The future's great, the future's suburban

There's a growing consensus, and some evidence, that one impact from the pandemic will be a declining importance for city centres. Businesses realise that their workforce are as productive and maybe a bit happier without the crowded commute to sit at a desk when they could stay home and do the same. Quite what all this looks like in the end is hard to judge right now in the declining days of the pandemic but that consensus suggests there'll be more home working, more flexible arrangements for travel, and less reliance on big floorplate, open plan offices in city centres.

The big impact of this will be on the worker - as US urbanist Aaaron Renn writes about his city of Indianapolis:

The nature of this new world is not yet clear, but based on what we’ve already seen in existing remote work, there are some things that we can anticipate. The first is that work will be less tied to particular geographies. On one hand, this would allow local firms to hire workers without them needing to move to Indianapolis. Not everyone wants to live here, and this will allow firms to tap into that particular labor pool. On the other, it allows people in Indianapolis who otherwise might have been forced to move in order to advance their career. Both of these allow the worker more choice in where to live

Worker choice brought about by home working and an increasingly sophisticated onoine world changes the point and purpose of the city entirely. Cities exist, in large part, because they made specialisation, cooperation and collaboration easier, if all these things are possible without the downside of crowds then cities need repurposing. The problem is, as Jethro Elsden observes, is that policy-makers are trapped in the urbanist mindset of density, agglommeration theory, mass transit and land constraint. Elsden points to transport policy as an indicator:

It sometimes seems as if many in the Westminster bubble think that cycling, walking and public transport are suddenly going to do the heavy lifting when it comes to transporting people to where they want to go. A vision that might work in London, where just 27 per cent of workers commute via car, but it’s hardly going to fly in the rest of the country, where the same figure is over 70 per cent and has hardly changed over the past two decades. 

Yet with the Government unveiling a recent vision for the future of transport away from the car and towards active and public transport – and constantly exhorting us to get on our bike or walk to work – too often policy seems designed with only inner cities in mind.

The same goes for planning policy. Prior to the post-war period, employment, retailing and leisure were far more dispursed across urban areas. In the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, much of that suburban commercial and industrial activity vanished as public policy promoted city and town centres as the sole location for destination shopping, leisure activity and office work. And while this created problems within the property market (made worse by grandiose modernist master-planning best typified by Stanley Wardley in Bradford) the biggest damage done was to diversity of land use in suburbia.

As all this unfolds there will be a new debate between what we might call 'agglomerationists' ("cities aren't just great but essential to innovation and growth") and "dispersionists" ("cities are an anachronism in a connected world"). Workers may well have the big say in all this as their preference for home working (or a more flexible mix of home and office) leads them to ask why they should rent an expensive cupboard in the inner city when they can rent - or buy - a nice home with a garden 200 miles away for less money. For the dense inner city to retain its purpose it has to create an offer to these same workers (perhaps built round leisure and pleasure rather that 'this is where the best jobs are') rather than try to pressure government into 'saving the city'.

What won't happen - or not how they think it will - is what leaders in cities like Bradford hope for. There's a belief, entirely misplaced, that businesses are looking to move out of London simply to save money:

Northshoring is a phenomenon seen in recent years as companies opt to move from the Capital and Southern cities to Northern areas where property and labour costs are lower.
The financial fallout of the Covid 19 pandemic could accelerate the process for businesses needing to make budget cuts, a recent Bradford Council meeting was told. And the City needs to prepare for this by making sure it has high quality office space available to compete with other Northern cities.

There's really not much evidence over a great surge in relocations and business is as likely to head to Colchester or Swindon as it is to opt for northern towns like Oldham, Bradford or Darlington. And, if the trend is to flexible working arrangements, then it's not 'high quality office space' that's needed but great homes, brilliant schools and fantastic local amenities. Despite this, policy processes remain fixed on rail investment, urban densification and the central business district model of spatial planning. The Transport Secretary took a trip to Manchester to announce lots of money on making it easier to get from Leeds to Manchester and the 'Manchester Plan' from that city's mayor presents another iteration of town centre focused densification.

The people moving out of London (and New York and San Francisco and Paris) are the people who are no longer trapped by the need to be somewhere close enough to commute and far away enough to afford. If more firms allow whole of partial home working, then people looking for work will have the option of  living somewhere with good broadband and settling into a once-a-fortnight shlep into town to meet the boss and do some necessary paperwork. And if highly qualified workers prefer this arrangement because it allows them to have a family and a less frenetic (or less tired) social life, then however much city promoters talk about urban living or agglomeration, they will be, for the first time in ages, swimming against the tide.

"Ah, but what about theatres, nightlife, art and so forth!" say our city pluggers, "don't they need big cities to succed?" And they're right, a lot of the things that make city so great don't translate to small town life well - diversity of food choice, eclectic cinema and stage, a bewildering variety in live music, and a vibrant arts culture all work best where there's a big population to draw on. Those young, educated trendies who currently live in inner city shoe boxes will still want to get to this sort of thing, so they're not heading to what they (perhaps mistakenly but who knows) see as a cultural desert further than a day trip from the grand city centre.

None of this is to say that businesses won't make hard-nosed decisions to relocate somewhere cheaper (although doing this has always been a warning sign of that businesses health) but rather to point out that the driving force for change won't be government or business but the preferences of workers and the choices of consumers. And those workers and consumers want to have a bit of both worlds - far enough from the city to afford as house with a garden but near enough to be able to get into that city for a show and make it home on a late train or with a slow drive.

Right now the plans and ideas for regenerating struggling places, for super skyscrapers in grand city centres and for the strengthening of the policy walls around cities look like a recipe of disaster, for another generation to be left begging for a crumb or two of the housing market. What's needed is a hollowing out of the city, for a repeat of what happened in the 1930s and the 1950s, as an explosion of workers are freed from the limits that tie them to poor quality living in a big city, a new suburbia as good as the old one. A new place of homes and families and open space and neighbourliness. If we get this right the future's great, the futures suburban.

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