Commuting is Dead, is the City Next? (Part 3)
Part 1: Origins of the Commuter City.
Part 2: Social costs and failed experiments.
Part 3: Combined-Use development and the Multi-Cellular City
In the early months of 2020, governments around the world responded to the rampaging coronavirus pandemic with stringent restrictions on travel and gatherings. With the forced closure of offices, tens of millions of people who’d spent their adult lives commuting to work each day suddenly found themselves working at home.
2020 has widely been seen as a global experiment in remote working, powered by video calling and online collaboration. But it has also been a mass experiment in a radically different way of using the city, with commuting removed from the equation. Around the world, millions of people have developed a more intense relationship with their neighbourhood. They explored their surroundings, discovered new places, observed the changes in trees and wildlife with the passing seasons. Some cities have seen a spontaneous upwelling of community support, with people mobilising to bring groceries and medicines to the old or vulnerable.
At the same time, for many people this has been a period of hardship, suffering and loss. The experience of homeworking has not been easy for those living in cramped high-rise apartments, or parents with school-age children. But having experienced life without a daily commute, few seem eager to return to their previous pattern. When LinkedIn surveyed 338,000 people about how they wanted to work in the future, the results were striking:
32.1% - Work from home 5 days/week
10.2% - Work from home 4 days/week
29.1% - Work from home 3 days/week
19% - Work from home 2 days/week
4.4% - Work from home 1 days/week
4.9% - Return to working in office 5 days/week
(Source: LinkedIn)
It’s clear we are witnessing a seismic shift in the way cities work. Despite the wishful thinking of landlords who own city-centre office buildings, working patterns will not return to their previous structure. However, it’s a mistake to view the corona pandemic as the cause of this shift. As Part 1 illustrated, the commuter city is actually a historic anomaly which followed in the wake of the industrial revolution. The causes that brought it into being have long since vanished, whilst its human cost has become unsupportable.
Part 2 discussed the movement of artists and creative professionals, starting in the 1980s, to reject the commuter city and recreate integrated communities for living and working. Far from being an isolated phenomenon, this was the harbinger of a much broader societal rejection of the commuter city; and a reassertion of the desire to live and work in strong communities. The change was inevitable. The corona pandemic is merely a catalyst which has accelerated it.
The question now facing architects, urban planners, transit operators, property developers and governments is what the new city will look like, and how they can best adapt to it. To answer this question, let’s look at three different contexts.
1. Recombining residential neighbourhoods
Every city is surrounded by peripheral neighbourhoods, suburbs and dormitory villages, packed with people who have historically commuted daily to the centre. These places have often been abandoned during the day, lacking local employment opportunities and sometimes struggling to maintain basic community infrastructure like shops, cafes and clubs.
The inhabitants of these districts won’t be commuting any more, or they’ll do so much less frequently. But they won’t want to spend every day working at home. Whether it’s a craving for sociability, the desire to escape family distractions, or a preference for a psychological separation between home and work; every residential neighbourhood now needs shared workspaces that people can access within walking or cycling distance of their homes.
Suburban workspaces shouldn’t follow the pattern of hip inner-city coworking spaces, but should instead have a calmer ambience somewhere between a cafe and a community library. The large-scale shift to online shopping has triggered a crisis for suburban high streets. Creating thousands of suburban workspaces will be an important part of our high streets’ future role.
Local government in these neighbourhoods should ensure the new wave of suburban workspaces isn’t just for employees of big businesses based elsewhere. Facilities and support should also be provided to encourage local people to establish and grow their own businesses. In the past, a budding entrepreneur would be likely to move to the city centre to set up a business. The new urban structure should foster a more decentralised pattern, creating high-skill employment and growth in every neighbourhood.
2. Recombining city centre office districts
Some of the most potent symbols of the corona pandemic have been images of windswept city centres, with deserted streets and office buildings. These areas of the commuter city will be impacted more dramatically by the transition than any other. Demand for office space in these locations will never return to its previous level. The value of property, including some of the world’s most expensive real estate, is likely to decline significantly.
Before the end of the nineteenth century, most city centres were a tangle of housing and businesses. This is the structure to which they must now return. A district with a 95/5 mix between offices and housing might need to switch to a new balance of 60/40, plus a panoply of leisure and community facilities.
In the new geometry city-centre districts will also have a vital function as gathering points. The complex transport infrastructure, developed to ferry millions of commuters back and forth from offices, will take on a new role. With teams now scattered across dozens of different neighbourhoods, suburbs and dormitory villages; these city centre districts will be the easiest places to bring everyone together for meetings and other team gatherings.
