Work has always shaped our cities; the world’s great population hubs have provided pools of talent, suppliers and customers for business, and the towers of commerce still define skylines from Manhattan to Malaysia. But when work changes, how must our cities?
“Fundamentally the cost of distance — the cost of moving goods and people — sits at the foundation of so much of what we do. Cities were invented to solve that problem,” says Karen Harris, managing director of consultancy Bain & Company’s macro trends group. Yet as she and her colleagues Austin Kimson and Andrew Schwedel wrote in a 2016 report, technologies from robotics and 3D printing to autonomous vehicles are eroding the cost of moving people, goods and information, accelerating change in the “monuments to spatial economics” we know as cities.
Ms Harris argues that urban centres from Paris to San Francisco will always appeal to a group of “rich people and single people and empty nesters” who can afford them. Yet the fact that the middle-class bedrock of a city’s workforce now has other options raises the question of whether cities can retain their competitive advantage as hubs for work.