Covid killed our cities for good and you owe them nothing

Cities have struggled since the onset of Covid.

The next time I hear a politician or business leader plead with workers to get back into the office because the city needs them I think I’ll … cough on them. Or, at least, clear my throat persistently as they present to the next conference on why the city needs the average worker to come in and save it.

We don’t owe the city anything. We don’t have a contract with the city and, frankly, many don’t have fond feelings for the city, if only because it’s the place they were forced to commute to, spend too many hours working in and pay dearly for its food and drink. If we liked it, we’d go there on the weekend. And we don’t.

So, the feeling is not mutual.

We don’t owe it and many don’t miss it but that shouldn’t be surprising because the city wasn’t created for our enjoyment.

Remember the city is what grew up around the need for big businesses to gather their workers together to produce results. The city is a by-product of business. All those shops, cafes, consultancies and service businesses plonked themselves into the CBD because that’s where business was done and workers gathered. They didn’t go there to make a city.

Some cities are more than the sum of their office blocks. The great cities of the world are full of cultural institutions, history, architecture and residents and that last one is the most important in creating a city with heart, one that we might actually miss.

In New York, for instance, there has been a backlash against people leaving the city.

According to a report last month, the deserters have been accused of disloyalty. I get that. It’s the people of New York who make it a great city and most of them love living there.

Not our cities. Despite decades of advice that our cities should create more spaces for leisure, for creatives, for greenery even, our cities are still mostly office blocks.

Sure, there is a small population of foreign students/workers and an even smaller population of wealthy people who have an elsewhere house that they use when they’re not at board meetings. They too are there for the work.

There is a whiff of self-interest in the call to save the city. After all, I don’t recall anyone saying we’ve got to get people back to the small country towns because they’re dying – dying after the banks withdrew their branches and post offices closed and car dealers shut their doors.

If country towns were left to die without so much as a whimper from our leaders, you have to surmise there’s another agenda to the Save Our Cities campaign. You might suspect an economic imperative or business reason behind the call. Perhaps they want everyone back in the office, they want business as usual to resume, they want to get back to the old ways of working and, more pertinently, managing work.

Good luck with that. Workers, so they tell surveys, like working elsewhere. They like blending work and home life. They might also like independence, lack of surveillance, lack of a commute and the change of perspective from the suburban window. They might well be back in office blocks a couple of days a week but it won’t be because of a Your Country Needs You rallying call.

We don’t need to save the city. The city needs to save itself. And it can do that by making itself a place where people, not just workers, want to be. In the meantime, it only has itself to blame.

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