Opinion | The Pandemic and the Future City - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Pandemic and the Future City
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In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video
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A year of isolation has, in effect, provided remote work with a classic case of infant industry protection, a concept usually associated with international trade policy that was first systematically laid out by none other than Alexander Hamilton.
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Given a break from competition, for example through temporary tariffs, these industries could acquire enough experience and technological sophistication to become competitive
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the pandemic, by temporarily making our former work habits impossible, has clearly made us much better at exploiting the possibilities of remote work, and some of what we used to do — long commutes so we can sit in cubicles, constant flying to meetings of dubious value — won’t be coming back.
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Hamilton asserted that there were many industries that could flourish in the young United States but couldn’t get off the ground in the face of imports.
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for many readers this convenience is offset by subtler factors. The experience of reading a physical book is different and, for many, more enjoyable than reading e-ink.
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what I find in a bookstore, especially a well-curated independent store, are books I wasn’t looking for but end up treasuring.
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The advantages of remote work — either from home or, possibly, in small offices located far from dense urban areas — are obvious.
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Both living and work spaces are much cheaper; commutes are short or nonexistent; you no longer need to deal with the expense and discomfort of formal business wear, at least from the waist down.
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The advantages of going back to in-person work will, by contrast, be relatively subtle — the payoffs from face-to-face communication, the serendipity that can come from unscheduled interactions, the amenities of urban life.
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until Covid-19 struck these advantages were feeding a growing economic divergence between large, highly educated metropolitan areas and the rest of the country
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We may commute to the office less than we used to; there may well be a glut of urban office space. But most of us won’t be able to stay very far from the madding crowd.