I was amazed at how quickly the idea of socialising with friends indoors became a fuzzy memory, then the norm, then distant again. Lockdown, then not-lockdown, then lockdown again have served as a reminder of just how adaptable we are as human beings. Totally different experiences of the same social earthquake: surely they cannot but profoundly change us for the long term? If you live by yourself, you’ve made do without human touch for months on end if you’re crammed into a small space with your partner, kids and your parents, you may have spent weeks craving time and space not encroached upon by other human beings. And I’m one of the lucky ones: I haven’t had to say goodbye to someone on FaceTime or break the worst news to someone over the phone. Covid means that big chunks of her life have only been seen on a phone screen as she grows into a toddler. The first kiss my baby niece blew me was bittersweet, because like so many pandemic interactions it happened not in person but on camera.
Rowan Moore, Observer architecture critic Interaction But there is at least a chance that the travails of 2020 could lead to a saner approach to the places where we live and work.
#The world after covid series#
And this vision assumes that Covid passes, and that it is not one of a future series of equally vicious viruses. It could simply be gentrification, if done wrong, at a national scale.
This is not to say that no new homes should be built, nor that there won’t be problems with such a shift. On the other there are towns and small cities with good housing stock, an inherited infrastructure of parks and civic buildings and easy access to beautiful countryside, which through their location suffer from underinvestment and depopulation. On the one hand there are overheated residential markets in London, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh and elsewhere. Such changes could help to address, without the pouring of any concrete or the laying of a brick, the imbalance in the nation’s housing that was at breaking point before Covid. Those ex-urbanites, still valuing social contact and public life, might seek towns and small cities rather than a lonely cottage in a field. If the magic spell of the big city, which kept people in the tiny and expensive flats that now look so inadequate, is broken, then you might consider living in cheaper, more relaxed locations that hadn’t occurred to you before. If you no longer have to go to an office daily, you can live further from the city in which it is placed. These decisions might be based on life changes, such as having children. There will always be millions who want to live in cities and millions who want to live in towns and villages, but there are also those for whom these are borderline decisions, with pros and cons on each side.
These changes do not add up to the abandonment of big cities and offices predicted by more excitable commentaries, not a future of rural bubbles and of tumbleweed blowing through the City of London, but a welcome shift in priorities.
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