Over the past century, cities have been the engine for unprecedented economic growth. Per capita income in cities is higher, much of the growth in both GDP and real wages is in cities, and their stranglehold on both high-paying jobs and opportunities seems to only be growing. Cities, especially very large ones, allow for ever-escalating levels of hyperspecialization – it’s pretty difficult to find any work as a specialist in some uber-specific role, say being the definitive expert on C rated second-lien junk bonds for mid-size industrial companies, in Naperville, Illinois but one could very easily imagine such a worker being overwhelmed by demand in New York. The key to this specialization is ensuring that there’s enough demand to support these niche job functions. Cities create the density and scale that have historically been preconditions for this demand. Specialization translates into productivity. Productivity translates into efficiency – the promise of a city is that more workers together create a bigger pie on a per-capita basis than smaller agglomerations. Add in the benefits of proximal networks of corporations and highly skilled labor, some efficiencies in hiring and reapportioning workers, and you have the ingredients for economic prosperity.
There are a few key assumptions here.
First, that costs don’t rise commensurately with the value created. Wages are higher in cities, but higher wages chasing the same goods leads to higher prices as well. Sectors that are more constrained from productivity or supply increases, such as housing or education, see their costs rise much faster than inflation as higher real incomes chase a more slowly growing pile of goods. Paul Collier has an interesting discussion on this in The Future of Capitalism, but generally concludes that workers are still, on net, much better off economically in cities. Of course, this will be context dependent – a surefire way to exacerbate the problem is to allow nearly no supply increases (ex. SF zoning policies), at which point the system becomes increasingly precarious as the actual net productivity and network effects benefits the city creates accrue to capital holders of fixed-supply, necessary goods.
Second, that proximity and density are actually necessary for all these benefits of agglomeration to occur. The technologist’s dream is a world of minimized entropy, friction brought to heel, all inefficiencies tames and mastered. Through bits, we find freedom. The needs for density and proximity are surely examples of such friction. They force us to build on fixed plots of land, limiting our ability to increase supply of essential goods. They create long commutes and infrastructure problems, and they force us to choose between physical leisure activities and access to a job market and the benefits of networks. Up until now, remote work has seen relatively little traction relative to the internet’s promises. Proximity and density are still generally necessary for work, and the nature of cities has remained static accordingly.
Enter COVID.
Rare, generation-defining crises have a way of helping us to reimagine the world, forcing a sleepy zeitgeist to evolve at breathtaking pace. Companies are building out the processes and technology necessary for remote, flexible work. Leaders have begun to imagine what a fully remote workforce might look like, and how to create an environment geared towards a different model of work rather than simply adapting traditional work models to incorporate video conferencing. Change doesn’t necessitate a binary choice between fully-remote workplaces and fully in-person, traditional work. Allowing workers to come into the office 3 days a week or allowing them to do half their work flexibly, at whatever time they choose will be enough to open the floodgates. Just a bit of change in the costs of not being located close to the office mean that many will decide that the benefits of proximity to kids’ schools or saving on commute times no longer outweigh the other costs of living in cities.
Platforms that validate worker performance and connect them to employers can solve some of the hiring and reapportioning problems implicit in remote work. AR/VR technology are still very nascent but may eventually allow the potential to solve even some of the hardest problems implicit in remote work. If random, serendipitous contact is a desirable goal – surely this can be accomplished by a shared, flexible VR work environment. The people one encounters can be randomized daily, monthly, or however the employee prefers. I don’t think the aspects of randomness that we so prize actually require touch – just variety and unstructured interaction.
Of course, people go to cities for reasons other than jobs. Whether it’s for dating, access to artistic pursuits, a variety of restaurants, or simply having read their Fitzgerald and finding themselves drawn east – the non-occupational benefits of cities are manifold. Anything that might benefit from physical density, physical proximity or real physical contact will be a draw of cities.
