 Welcome to LSE, to the first of a new series of urban age debates on cities in the 2020s. This is hosted by LSE cities by the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft and by the LSE School of Public Policy. My name is Camilla Cavendish and I'm going to be moderating a great panel who was speaking from various locations around the world and we are being live streamed around the world. As with all LSE public events we do expect some tough questions and I'll be opening up to Q&A a bit later and please send your questions through the appropriate function on Zoom. The hashtag for the event is at Urban Age Debates and we're going to speak for about 75 minutes and end at 2.15pm here in London but our speakers are obviously in Miami, Singapore and Berlin and many of you listening in are coming from all sorts of other places where I hope you've managed to either have some breakfast or some supper. So the Urban Age Debates are exploring how cities are engaging with the profound global changes that have come about during the triple crises of the Covid pandemic, new demands for social justice and the climate emergency. So coming up in the other debates after this one, future events will include the mayor of Paris, leaders from Asian, Latin America and African cities, the designers Thomas Heatherwick and Norman Foster and the economists Mariana Mazzicotta and Edward Glazer. But today we have a great panel who are going to discuss the dramatic shift that we've seen in working conditions in the pandemic especially for knowledge workers. You know since the pandemic forced offices to close many knowledge workers have got very used to working on Zoom with no commute and some companies are welcoming a future where they may be able to tap into a more global talent pool because geography has become less important. On the other hand some individuals and I would include myself in this are desperate to get out of the house and back into some real live interaction with colleagues. So we're going to ask what are those changes that we've seen in working conditions and what might that mean for the future of cities because of course plagues historically have been bad news for cities. I'm in London and the embankment here was actually built to provide the city with a modern sewage system after thousands of people died in the cholera pandemic of 1854. And after that time you've got Ebenezer Howard's concept of the garden city which said look you can have greenery you can have hygiene at the end of a railway line out in the suburbs. So one of the questions I want to ask is which places are going to prosper out of this and will it be suburbs or will cities have an enduring appeal. On the panel we have Richard Florida the urbanist author and academic and professor. We have Aisha Khanna artificial intelligence strategist who does a lot of work in Singapore and is running a very interesting entrepreneurial company that I hope we'll talk about and we have Yenina Kugel a business executive who's worked with Siemens among others. I'm going to start with Professor Richard Florida. Richard can you tell us a bit about what trends you were seeing in relation to knowledge work before the pandemic and how do you think the pandemic is accelerating those or will it will influence those as we move forward. Well I think that the big trend going from the late 20th century say about 1984 is the rise of knowledge work and you know whether you measure that by the percentage of people who hold an advanced degree or have advanced education or the people who work in occupations that are professional knowledge innovative or creative you know we see an enormous surge in that as we move from an older industrial economy where people work with their hands and their backs in the run to a newer knowledge economy where the mind has become the means of production. I think going back at least to that time maybe earlier there has been a shift towards telework what used to be called telework which is now called remote work or work from home it grew in bits you know in cycles but it never really got to more than a few percentage points of the population. The pandemic coincided with the rise of you know fairly reliable broadband and the rise of a whole series of new technologies of which I learned the name like zoom in March of 2020 I learned the word zoom and the verb zoom the noun for zoom and the verb zoom and at that point you know most knowledge workers then began to work from home and you know a huge percentage of knowledge workers essential workers still had to go about their business and work with the public and work with others and were much more at risk for contagion of the disease COVID but knowledge workers got to work from home and I think the best predictions that we have are roughly before the pandemic about five percent of knowledge workers in the advanced countries worked remotely and now 20 percent although 40 percent of knowledge workers say according to recent surveys they would like to work from home and I do think to be to be quite candid Camilla I think the biggest change of this pandemic will not be in the geography of residents I think there's been a lot of speculation will London decline will New York decline will Sanford we can go on and on will people move to the hinterlands the big change will be in the geography of work and that's something we can we can talk more about it so I do think this pandemic will be slightly different in that this this pandemic will have an effect on accelerating changes in the geography of work and just to put a quick exclamation point on that I think the big threat if you will to cities will be in the central business district you know we have packed and stacked knowledge workers as a legacy of the industrial age like we packed and stacked factory workers and factories we packed and stacked knowledge workers in these giant office towers and they endured long commutes by car and train and bus and what have you I think that we could see some significant they won't be eclipsed but we could see some significant decline in the demand for the central business district and I think that will be one of the big big challenges and opportunities coming out of the pandemic that's very interesting and and what happens then to the service ecology around those office blocks in the central business district you know what happens to the cafes and the taxi drivers and all of that well we actually have one very good research paper done on this by the nber national bureau of economic research which has done spectacular work I mean I have these papers catalogued and there's literally hundreds if not thousands of them produced on the COVID-19 crisis there's one which focuses on this and it says the biggest negative impact of the pandemic well because remote it's interesting knowledge workers which means potential remote workers are very highly concentrated in large center cities like london new york singapore san francisco that that that's where that kind of work even though you can spread out has been concentrated so any impact on remote work any shift of remote work outside of the central business district will impact that so let's say in terms of demand for office space the estimates are 20 to 30 reduction even though workers will need more space they're 20 which is significant but interestingly this this research paper suggests that the biggest impact of the reduced demand for central office space will be precisely on those service workers so so the essential service workers