In the book ‘Hedge‘ Nicolas Colin makes the point that dense cities are rewarded in the Collaborative Age. “The Entrepreneurial Age seems to reward large cities and nothing else , and old jobs have been radically displaced as a result . As factories are now empty , the occupied working class is now employed primarily in services — services that are more and more concentrated in cities. Hence , as Richard Florida puts it, the city has become the “ new factory floor”“
There are conflicting movements at stake here: increased possibilities for remote work (enhanced by the Covid crisis), making it possible to live in the countryside at the condition of having a strong and reliable internet connection; and the network effect of cities that allow the deployment of more effective logistics and services. It seems however for Nicolas Colin that metropolis have a future, in particular because “workers are being redeployed from the suburban industrial class of the twentieth century to the urban service class of the twenty – first century“, and because networked services are orders of magnitude more efficient there.
There could possibly even be an argument on the fact that the creative class would tend to move to the countryside or small towns whereas the working class would tend to concentrate in cities, creating further inequality (and being an opposite trend than the one observed in the 20th century).
In any case, dense cities and metropolis seem to have a future as places of creativity, encounters, and network efficiency. How much concentration on a limited number of cities will happen remains to be seen.
On the same topics, previous posts include
