Opinion
- Our lives in urban centers have been completely upended over the last 16 months.
- As we look into the near future, some of us begin to experience the call back into our workplaces and experience the awakening of a long slumber of cities, it’s without a doubt that life as we knew it will never be the same.
- While some on the extreme end have been asking “will we even need cities?” (to which the answer is a very definite yes), how will cities change if we continue to move forward in this digital era of work and life that was accelerated by the pandemic?
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Some believe that this will push cities in a direction that makes them become more of “Urban Hotels” where people will come and go on a more frequent basis, forcing businesses to change to accommodate those peak hours when people will be in the area. It will make downtowns more of a clearly defined destination with very specific offerings. In turn, the suburbs will also need to evolve with the creation of more dense housing and the amenities that historically, downtowns have offered. The suburbs of the future might be seen as less “boring”, and become more desirable, especially to younger generations.
What’s happening in cities now is that buildings that were designed before the pandemic are still underway in terms of construction, and downtowns feel more lively than ever. Major transit systems are back to running on full schedules as the need for capacity increases. The record-low rent prices are now back on the rise, and the highly competitive job market of coastal hubs is now on a massive hiring spree- anything to get people back into cities.
The window of opportunity for suburbs to reconsider how they are perceived is narrowing, and the prediction that most of the world will live in cities by 2050 seems to be more true than ever. But there’s still one question- how many of the habits we gained over the last year and a half will stick with us into the future? Or will we soon revert into a life that once was, and cities that once were, more 2019-esque?
Author: Kaley Overstreet
This article was first published in Arch Daily and is republished with permission.