The pandemic may kill old cities, but new ones are on the way

2020 was a crazy trash fire of a year — but especially so for cities. With the pandemic, smoke days, hurricanes, empty offices and closed schools, the list of ways cities were smacked down doesn’t seem to end. As bad as last year was, most people don’t realize that we haven’t seen anything yet. This grim reality does, however, come with a silver lining: with a growing urban development toolkit and massive demand for a new way of living, we appear to be on the cusp of a golden age of community building. And a new kind of city is set to emerge.

Project SEED — Burning Man LAGI Prototype

The startup world has long cheered on the rampant pace of development and rewarded innovation above all, because technology allows us to do more. It accelerates change. Yet all that change is responsible for the painful level of disruption we feel right now.

As technology advances, we are increasingly disrupting more people, companies, products, and natural systems. Like innovation, this doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but through combinatorial disruption: when one disruption in one part of the ecosystem accelerates or stacks up on disruptions across the landscape in a compounding effect.

2020 was the year that our ability to create change exceeded capacity to tolerate it.

It’s hard to imagine, but if the rate of development stays roughly on the same course as it has for the past few decades, doubling every two years, we will see a billion times the disruption over the next 25. So while 2020 seems like a particularly crazy year, it’s going to soon seem like the quaint olden days.

Cities may be the place where this network effect of innovation and disruption are felt the hardest, because one change can quickly set a chain reaction into motion. Covid hits and restaurants, schools and businesses close, people can’t pay rent, families are cooped up and stressed in small apartments, people start to leave the city, tax revenues fall, services get cut, more people leave the city. But the kick is, during this vulnerable moment, a host of new tech and startups rushed in to fill the gap, dealing a second long-term blow to cities. Online meetings replaced office spaces, food delivery skyrocketed, remote education became the norm, and e-commerce seems to have put the final nail in brick and mortar.

But there is hope in all this turmoil. The tools that accelerated cities’ demise during Covid will be used to build new ones after the pandemic has passed. It used to be that to start a new development you needed an economic anchor: a natural resource like a gold mine or beaver trade, an employer like an IBM or a factory. Then the population needed housing, a school system to support families, a main street retail corridor to supply the goods, a public transportation network to whisk people in and out and around, and, finally, a cultural perspective or institution to give the place a soul.

These are all now turnkey components that require no public investment, are already built and can be delivered next-day. And they don’t require the scale of a mega city to have access to a full depth of products or services. Education can happen anywhere with online and hybrid schooling, houses are prefab and some even have wheels, ghost kitchens and ecommerce are the go-to for a new generation and have a fraction of the overhead of traditional retail and food and beverage. And like it or not, the trend towards online entertainment — major movie releases online, Twitch DJs, or the hours spent on TikTok and Instagram — creates a global culture not tied to place.

The same things that are tearing our old cities apart are making it possible to spin up and iterate new communities on a shoestring. These are the top seven trends that are changing the landscape of cities forever:

1. Remote work is perhaps the biggest enabler of a new generation of communities and cities. For the first time ever, for billions of people, where you live is no longer a factor on where you make your living. On top of this, no more long commutes in traffic to crappy office buildings. Tools like Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace and what we’ve been hearing about generally as “The Cloud” for the past 15 years is actually here and has made the pandemic survivable for many businesses. Sure, it’s been tough — cooped up in apartments taking care of kids while trying to work a job and manage a house — but that’s because we haven’t been set up for it, and our physical environment wasn’t designed for it. We are living a 2.0 life in a 1.0-built environment.
2. Modular, prefab buildings outperform old building practices in cost, efficiency, and speed of construction by a long shot. A new wave of them are on the way, designed for flexible post-Covid lifestyles. Rent and equity models are changing as well, with crowdfunding and subscription services for new models of co-living and digital-nomad communities.
3. Urban mobility networks like Uber, Lyft, Scoot, Bird and Lime can be brought online instantly and with zero public investment, unlike traditional mass transit that takes decades and billions of dollars to roll out.
4. E-commerce in the form of Amazon, Instacart, and Goodeggs has made the old way of distributing, storing, and selling basic goods and groceries obsolete. And with the one-two punch of Instagram advertising and Shopify, niche products are available directly to consumers, filling the demand for cute specialty stores.
5. Ghost kitchens, like Uber’s CloudKitchens and Kitchen United, are popping up everywhere and transforming food and beverage by housing multiple delivery-only restaurants in underutilized parts of town. There’s minimal risk in overhead costs and no prime real estate required, making it possible for restaurants to efficiently share the same backend infrastructure and serve a city from a single location, could be a 1 trillion opportunity in 10 years.
6. Online learning for K-12 and college education is still in its infancy, but we don’t see this trend going away: in fact, it’s projected to be a $320B industry by 2025. Access to the best teachers, professors and materials regardless of where you are seems like it should be a basic human right. The scalable nature of digital media seems to be the perfect fit, and education has the clearest hybrid opportunity. The need for in person social interaction, mentorship and support, however, is not being replaced by online courses, and it shouldn’t be. It’s a great example of how a city could be built with shared spaces for adults, children and students to gather, discuss and play.
7. Real estate crowdfunding is a critical component enabling the construction of new developments and even new cities. There’s a new form of collectivism happening, where people can participate in the value they create in their communities through equity and real estate investment platforms like Republic.co or Fundrise. In cities of the past, planning, development and profits from the built environment were only accessible to a select few. Today, with all the new tools available, you can design a project, put it on a crowdfunding site, and have the future inhabitants put up the capital to bring it into reality.