Technology’s potential to disrupt the necessary density and proximity conditions here are the subject of countless articles and technology investments. Epic Game’s Marshmellow concert within Fortnite might be a harbinger of things to come – it was an audacious attempt to bring not just the concert but also some sense of community to a virtual format. Museums, shows, large gatherings – all have any number of technologists trying to offer them online. One can imagine virtual concerts, museums, plays, or anything else especially if AR/VR technology take off. Virtual dates could be par for the course, and meeting someone in person could become a significant step in a dating progression. We’ve already started down that course, with the gradual ramp-up in virtual communication that precedes serious dating. Again, the potential for disruption isn’t binary – it may very well be that I’m okay with going to concerts for certain types of music virtually but require density for others. A combination of accessible communication tools, video chat, and autonomous vehicles could easily extend the radius in which one is willing to look for romantic partners. Gradually, density and proximity’s power as constraints begins to erode.
Let’s digress for a while, before bringing it back to cities. Using technology to remove proximity and density requirements is the common focus when these things are discussed, but something that’s focused on less is the degree to which we view an activity as an experience that needs to be embodied. These attitudes are necessary personal and subjective, but also a function of our basic orientations towards the world, our interpretation of events, prevailing sociocultural and linguistic constructions, and our specific historical moment.
For me, the notion of a virtual concert may seem to be borderline oxymoronic. Isn’t the point of a concert that it’s in person? That you can see, hear, feel the crowd and the performers? For my brother who is 10 years younger than me, the notion of a community oriented around a game and a concert contained within are much more intuitive. The embodied, physical component of the concert is less important to him.
What is a concert, anyways? Are an EDM concert, a music festival, and an orchestra performance the same thing? Might we have different relative weights we put on the importance of a crowd, of a real-time live performance, of other components of the concert experience for each of these? We use words to group unlike things into categories to help make the world intelligible. These taxonomies are useful insofar as they allow us to act more quickly, but the fact of the matter is something is lost through categorization as well. Difference is obscured. The difference may seem semantic, of course not all concerts are the same and of course we interact with them in different ways. We have to have some common ground to be able to communicate with eachother. The problem is, in times of drastic change these categorizations can obscure more than they elucidate.
What determines our relative, subjective value for the physical component of different experiences? I’d argue that much of it has to do with our sense of self. What, exactly, are “you”? Not simply a consciousness or a body, but also an entity that chooses to represent itself in certain ways and has a place in an intricate superstructure of societal norms, roles, and symbolic constructs. You are your attitudes. You are your choice of room design. You are your clothes. You are whatever gender identity you choose or do not choose to assume. You are your profession. You are your spoken words, but also your text messages and twitter feeds and professional opinions. These are all manifestations of you, your agency and actively constructed identity. You actively, performatively, reconstitute yourself, day after day.
We assign different weights to these factors. Some of this is personal. I might find my occupation a much more self-relevant expression and constitutive element of self than another. This also varies temporally, as we live and grow. 16-year-old me placed much more store in his role as a competitive debater or in the books he read and loved as a central component of identity construction than 22-year-old me does. This is also a product of a specific historical moment, and socioculturally mediated. America is a society that places an emphasis on gender, race, and occupational identities – but compared to India, places comparatively little on family, or caste identities. These norms become inculcated through a million implicit and explicit cues that establish a normative, prescriptive method of identity construction.
This notion of the self is important, because it implicates when I desire physical, embodied experiences. Is the avatar on the screen, “me”? It’s an extension of my will, its presentation is a method of my chosen self-expression. It is me and not me, in the same way that all the symbolic constructs and representations, my actively chosen and constructed physical environment is me. If I feel a little bit more like the avatar is me, might I be slightly more likely to enjoy a virtual concert? To feel that I can buy in? Will I be willing to more vulnerable when interacting with others in a virtual work environment? IF VR technology takes off and it’s not longer a simple avatar on a screen, will that be sufficient for me to make the leap? For others? To do so partway, at least?
A rational orientation towards the world would have us live in a place that most caters towards our individual embodied needs. Personally, I “need” to be physically embodied to go hiking and skiing, no virtual experience would feel sufficient to replicate it. I prefer physical, proximate contact, but I find virtual conversations with friends to be quite a good proxy. I have no emotional investment in a physical workspace or office, except insofar as it encourages productivity or serendipitous connection. A more thoughtful, deliberate orientation towards our living spaces would allow us to choose our individual specific embodied needs – whether that be work, nature, romantic contact, friendship, or anything else and deliberately select communities geared towards this.
