My friend Alex Feldman just shared this New York Times opinion piece with me. Along with it, he said, "Thought you'd appreciate this." And he was right, because he knows me. He and I have a long history of geeking out about cities, hosteling around Europe together, and booking irresponsible flights at odd times in odd locations.

The article is by Richard Florida, and it's called "Dubai Was Not Built For War." It follows one of the themes that we recently spoke about, here. People come to cities in search of opportunity. Cities are labour markets. But Dubai is perhaps an extreme example of this. You could say it's a city designed almost exclusively for opportunists. From Florida:

Nearly nine in 10 Dubai residents are nonnationals — by far the highest percentage of any major city in the world. Across the Emirates as a whole, about 10 million of 11.4 million residents are foreign nationals. Many are from Britain or the United States, but many more are guest workers who do the service jobs on which the city depends and typically come from South Asia, Southeast Asia and the wider Middle East. Even a traffic violation can trigger deportation. Citizenship is based almost entirely on descent; it’s been intentionally made very difficult for even long-term foreign residents or their children to become Emirati, even after decades of living and working there. The system is designed to rely on migrants while keeping them permanently temporary. That makes it extremely hard to be rooted, to belong, to be attached.

The result is a new urban model ("Dubai-ification") compared to how we used to think about cities:

This new kind of city is a sharp break with the past. For most of human history, people lived and worked in the same place, and cities grew up around that basic fact. They transform, rebuild after fires and disasters and become richer and sometimes poorer, but they draw their resilience from their rootedness, the fact that people feel they belong there. To say “I am a New Yorker” or a Londoner or “I am from Pittsburgh” or Detroit or Rome or Barcelona — that is not just a map. It conveys a deep sense of history, belonging and meaning, a personal identity, not just a transaction. Those identities are messy and unequal, but they are substantial. They are one of the primary ways people answer the basic questions of who they are and where they belong. And they are part of what brings people back to hang on and rebuild, no matter what.

At the time of writing this post, Polymarket shows a less than 50% chance of a ceasefire with Iran by the end of May, and a 71% chance of one by the end of December. That's not 100%. So, we'll see. Maybe it becomes even more protracted. Hopefully not. Regardless, the question everyone is asking is: How many of the "permanently temporary" will actually stick around if they no longer feel safe?

My view is not many.

Cover photo by Christoph Schulz on Unsplash

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

This morning I stumbled up on this conversation between Richard Florida and Ed Glaeser about the post-pandemic city. It's from September 2020 and that is obvious in some of the comments. Richard Florida (who was in Toronto) remarked that it felt like the pandemic was mostly over at that time and that Canada had seemingly done a much better job than the US at tackling it. That no longer feels right. But I did find myself agreeing with some of their other points.

Here's one from Ed Glaeser that looks back to previous health crises:

But pretty much since the 14th century, urbanization proceeded despite the reappearance of the Black Death in the 1350s. Urbanization proceeded despite the Great Plague of London in the 1660s. All of the great diseases that spread in 19th-century America, cholera, yellow fever, the urbanization just chugged along. Even the influenza pandemic of 1919-1920 was followed by a tremendous decade of city building. So, I think our cities have proven to be remarkably resilient.

For the full conversation, click here.