To satisfy this need a portion of current office estate must be converted to facilities to host meetings. Large corporations are likely to retain their own dedicated locations for meetings and events, whilst there will be an explosion of demand for flexible, open-access meeting facilities to serve small and midsize businesses.
Alongside the growth in housing and meeting facilities, city-centre office districts also have an opportunity to greatly expand their role as cultural destinations. The same transport infrastructure that makes them convenient as meeting points will also make them attractive as locations for galleries, concerts and nightlife. As a result of these changes, office districts which have been desolate at evenings and weekends can become far more diverse, filled with activity and different groups of people at all hours of the day and night.
The greatest risk facing office districts is the risk it will take a decade for property prices to settle at a level where it’s viable to convert buildings into housing, meeting spaces and cultural facilities. But the sooner this happens, the faster the city will thrive again. City governments should do everything they can to ease the transition for landlords and encourage conversion to new uses.
3. A Combined-Use model for large-scale developments
In parallel with recombining existing residential and office neighbourhoods, cities must make a radical change in how they approach large-scale property development. As discussed in Part 2, from the 1990s the “mixed-use” model started introducing offices into housing schemes. However, the two elements remained disconnected, with no sense that the people living in the housing would ever work in the offices. In the post-commuter city, these two elements must come together as an integrated whole. I call this model “combined-use”.
The heart of a combined-use development is a community of people who live and work in the same neighbourhood. This might include people in very different situations:
- The owner of a video production business with a team of six; who rents a two-bed apartment, rents a studio for the business and entrusts their young child to a creche during the day.
- A couple employed by large businesses in the city centre, who now works from home three days a week; they own a three-bedroom flat and pay for flexible membership in a coworking space, where they also attend talks and yoga classes.
- A teenager in a low-income family; who lives in a four-bedroom subsidised home, attends free monthly talks from entrepreneurs running small businesses, and has also signed up to subsidised classes teaching the basics of the running of their own business.
- An entrepreneur who’s just raised seed funding for a new software venture; who has a monthly rental package covering a studio apartment, a full-time desk in a coworking facility and a six-month accelerator course.
- A sculptor who’s just graduated from art college; who has a monthly rental package including a room in a five-bed flatshare, and a subsidised studio.
These examples focus on the integration of residential, workspace and service elements. It goes without saying a combined-use scheme must also provide a variety of other facilities such as schools, cafes and grocery shops. The combined-use model is designed to foster strong, diverse communities where people both live and work. In place of today’s narrow view of “homes” and “offices”, its foundation is a holistic understanding of each individual and family’s needs.
The Trampery started working on combined-use ideas in 2014. Its first scheme based on this model is currently under construction in Hackney Wick, London, in partnership with the housing provider Peabody. Fish Island Village is a new urban neighbourhood comprising 12 blocks spread over 6 acres. It will offer housing (including subsidised housing) for 2,000 people, workspace (including subsidised workspace) for 500 people, and a variety of communal facilities. Fish Island Village is due for completion in Summer 2021.
A combined-use community is a balanced social and economic unit in its own right, not just one piece in a bigger jigsaw. It is filled with people and activity throughout the day. It’s an environment where people bump into their neighbours in different contexts and form deeper relationships. It fosters resilience, mutual support and stronger communities.
Conclusion: The Multi-Cellular City
Each of these three contexts provides an integrated community where people live and work. The “zoning” of function-separated districts is gone. In its place, neighbourhoods will develop a distinct identity based on their geography, culture, values and specialisations.
In this version of the city, each district becomes a self-sufficient cell, connected to the other cells via a complex mesh of trade, governance and infrastructure. Larger cities already have something of this character, but the abandonment of single-function zoning will massively accentuate it.
I believe this Multi-Cellular City will be the successor to the Commuter City. In the wake of the corona pandemic, change will be swift and merciless. No city can be assured of its status. Those that embrace the new model and innovate will prosper. Those that cling fearfully to the old paradigm will become irrelevant.
Humans have created and recreated cities for ten thousand years. Unlike rural societies, the city has always been a place of innovation and change. Let us embark upon this next reinvention, and remake our cities to flourish for the coming century.
The Trampery is a London-based social enterprise that delivers workspaces and accelerator programmes for entrepreneurs. The Trampery is committed to playing a role in the shift towards a more balanced form of capitalism, supporting entrepreneurs, startups and scaleups who pursue social and environmental benefits alongside profit. Learn more here.