Any serious discussion about the future of work, the future of cities, and a post-COVID world has to grapple with the question of our individual embodied needs. The point isn’t that we won’t need embodied contact, it’s that for any given person varying levels of embodied contact are needed across different domains. By allowing people to eschew embodied contact in domains they don’t care about and focus on what they do, we allow them to choose a life that is most fulfilling to them. I’m unsure what the future will hold, but I’m hopeful that future generations that are more comfortable with technology will be more thoughtful about their physical needs, and cities will respond and restructure accordingly.
There are a few key assumptions here.
First, that costs don’t rise commensurately with the value created. Wages are higher in cities, but higher wages chasing the same goods leads to higher prices as well. Sectors that are more constrained from productivity or supply increases, such as housing or education, see their costs rise much faster than inflation as higher real incomes chase a more slowly growing pile of goods. Paul Collier has an interesting discussion on this in The Future of Capitalism, but generally concludes that workers are still, on net, much better off economically in cities. Of course, this will be context dependent – a surefire way to exacerbate the problem is to allow nearly no supply increases (ex. SF zoning policies), at which point the system becomes increasingly precarious as the actual net productivity and network effects benefits the city creates accrue to capital holders of fixed-supply, necessary goods.
Second, that proximity and density are actually necessary for all these benefits of agglomeration to occur. The technologist’s dream is a world of minimized entropy, friction brought to heel, all inefficiencies tames and mastered. Through bits, we find freedom. The needs for density and proximity are surely examples of such friction. They force us to build on fixed plots of land, limiting our ability to increase supply of essential goods. They create long commutes and infrastructure problems, and they force us to choose between physical leisure activities and access to a job market and the benefits of networks. Up until now, remote work has seen relatively little traction relative to the internet’s promises. Proximity and density are still generally necessary for work, and the nature of cities has remained static accordingly.
Enter COVID.
Rare, generation-defining crises have a way of helping us to reimagine the world, forcing a sleepy zeitgeist to evolve at breathtaking pace. Companies are building out the processes and technology necessary for remote, flexible work. Leaders have begun to imagine what a fully remote workforce might look like, and how to create an environment geared towards a different model of work rather than simply adapting traditional work models to incorporate video conferencing. Change doesn’t necessitate a binary choice between fully-remote workplaces and fully in-person, traditional work. Allowing workers to come into the office 3 days a week or allowing them to do half their work flexibly, at whatever time they choose will be enough to open the floodgates. Just a bit of change in the costs of not being located close to the office mean that many will decide that the benefits of proximity to kids’ schools or saving on commute times no longer outweigh the other costs of living in cities.
Platforms that validate worker performance and connect them to employers can solve some of the hiring and reapportioning problems implicit in remote work. AR/VR technology are still very nascent but may eventually allow the potential to solve even some of the hardest problems implicit in remote work. If random, serendipitous contact is a desirable goal – surely this can be accomplished by a shared, flexible VR work environment. The people one encounters can be randomized daily, monthly, or however the employee prefers. I don’t think the aspects of randomness that we so prize actually require touch – just variety and unstructured interaction.
Of course, people go to cities for reasons other than jobs. Whether it’s for dating, access to artistic pursuits, a variety of restaurants, or simply having read their Fitzgerald and finding themselves drawn east – the non-occupational benefits of cities are manifold. Anything that might benefit from physical density, physical proximity or real physical contact will be a draw of cities.
Technology’s potential to disrupt the necessary density and proximity conditions here are the subject of countless articles and technology investments. Epic Game’s Marshmellow concert within Fortnite might be a harbinger of things to come – it was an audacious attempt to bring not just the concert but also some sense of community to a virtual format. Museums, shows, large gatherings – all have any number of technologists trying to offer them online. One can imagine virtual concerts, museums, plays, or anything else especially if AR/VR technology take off. Virtual dates could be par for the course, and meeting someone in person could become a significant step in a dating progression. We’ve already started down that course, with the gradual ramp-up in virtual communication that precedes serious dating. Again, the potential for disruption isn’t binary – it may very well be that I’m okay with going to concerts for certain types of music virtually but require density for others. A combination of accessible communication tools, video chat, and autonomous vehicles could easily extend the radius in which one is willing to look for romantic partners. Gradually, density and proximity’s power as constraints begins to erode.
