The pathway to a post-Covid city

• The office will shrink, but it won’t disappear.  The whole point of living in a dirty, overpriced, overcrowded city is to meet people and swap goods and ideas. Many offices will remain hubs of ideas exchange.
• Ditching daily commutes — along with the season ticket, car, dry-cleaning and office lunches — would gift workers time and a de facto pay rise. Some could leave big cities for cheaper lives elsewhere: we may have accidentally found the magic bullet for moving good jobs to the hinterlands, even for healing the political rural-urban divide.
  
• Once people spend all day in their home neighbourhoods, they can go within the space of an hour from working to shopping to childcare. This would be “work-life integration” rather than “balance”
• The new urban catchphrase may become “the 15-minute city”, where all of life is close to hand and spaces are used nonstop.  Many spaces will become adaptable: an office by day, a youth club in the evening.
• Even before the pandemic, cities had too many shops. Surviving shops may become showrooms and mini-warehouses, where salespeople aim to acquire long-term customers (and their data). Some shopfronts in prestigious places could be rented out short-term to pop-up tenants, such as retailers launching new collections.
• The fading of retail will hurt landlords, city governments (whose tax income will sink) and shop assistants. The winners will be residents who can move into former shops. Dying shopping malls could become senior housing with upgraded food courts. Restaurants and bars — quintessential meeting places — have a bright urban future.
  
• The home itself is going to change. Where possible, it will include a custom-built office or a communal co-working space. It may get green heating from sources such as the sewage system, as in Oslo. It will have its own built-in parcel drop box, or share a communal one.
• Partly to make citizens happier, partly to combat more frequent heatwaves, cities are acquiring rooftop gardens. For example, Barcelona is encouraging residents to create communal rooftop gardens. In one swoop, an unused space can foster community and health, reduce loneliness, produce food, throw shade and save on air conditioning. Denver has more than 180 community gardens. But their creation cannot be ordained top-down, says Litt. Local people must be involved, for a commitment lasting many years.