One way to describe cities is to call them labor markets. Historically, people have chosen to live in cities because they have provided economic opportunities (among, of course, many other things). That's why the data is very clear: wages are higher in larger cities.

But what we have also seen over the last few years -- and what is causing a lot of dislocation in real estate markets -- is an untethering of work. More people are working from home and from locations that offer greater lifestyle benefits (or greater tax benefits).

We spoke recently about what this divide between in-person and remote work might mean, but regardless of this outcome, I think there's an important truth here: Lots of people would like to live somewhere else. (In my case, my daydreams take me to Paris.)

And for the first time ever, really, it is possible for more people to do this and stay connected to work somewhere else. Earlier innovations, such as the streetcar or car, also compressed geographies and empowered people to travel greater distances. But now the catchment area has seemingly expanded to the world.

I'm not saying anything particularly novel here, but I do think it's important to point out that this desire exists in many of us. Because this tension between "I do work here" but "I really want to live over there" seems like it's only increasing.

On Monday morning, I flew on Delta from Salt Lake City to Toronto, which in this direction takes just over 3 hours. And it was my first time ever experiencing reasonably reliable wi-fi on a flight. Maybe this is already common for the people who fly in the front of planes, but for me, I've never had the wi-fi work so well.

Usually it goes like this: I try and connect, everything is painfully slow, and so I get frustrated and move on. But this time around, I was able to check all of my emails, download fairly large PDFs, mark them up on my iPad, and write yesterday's blog post. It was pretty great, and it allowed me to land in Toronto with far less anxiety around my work backlog.

But it also got me thinking about what this means for travel and work. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I greatly prefer working in an office with my team. I think proximity matters.

At the same time, I recognize that technology is empowering new kinds of remote work, that we are all becoming more globally connected, and that, in the future, most of us are likely to travel more, rather than less. This will be for both work and for fun.

While solid in-flight wi-fi may not seem like that big of a deal, in my mind it's a game changer. People will become more mobile if they can sit on flights and actually be productive (and maybe Apple Vision Pro helps with this). It is another step in what feels like an ongoing untethering of work.

During the pandemic, there was a lot of erroneous talk about the death of cities. Much like when the consumer internet first came around, the thinking was that technology would make geography irrelevant. I was and am vehemently against this idea, but it's hard to not feel like technology is doing something. But what exactly? According to Richard Florida, Vladislav Boutenko, Antoine Vetrano, and Sara Saloo, it is creating something called the Meta City:

The various communities that make up the Meta City may be in different time zones and noncontiguous locations, but they function together as a coherent network with a distinct structure and logic. The Meta City combines physical and virtual agglomeration, in seeming defiance of the laws of physics, making it possible to occupy more than one space at the same time. As a result, urban areas within the Meta City network can share economic and social functions.

The narrative is compelling. Cities have always responded to and been a product of new mobility technologies. Streetcars, subways, and the car have all reshaped the geography of our cities. Some would argue for the worse. What the Meta City proposes is that technology today is not a disruptor of cities, it is simply another mobility shift. Rather than make cities irrelevant, it actually makes them more important by expanding their reach:

The pandemic-era shift to remote work is yet another technology stretching the boundaries of the city into a new and larger geographic unit. But instead of doing so physically, it does so by enabling virtual expansion. The share of American workers engaged in remote work tripled from roughly 6% in 2019 to almost 18% in 2021. Remote workers can access significant quality of life at far more affordable prices in smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

Some specific examples:

Many of these rising places are critically connected to established cities. As we will see, Austin’s rise is best understood as a satellite of San Francisco’s long-established tech hub. Miami is enmeshed in New York City’s finance and real estate complex. The rise of the Meta City informs a counterintuitive logic: Leading superstar cities are seeing their role as economic hub expand, even as some talent and some industry disperse to satellite centers.

Finally, here's their ranking:

If you believe this to be true, then it should be good news for the real estate located in the cities listed above. But it also means that we are now facing a new kind of hub-and-spoke model of urbanism. London and New York remain at the center, but tech is only strengthening their reach and influence. This is a new way of thinking about the flow of human capital around the world, and I'm sure it will have impacts on how we plan and build our cities.

Image: Harvard Business Review