Let’s digress for a while, before bringing it back to cities. Using technology to remove proximity and density requirements is the common focus when these things are discussed, but something that’s focused on less is the degree to which we view an activity as an experience that needs to be embodied. These attitudes are necessary personal and subjective, but also a function of our basic orientations towards the world, our interpretation of events, prevailing sociocultural and linguistic constructions, and our specific historical moment.
For me, the notion of a virtual concert may seem to be borderline oxymoronic. Isn’t the point of a concert that it’s in person? That you can see, hear, feel the crowd and the performers? For my brother who is 10 years younger than me, the notion of a community oriented around a game and a concert contained within are much more intuitive. The embodied, physical component of the concert is less important to him.
What is a concert, anyways? Are an EDM concert, a music festival, and an orchestra performance the same thing? Might we have different relative weights we put on the importance of a crowd, of a real-time live performance, of other components of the concert experience for each of these? We use words to group unlike things into categories to help make the world intelligible. These taxonomies are useful insofar as they allow us to act more quickly, but the fact of the matter is something is lost through categorization as well. Difference is obscured. The difference may seem semantic, of course not all concerts are the same and of course we interact with them in different ways. We have to have some common ground to be able to communicate with eachother. The problem is, in times of drastic change these categorizations can obscure more than they elucidate.
What determines our relative, subjective value for the physical component of different experiences? I’d argue that much of it has to do with our sense of self. What, exactly, are “you”? Not simply a consciousness or a body, but also an entity that chooses to represent itself in certain ways and has a place in an intricate superstructure of societal norms, roles, and symbolic constructs. You are your attitudes. You are your choice of room design. You are your clothes. You are whatever gender identity you choose or do not choose to assume. You are your profession. You are your spoken words, but also your text messages and twitter feeds and professional opinions. These are all manifestations of you, your agency and actively constructed identity. You actively, performatively, reconstitute yourself, day after day.
We assign different weights to these factors. Some of this is personal. I might find my occupation a much more self-relevant expression and constitutive element of self than another. This also varies temporally, as we live and grow. 16-year-old me placed much more store in his role as a competitive debater or in the books he read and loved as a central component of identity construction than 22-year-old me does. This is also a product of a specific historical moment, and socioculturally mediated. America is a society that places an emphasis on gender, race, and occupational identities – but compared to India, places comparatively little on family, or caste identities. These norms become inculcated through a million implicit and explicit cues that establish a normative, prescriptive method of identity construction.
This notion of the self is important, because it implicates when I desire physical, embodied experiences. Is the avatar on the screen, “me”? It’s an extension of my will, its presentation is a method of my chosen self-expression. It is me and not me, in the same way that all the symbolic constructs and representations, my actively chosen and constructed physical environment is me. If I feel a little bit more like the avatar is me, might I be slightly more likely to enjoy a virtual concert? To feel that I can buy in? Will I be willing to more vulnerable when interacting with others in a virtual work environment? IF VR technology takes off and it’s not longer a simple avatar on a screen, will that be sufficient for me to make the leap? For others? To do so partway, at least?
A rational orientation towards the world would have us live in a place that most caters towards our individual embodied needs. Personally, I “need” to be physically embodied to go hiking and skiing, no virtual experience would feel sufficient to replicate it. I prefer physical, proximate contact, but I find virtual conversations with friends to be quite a good proxy. I have no emotional investment in a physical workspace or office, except insofar as it encourages productivity or serendipitous connection. A more thoughtful, deliberate orientation towards our living spaces would allow us to choose our individual specific embodied needs – whether that be work, nature, romantic contact, friendship, or anything else and deliberately select communities geared towards this.
Any serious discussion about the future of work, the future of cities, and a post-COVID world has to grapple with the question of our individual embodied needs. The point isn’t that we won’t need embodied contact, it’s that for any given person varying levels of embodied contact are needed across different domains. By allowing people to eschew embodied contact in domains they don’t care about and focus on what they do, we allow them to choose a life that is most fulfilling to them. I’m unsure what the future will hold, but I’m hopeful that future generations that are more comfortable with technology will be more thoughtful about their physical needs, and cities will respond and restructure accordingly.
Scraps of Poetry and Madness 