 City centre businesses are pleading with people to get back to the office, but the latest data shows there's still a lockdown effect in some areas. I think the face-to-face economy is going to become super, super premium, and it will only be when it's very, very high value will it work. Thousands of meetings didn't have to require a 40-minute journey to get there for an hour's conversation. What becomes of cities? What happens to buildings? It's the real estate people who are beginning to ask that question. You're looking at a face. You're not seeing how people respond to other people. You don't have the opportunity for a quick sidebar conversation with somebody except through chat. Virtually never have I randomly spoken to a stranger in a coffee shop, a pub or a street, and that turned into a meaningful relationship. How many times on Twitter have I tweeted something and ended up having a follow-up conversation with someone, and it turned into material reality? That's it. More knowledge workers will be choosing to work from home or work virtually, meaning that they have these trends of shorter tenure. This concept of a fourth dimension for offices, and the fourth dimension really being you have place, you have technology, you have work processes, and then there's this ideal that you can work anywhere, anytime. So somebody who goes to the office to connect with other people, say, will have the same sort of interaction with others in a hybrid organization as those that are working from their home or from some other space. Technology doesn't exist for a hybrid meeting that puts an incredible disparity between the people who are in the room and the people who are outside of the room. When it comes to corporations, and it's very hard to say, the duration of the pandemic is only roughly a year, and I'm saying only because when it comes to change and cultural change, you actually need much more disruption. For me, it seems a little bit like that, and all of that thinking in digital age will foster and will challenge us more in having more flexibility in our decision making. What changed with the pandemic was that we were able to see a mindset shift where we were beginning to get back to the level of productivity and of trust and of relationship building in a virtual setting. The large cities will still be very attractive, but you will have little clusters of mini cities now. There will be an enormous premium for a minute. The big change will be in the geography of work. I'm very nervous about these divides across the span of demographic, gender, race and class issues, widening exponentially and astronomically as we come out of this crisis. London, New York, Berlin have survived far worse than this. Generic places, smaller places will be a lot harder than people think. Cities, you know, albeit rarely, have come and gone. Power has backs and waned. Places have been in the center of the world and not been in the center of the world. And I think there's no inherent right to exist. Now, if we step back and we consider this discussion in the context of what urbanists and geographers have been speculating about for a long time, we are, of course, reminded of the late 1980s and early 1990s with predictions about the death of distance or the end of geography. And a lot of people that care about cities, that work in cities and that research cities have been pretty much reassured over the last 20 to 30 years that digital technology does not replace physical connectivity. So is it that we are just, once again, overemphasizing what may happen due to technology in the short term and under appreciating how dramatic changes may be in the future? Or are we really seeing on this occasion a very constant determinant of human development around physicality? The vibrancy of the city center is a social good. It's something that is valuable. It's something that people think is worth having. People are willing to pay higher rents in order to be near to it. Landlords have to rethink the value of restaurants, bars, and amenities. And right now, the landlord's view of all of those is they are profit centers and their ways to make money. And I think they have to look at them much more like these are lost leaders to make people come downtown. The city, the workplace, needs to become even more compelling. A worker might choose to work around four days a week or one day a week. The delta between those two things is going to depend on how much the worker wants to be somewhere and feels like it's fun and creative and has value. What is much more difficult for people as they become isolated or independent is the development path for people for young graduates who join the organization and their mentoring and capability development is much, much more difficult and needs to be much more carefully matched. You know, there'll be 66% of the workforce that falls further and further behind. And without real strategic and intentional action, those divides are going to widen. The real question is how can we redefine what that mixed development looks like? How does it operate and who does it serve? So I think we're in a very interesting moment where in some ways we're caught in this plot twist. I am hoping that if and how the workplace transforms, some of those benefits get to spill out to the larger context. You know, we need to remove the elitism of location if we want to be more inclusive. And these technologies do provide a way for us to do that.