The Post-COVID Workplace/City

"If pandemics become the new normal, then tens of millions of urban service jobs will disappear."
"The only chance to prevent this labour market Armageddon is to invest billions of dollars intelligently in anti-pandemic health care infrastructure so that this terrible outbreak can remain a one-time aberration."
Edward Glaeser, professor of economics, Harvard University

"Public transit agencies in many cities face extraordinary dual crises of both confidence and financial sustainability."
"[After the pandemic cities] will remain vibrant and dynamic centres of economic and cultural activity."
Jennifer Keesmaat, former chief planner, municipality of Toronto

"The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed as many as 50 million people worldwide, and yet New York, London, and Paris all boomed in its wake."
"In fact, history shows that people often moved to cities after pandemics because of the better job opportunities and the higher wages they offered after the sudden drop in population."
"Ambitious young people will continue to flock to cities in search of personal and professional opportunities. Artists and musicians may be drawn back by lower rents, thanks to the economic fallout from the virus."
"The crisis may provide a short window for our unaffordable hypergentrified cities to reset and re-energize their creative scenes."
Richard Florida, urban theorist, Toronto

World Bank/Peter Kapuscinski

"There's going to be a forced evolution at the office."
"I think we're going to see a change there, where you're going to have employees spaced out, they won't maybe be facing each other in the office."
"Keyboards, mice, headsets, those things are going to be personal accessories now. So you'll have either a locker at the office that  you can lock yourself or you're hauling it back and forth every day."
Evan Hardie, researcher, future of work

Companies will be challenged to redesign work spaces to allow for new COVID-infection-aware physical and social distancing rules. The SARS-CoV-2 virus threat will be seen as a harbinger for things to come; other threatening types of viruses will begin to come onto the scene once the current epidemic subsides, either naturally as the world learns to deal with it, or through an effective vaccine eliminating its threat. But COVID-19 will not be the last such threat, and the world and society will be adjusting to this new, permanent reality.

The open office trend that became familiar everywhere is now set for a complete reversal. Beginning with spaced desks, personal lockers, voice-automated technology, staged elevators and one-way hallways, with new protocols like varying shifts, cleaning surfaces after use and the wearing of personal protective equipment to the office, according to the expert forewarning of Evan Hardie, forecasting what the new workplace will resemble.

This, in a world that suddenly became quiet and shut down, where great cities' central squares and main streets reversed swiftly from busy thoroughfares, noisy and roiled with activity, giving way to still urban landscapes, absent vehicles of any description, as people huddled in their homes in social isolation, as ordered by frantic governments, anxious to ensure their suddenly-inadequate hospitals and health care systems weren't overwhelmed as critical care patients flooded ICUs and undertakers struggled to cope with corpses of those who succumbed to the virus.

Subway systems and elevators in corporate real estate were transformed into epidemiological hot-spots in the new global pandemic environment. City dwellers and downtown workers swiftly adjusted to the new reality of working from home, while small businesses, hotels, restaurants and bars, gyms and child-care services went on hold, and many were shuttered for good. No more tourists, business travellers, conference groups to keep hotels and restaurants flourishing, putting the service industry on notice that they'd be hard hit.

The sleeping city and the business accommodated in it traditionally will have to be nudged awake, however. Discussions emerged revolving around new types of social etiquette, including widespread masking. "Until recently, work happened in the office. We've always had some people remote, but they used the Internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your [working from home] setup", elaborated Tobias Lutke, Shopify CEO.

The Economist, in the United Kingdom, reported firms are now in the process of reconsidering "what offices are for, and many are concluding that a lot of tasks are better done from home", quoting a real estate firm, that "the days of people taking a 74-minute average commute into town to process email, and then 74 minutes back out -- they're gone". A different future now awaits workplaces and city landscapes.

Working from home is teaching us new skills - and can give us time to learn new ones, too

Image: DarkWorkX on Unsplash