who are working in low wage precarious positions working very hard to make life ends meet working hard to support all of us during the pandemic the biggest negative impact will be on their jobs and wages because those jobs and wages will be reduced dramatically as demand for restaurants cafes and so on that support surface economy reduced so quite terribly quite tragically the biggest negative effect will not only be on the city fiscal situation but on the low wage contingent workers in those urban areas that's interesting just one last question on this i mean do you think a lot of those workers the the essential workers as you say are probably themselves commuting long distances because of the kind of high rents that we've seen in central business districts so i mean i'm just thinking if some of that ecology shifts outwards is that actually going to be a better deal for some of those people because it'll be closer to home i i think uh twofold um one i think the biggest negative effect will be on increasing i i think it without um strategic and intentional action on the part of national governments provincial governments and local governments uh there will be a terribly negative effect in terms of increasing uh work inequality i think that's for sure i do think with intentional action some of the space in the central business district and because of declining rents overall for a short term we would see some opportunity to provide affordable housing convert office towers to housing and so forth but if you think about the 2008 financial crisis there was this brief moment when housing became slightly more affordable in large urban super star cities and then it surged up where and you know look the night the spanish flu was followed by the roaring twenties i i think we could potentially look forward to a roaring 2020s and if you just look at the most recent predictions by goldman sacks discount how you like they're predicting in the united states in the united states growth of seven and a half percent next year well united states hasn't seen seven and a half percent growth in i don't think in my lifetime so so you could imagine a situation where despite all the prognostications of gloom and doom there is a slight decay in in rents in super star cities but they surge back upward maybe maybe we won't see the oligarchs you know the oligarchs may have decided that they'd rather live in larger states in monaco or miami beach or wherever but but we will see demand from professionals from knowledge workers from creatives and young people uh which although it might not create demand for those super townhomes or those super penthouses will still push up rents and make cities unaffordable for middle-class working people and service workers great that's very very interesting i'm i'm going to turn to isha i'm going to see if our other panelists agree um i mean isha first of all can i just say you know you're an entrepreneur do you feel that there are limitations to remote work i mean how much in the past has your company used remote work and how much have you needed to bring people together to create and to collaborate well we uh the place where we really feel that we need to come together is when we're trying to build relationships of trust within the team or with our clients so what we do is we build very large data platforms for large telcos and healthcare companies and government ministries and um so we have always been able to work remotely because our work is digital and data driven by nature but definitely we felt that it was important for us to go in person and meet with our stakeholders what changed with the pandemic was that we were able to see a mindset shift in our clients and within the teams over time where we were beginning to get back to the level of productivity and of trust and a relationship building um in a virtual setting i certainly did not expect that but that has been very interesting to watch apart from this i think it has opened up to me and you know i'm i come even though i'm an artificial intelligence i've done a lot of work in human rights and women's rights and for me it's been very interesting how this has opened up our team to second third-tier cities and indonesia and pakistan where we have hired really smart machine learning engineers some of them women that we would not have found before or considered before because of the need for our teams to be physically present together sometimes so i feel there is a democratization of access to work as well that this has resulted in i certainly have more access to talent and because of this openness of our clients and organizations we're working for and of my team itself to work with people in different countries it has actually created more diversity and and more out of the box thinking paradoxically in our firm that's really interesting because that's very much counter to what some people are saying which is they find it really difficult to spark creativity digitally and i mean it sounds like you've actually found a way to empower people and continue to create them do you think that when the pandemic receives you're going to want some physical space for interactions or will you not need that you know absolutely i mean i think there are two things you have to look at the profile of my team i'm the oldest by like decades my team i'm really young they are very at ease they also very much understand you know their digital rights and i'd love to talk about this later of you know that the pros and cons are just not i'm not touching freely with you it's also i'm observing you through voice through video through breath sensors like you know there's so much more now that is a downside of using technology but when you are working with young people whose average age is in their 20s they are much more at ease and they seem to slip into this more easily and use technological tools much more easily whereas i see the people who are older and especially not in the tech field struggle somewhat just because it's different and i think that in general with technology disruption and this being one kind of disruption we do have to continually adapt to new circumstances so this has been a a good lesson for all of us that with more automation more digitalization pandemic or no pandemic we will have to adjust to different ways of working and upskill ourselves to the new demands of the you know fourth industrial revolution yeah but that's quite an exciting prospectus so thank you Janina can i come to you and ask about the big corporation perspective so from your experience i mean how do you think corporations are going to try and get this balance between remote working and office working as we go into next year i think everything that has said and when Richard said is like he learned the word then now the verb assume we also have to remember that most of the things that we are used now are technologically possible already and there were organizations already and i actually mentioned that that we're using that remote work people you know traveling a lot service people people working in global teams what i think really makes the trick is the culture of every organization because one of the things and what we experienced now over the last year is that everyone that was knowledge workers right that's the limitation that we're speaking about we were all forced into an interaction like that but then what happened in the very beginning is like that everything took place it's like analog meetings took place and then suddenly you know