offices are forced to close, or when people are afraid to visit them, the impact on villages
and small towns is minimal. Cities, by contrast, almost stop functioning.
In the initial panic, many urbanites fled. Mobile-phone records suggest that 17% of
Parisians departed in the week before France was locked down in March. Over the
following months, city-dwellers in many countries recalibrated their attitudes to
property. A poll by Ipsos mori in June 2020 found that Britons of every generation
prized a private garden above all other features of a home, including secure locks and a
good internet connection. Suburbia had not looked so alluring for years.
So big cities will enter 2021 in an awful state. Offices will still be quiet; theatres will be
closed; public-transport agencies will be begging governments for bail-outs. The army
of urban service workers—the coffee-pourers, nail-painters, sandwich-makers and yoga
instructors—will still be struggling to pay the rent. But by the end of the year things will
be looking up again.
Cities will recover not because a covid-19 vaccine or better treatments appear, although
those would help greatly, but because of their innate capacity for change. Adapting to
shocks is what great cities do. As previous industries withered, they turned cotton
warehouses into offices, railway lines into parks and slaughterhouses into boutiques. If
shops and offices are abandoned, urbanites will find new uses for them. This flexibility
seemed to hurt cities during the pandemic, as white-collar workers switched to working
from home and stopped buying bus tickets and sandwiches. But not adapting would
have been calamitous.
Cities’ power to assemble talented people remains strong. The Black Lives Matter
protests and a rash of illegal urban raves have shown that young city-dwellers still want
to congregate. Middle-aged office workers may feel differently. Yet predictions that
knowledge industries will abandon city centres for a network of small satellite offices
misunderstand the purpose of offices. They are not for making phone calls or tapping at
computers, but for sharing ideas. A hub is essential; a suburban satellite office may not
be much of an improvement on a converted bedroom.
Some urbanites will move to suburbs and small towns. They have long done so: it is
almost a feature of great global cities that they have a negative balance of domestic
migration, and rely on babies and immigrants to keep up their numbers. But anybody
who believes that the outflow will turn into a flood has perhaps not tried to get planning
permission for a house or a block of flats in the suburbs recently. Cities will hit the
ground hard, then bounce.
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