Our obsession with city living is out of date

In March last year, the world made an interesting discovery. We found that a high proportion of knowledge-work could be performed remotely. Significantly, this came as a surprise to everyone. It should be a source of mild shame that, for all their talk of innovation, very few companies or institutions had experimented with this possibility beforehand.

Given that this technology might help solve the housing shortage, geographical inequality, intergenerational wealth inequality, the transport crisis, the pensions crisis, the environmental crisis and almost everything else people worry about, it seems odd that it attracted so little consideration until a pandemic forced our hand.

If I pay a London-dwelling employee 10 per cent extra, they might afford a larger airing cupboard by 2030

Now, at the risk of sounding smug, I was an outlier here. Back in 2018 I instigated ‘Zoom Fridays’ among my colleagues to find out what worked and what didn’t. I don’t think this was prescience on my part; instead, I was an outlier for several other reasons.