I really wonder how WFH will physically reshape cities. Will we see less dense downtowns, with more people working in the less populated parts of a city? I'm not even talking about suburbs. In my city, downtown has a handful of skyscrapers where the major employers are (banks, government, state-regulated monopolies), but with fewer people going there these days, the faster growing parts of the city are places which used to be almost uninhabited (former industrial areas being turned into brick-laden brewery districts with cheaply constructed "luxury" apartments).
Will we see fewer skyscrapers, as fewer people clamber for downtown apartments to live close to their jobs? Downtowns are generally desirable in themselves, but that's often because of the retail and restaurants that popped up to serve the people working there. If nobody works there anymore, does it generate a vicious cycle in which retail and restaurants can no longer sustain themselves, being forced to close, and thus downtowns lose their inherent desirability?
Do the cheaper and sparser places get pushed further and further out, until we end up with more sprawled-out megacities replete with suburbs and shorter buildings like Los Angeles?
it would actually be pretty great for cities to have more multimodal patterns of density, rather than the current unimodal downtown + progressively increasing sprawl (I'm looking at you, nyc)
Will we see fewer skyscrapers, as fewer people clamber for downtown apartments to live close to their jobs? Downtowns are generally desirable in themselves, but that's often because of the retail and restaurants that popped up to serve the people working there. If nobody works there anymore, does it generate a vicious cycle in which retail and restaurants can no longer sustain themselves, being forced to close, and thus downtowns lose their inherent desirability?
Do the cheaper and sparser places get pushed further and further out, until we end up with more sprawled-out megacities replete with suburbs and shorter buildings like Los Angeles?