The Center Cannot Hold
The future of cities
[Originally published on Substack — subscribe here!]
I’m typing these words from Maui.
Why am I living in Maui, you ask?
Of course, asking the question reveals its obvious answer: why not live in Maui?
In the last decade, and particularly in the last year, we have witnessed a cultural shift that has upended a long established trend: urbanization.
It’s important to identify why these trends are happening if we hope to understand what our futures may look like, and we can attribute these trends to three key factors.
The first and most dominant factor is the advent and popularization of remote work.
In the information economy, geography itself is rendered irrelevant. These days, teammates at a company can communicate just as effectively when one is in NYC and the other is in SF as they could if they were on different floors of the same building.
In a world where manufacturing jobs have been outsourced and retail/service jobs are continually being automated away, more people are entering the information economy. Where before the image of a worker was a factory employee, that image is now a hipster behind a laptop.
