Trendy urban life has made us chillingly vulnerable

One of the most maddeningly wrong explanations for the collapse of home ownership among younger people is that they are a group who no longer cares about owning things. They rent cars by the hour, share taxis with strangers, work flexibly online and even borrow dogs and clothes via apps, so why would they want anything so old-fashioned as property?

Will COVID-19 kill the hot desk too?Credit: Moodboard

The simple truth, of course, is that buying homes became increasingly unaffordable, but the bizarre idea that people are happier to share without responsibility than own for ourselves has spread like poison. It's behind open-plan offices and hot-desking. It's given comfort to those who have sought to destroy car ownership in favour of public transport. It has informed the trendy uber-densification of our cities, with their legions of tiny flats off shared hallways, rather than proper houses with their own front doors. The dominant ideology has been that we are social creatures, that it is futile for individuals to seek to be in control.

But as the coronavirus advances, I fear it has left people vulnerable. My trip to work and back on public transport is a bald reminder that, however disciplined my personal hygiene, I may catch something by dint merely of being crammed up against the wrong person. Friends in cramped flats with limited storage, reliant on the constant availability of everything they need in supermarkets, are suddenly confronted with the problem that, even if they wanted to stockpile to prepare for a fortnight in self-isolation, they have little space to do it properly. We are told to be resilient, but much of what has counted as modernity militates against that.

Will any of this be reassessed? Hot-desking has already gone in some companies. Starbucks has banned those reusable cups we were all told were the future in favour of disposable ones, with experts saying controlling the virus should be given greater priority than environmental concerns. Will plastic bags make a comeback, too? Hygiene has always been one of the arguments in their favour, given that people rarely wash the cotton alternatives.

I have no idea whether the coronavirus will prove to be as serious as some experts believe. But we do appear to have built an extraordinary complacency into the structure of modern lives, with its assumptions about the virtues of urban living and extreme centralisation of economic activity in cities, about unbreakable supply chains able to guarantee just-this-minute consumption, and the prioritisation of tackling dangers to the planet over other catastrophic threats. Even in the face of an epidemic, individuals should not have to feel that it is futile to seek to be in control.

The Telegraph, London