These may seem like awkward, janky lego blocks right now, but we are just at rev 1 with most of them, and they will get better with every month that goes by. They have strong structural advantages. They are inherently distributed and not prone to failure; they are flexible and reconfigurable. And while they are disrupting old cities, they are making it incredibly easy for new communities to emerge. Cities of the future won’t need to upgrade their infrastructure: There will be multiple, competitive, direct-to-consumer offerings running independently, each being constantly upgraded in real time.

What does this mean for real estate? No longer being tied to place for work, education or culture allows for new opportunities in undervalued or underutilized locations. Second cities, destinations and the middle of nowhere are going to get the lion’s share of growth in the coming decades. Major cities like Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco, with massive investments in their existing built environments, have a lot to lose in this new age of geographic abstraction. Smaller cities like Portland and Austin are more flexible with building codes and lower costs of living. Destinations like Santa Fe, Hudson New York, and Nevada City California, and sparsely populated, but beautiful, places like the Black Rock Desert and the Hawaiian Islands will attract new residents and community developers leveraging the latest in the urban toolkit.

What will cities look like if we optimize for the human experience instead of prioritizing infrastructure like roads, stores, offices? We have been mourning the loss of cities of commerce, work and systems, but maybe this is something to celebrate. We now have the chance to build cities of joy, connection and compassion. Smaller roads and bigger parks, less offices and more plazas, fewer supermarkets and frequent picnics. No more drab school buildings, and instead; more kids playing.

We don’t really know what this new city will look like. Because it lends itself to a more cooperative, iterative way of designing and experiencing the built environment, it will be up to the next generation of builders, residents and companies to lay the groundwork, test and iterate. And this potential multi-trillion dollar shift in the built environment is already happening. Everything from intentional enclaves of a few Solar Punks, to rural developments like Vita Foras, to larger scale walkable neighborhoods like Cul de Sac are starting to pop up. Even Yeezy seems to be trying to build something like a city in Wyoming. My company, Kift which combines vanlife and communal living, is building a network of communities, doing for real estate what the cloud did for computing. And we’re about to close out our oversubscribed equity crowdfunding campaign so the community can share in the ownership of what we build.

Post-pandemic, we see this trend of community building accelerating dramatically, and now states are making it easier for large scale developments to happen — Nevada governor Steve Sisolak recently announced a proposal to allow tech companies to make their own local governments if they own enough land.

If remote-everything still sounds dystopian to some, it’s because they aren’t looking at the long arc of the evolution that’s going to take place over the next few decades, and the inevitability and consumer demand for these changes. We’ve had thousands of years to iterate in-person schooling and we’re still struggling with blackboards and chalk; we’ve only really started figuring out online education in the past year, so give it some time.

What does it mean when restaurants and grocery stores are decentralized and exist virtually across the city — could a food desert be eliminated with the launch of an app? When the best schools are online — could there be equal education opportunities in all neighborhoods? When everyone has access to peers, role models and resources — could they express themselves confidently, find joy and be equipped to contribute back? When jobs are not dependent on commutes — could we spend more time with our chosen communities and drive economic opportunity where we live? Of course, this doesn’t eliminate the underlying cause of all economic disparity, but it will remove the massive hurdle of physical access.

Unencumbered from centuries of accumulated design debt, and no-longer relevant geographic constraints, we can create cities that are more humane and in harmony with nature, aligned with resident economic interests, based on lower impact designs, renewables and advancements like integrated agriculture and electric and autonomous transport, but also on fundamentally human activities like walking and loitering.

Now with the potential to take advantage of the web of recombinable resources at our disposal, we will see the next generation of cities spun-up like a cloud computer, crowd-funded by it’s future population, made of prefab-modular, reconfigurable or mobile construction, with a workforce generating income from across the internet, an on-demand local transportation network, and next generation hybrid education system. It’s never been easier to build a city or community, and with the pressure of the pandemic and the opportunity to live anywhere, we’re going to see a host of new communities pop up — everywhere.

This new generation of urban designers and community builders will look more like curators or DJ’s: responding in real time to their audience, giving them what they want from a crate of turnkey components. They’ll make better city products with less effort, in radically shorter timelines, because they’re recombining what the ecosystem creates to help us overcome the massive pile of disruption headed our way. And if 2022 is going to be twice as crazy as last year, we better start building now.