DIGITALISATION
The 2020 pandemic has accelerated the previously very slow trend towards personal computer-based remote working and retail activity by probably two decades in a year. It is most unlikely that at the end of this pandemic, office work or physical shopping will revert to the previous state, but equally absurd to predict their complete demise.
Leading industrialists and human factors specialists have noted that remote working can be efficient in replacing communal office work for a percentage of the time, especially for those with established personal and professional relationships. However, over time those relationships degrade, new staff are not developed, and (vitally) the soft skills of shared endeavour, team spirit and creative team thinking reduce.
The social and economic value of ‘commuting’ has been challenged by some, but this is muddled thinking. Human endeavour is collective.
Even the most connected and agile young will continue to come together physically in shared workspaces - the era of the lone genius inventor is long over. Even if each generation throws up its Einstein, it is only with those around them that genius is developed into wealth-creating activities.
There will be some who discover that they could work from home or the beach in perpetuity, but who may quickly find that their livelihood has been off-shored to someone similarly skilled in a lower-wage economy elsewhere or simply put out to tender in a race to the bottom as companies have no emotional investment in them.
The future will certainly be different. Office (or more accurately shared-space) work will die as a Monday to Friday ‘9-to-5’ activity, to be replaced by more flexible working around core hours during a shorter week - with Monday and especially Friday attendance greatly reduced.
Only a proportion of city employment is in offices, ranging from around 35% in major financial centres such as London to more typically 15%-20% in more typical cities. This format does, however, support a significant number of other service employment roles - ranging from office security to sanitation and transport, which will continue.
Most people, living in cities and their suburbs, will still work in centralised facilities - including health care, manufacturing, service and retail sectors. Therefore, effective short-distance city mobility will remain as essential as water and sewerage.
Routine business meetings and contact will continue to be carried out ‘virtually’ perfectly well, but activities ranging from more complex group discussion and business development through to establishing and fostering personal and contractual relationships will continue through physical meetings.
Travel for business will therefore reduce greatly. But it will, by definition, be for important reasons, and therefore expectation of travel quality and dependability will be high.
Retail activity will divide into two main classes. The major one will be the replacement of physical shopping for ‘routine’ purposes by online purchasing, leaving a smaller more boutique activity of shopping as a leisure experience.
Not only will this have a significant impact on the nature and make-up of shopping centres and streets, as they change to become leisure ‘experiences’, it will also drive a continuing major expansion in small package distribution logistics.
Likewise, digitisation of railway systems will enable the drive to further automation of many activities, from ticketing and billing through to asset management, requiring sustained investment in emerging technologies overlaid progressively on an historic infrastructure and necessitating major changes in skills and working practices.
CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS
Life expectancy of the population is increasing, although there is some evidence of a limit - not least due to increased obesity. Simultaneously, the developed world has experienced a sustained gradual decline in birth rate, more than offsetting the reduction in infant mortality.
The combination of these factors will continue to lead to a steady increase in the ‘healthy aged’ population, compensated for by inward settlement of younger adults from the less developed world.
While in Britain this has stabilised the proportion of working to retired people, rapid population growth as a consequence is stretching all types of established infrastructure.
The increasing elderly population can be expected to gravitate to city areas for access to healthcare and social facilities, while having the time and income to travel widely for leisure.
Meanwhile, limitations on the acceptable density of urban dwelling, and the desire for ready access to public and private open space, have been brought back into focus by the current health pandemic.
Therefore, the trend towards densification of cities will stop, and if anything be reversed - with the consequence that cities will seek to expand horizontally more than vertically.
Industries, including the railway sector, will invest in mechanisation and automation to reduce the need for human activity, accelerating the already well-established trend of elimination of semi-skilled office or assembly line workers. The next phases will be about replacing many ‘professional’ lone worker roles - the people who thought they could work from home.
In reality, many of the categories of work that will thrive are the close-contact but not highly paid population-serving industries. These are the very people who will need to travel to a workplace. But, being modestly paid, cost will be very important.
At the same time, the city population is likely to spread over a greater geographical area to limit high-density living, and so will require faster transport to avoid extending acceptable travel time.
