“Much more serious and deadly pandemics have not really even dented the arc of urbanization,” said Florida. “I think we’re in the infancy of this.”
Urban experts all agree on one thing: all of these changes will be influenced directly by the degree to whether working from home becomes ingrained as a new normal.
While some businesses, notably technology companies, have signaled a permanent retreat from an office setting, most experts predict a hybrid model.
“The answer to just how many days we return to an office will drive a lot of change,” said Christopher Mayer, professor of real estate at the Columbia University Business School in New York.
Overall, a diminished demand for office space — one of the most prominent by-products of COVID-19 — as well as the sense that new offices will require more room for each employee — will bring a series of changes to the workplace environment.
These will include a boom in so-called hot-desking, where employees coming to an office space on different days use the same work stations, said Carlo Ratti, professor of Urban Technologies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the SENSEable City Lab.
Zoom, that pandemic work darling, isn’t going away. But city businesses may start providing areas to conduct virtual meetings as a way of generating added revenue, Ratti said.
“The way Starbucks became a place for email, these could be new places to patronize while Zooming,” said Ratti.