renewable fuels.

Brazil’s minister of justice and public security Flávio Dino has proposed an “anti-coup package” aimed at protecting the country from anti-democratic threats. The proposal comes after supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed key government buildings earlier this month (pictured). Dino’s plan, which he will present to congress in February, includes the creation of a national guard to protect government buildings in Brasília, the monitoring of certain social media networks and harsher legal consequences for those who act against the “democratic state”. Supporters of the measure have praised Dino for acting quickly.

But some academics have suggested that the government must tread carefully when monitoring content on social media. “The more detailed the legislation is, the higher the risk that it will be [politically] biased,” Carlos Affonso Souza, a professor at the Rio de Janeiro State University told Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. He has a point. If congress approves the law, the new administration should ensure that it heals rather than further divides the country’s still polarised political landscape.

Toronto’s mayor, John Tory, has vowed to restore a sense of safety to the city’s public transport network following a spate of separate, violent attacks on passengers and staff since the beginning of the year. In response, 80 police officers have been deployed to patrol subway stations and other points on the network – a move that has been described by critics as inadequate for a system that carries more than 1.7 million passengers every day.

A sense of unease in the city was highlighted during last October’s mayoral election when only 29 per cent of residents turned out to vote – a record low. The incidents have served as a jolt to many of those who abstained. Toronto’s political leaders, who embarked on a recent spree of cutting public-service budgets, need to urgently reverse their hands-off approach to the city’s management. It’s clearly not the right way to solve problems.

Image: William Eggleston / CO Berlin, Untitled, c. 1971–1974

Photography / Berlin