you realize that maybe it's more tiring than what i actually said is like you have people that are not used to it there's a different learning and so it's not only about whether it's technological possible it's about to really see it's like can we adapt to the entire different dynamics that digital collaboration and digital virtual action has to take place so for example do we miss social interaction yes we do i personally and that's also most probably an h issue i mean do i believe that sum or whatever can replace social interactions i don't think so but what you could do is you could also start every meeting with a little bit of a social interactions like we did before we actually were going live with every one of you now and 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 and we were also between us discussing that for example i'm living in europe it's total lockdown richard is currently in florida he can pretty much like still do what our he wants to a certain simulation so we also have different experience all around the world when you think about large corporations i still have mapped and spoken to managers that are still in that mode of thinking that they want to control their employees so and sometimes i'm having a discussion i said i mean even if you were present in the same office what did you do we're standing behind 10 computers of your people and thinking what they were doing and watching them and controlling them but that feeling i want to see my people i want to see what they're doing is still there i even know from companies where there are requests out to measure the it utilization okay how many people were online how many emails were floating was there a view or a shift of like it traffic data traffic that you could actually see and when you take all of that into consideration and then you have of course those organizations that are up for it that were says like okay we need to do some changes so it all comes back to really summit back we are all human beings and virtual and digital collaboration means we have to change the way that we behave and how we interact and i think i see good signals but i also do definitely see some very scary issues and maybe last comment to that i think what also happens is the inequality back home a issue is mentioning some of our teams being like in their early 20s maybe then the biggest thing that you're having as an issue is maybe that you don't see and you can't meet other people but when you're on my age okay and you have children that are in homes cooling i always call it the hashtag home everything it's kind of like you're getting nuts by everything that happens in the same room as you also said in the beginning so we also have to take into consideration to definitely balance out who's who what are pretty much the backgrounds of everyone else and then you have those let's assume everyone's staying home we're still in a luxury position our house is big enough but there is a lot of families that are living all around the globe that don't have a lot of space and usually it's not so important that people usually only sleep home well when suddenly the entire family has to stay and do everything in the small place that they're living in it causes different facts now our corporates ready for that already not yet and so i think that will really be something that we have to attack over the next month to come yeah that's very very interesting and of course i'm i'm sure we've all experienced as i have recently working with teams of people largely in their 20s who are also living in really small accommodation often sharing the kitchen table with somebody who's kind of leaning into your screen and actually um it's it's it's very tough and i agree that i'm homeschooling two kids downstairs at the moment and you know i would quite like to get out but i i think um if you're in your 20s it can can be even worse can i ask you one more question actually you need to know about women in particular um i mean this crisis has put a burden on working mothers in particular it seems to me i was really struck that aisha was actually saying that her company is creating new opportunities for women at the same time but how do you see that yunina in in the big corporate world i mean i think it's like we have to look at the at the broad numbers and for just a quick second we also have to think about like those that are not knowledge workers that pandemic has been overly dramatic having a negative impact on women that are mostly losing their jobs first um you know in some of the areas that they were there and then if they didn't lose their jobs then they were actually coming to shortage of work times which is another thing and then let's go to those knowledge workers that theoretically could continue the work what i saw was a trend of women due to the amount that they actually had to do back home you know because over proportionally they're taking a larger stage in doing the care work okay so whether it's children or whether it's a household or whether it's elderly people everything there is hardly any country the best is still sweden you know where there is a balance of care work between you know men and women in a in a heterosexual family situation but due to the fact i also saw a lot of women and my plan was always to companies not to reduce the working hours and let women you know just like also like cover up for the balance of life saying is like we know that you have a lot to do maybe you cannot work like eight or ten hours but we will just like also take our responsibility in that and i think this is the dramatic signal that we've seen and i haven't seen any state that for all of the things that they were launching in terms of like financial aid that had a gender balancing in their packages in their financial aid packages in their welfare packages but i think that definitely needs to come because what we could see was the disbalance in society that we know yeah that's that's a very striking point um there's so many different different things to talk about here i mean i wonder just first of all if we just talk a little bit more about work um and and what you think the priorities will be of employees after the pandemic as they come back to whatever the new normal is i mean you know will will it be about health i mean richard i think you you suggested that will be people may be more spaced out i mean will it be about interaction it will it be this roaring 2020 is when everyone's just going to want to party i mean richard what do you think the priorities will be well i i think for the past 30 or 40 years we've seen a revolution in knowledge work in in the mind becoming the means of production and i think the big thing is we don't have any support structures i think aisha and janina said this so powerfully we don't have any support structures around that so we're just downloading more responsibility on the highly individualized and atomized knowledge workers even to the point forcing them to set up their own technological infrastructure in their home provide home care provide education to their children and i think we're going to see bigger divides by geography i think gender you're 100 right by demography by age as well as by race and by by class uh coming out of this i i think work is going to be different um some advantage group of people and i think this is mostly the one percent can work remotely and have a wonderful support staff in the office and out of the office the 20 or 30 of us who do knowledge work will be able to navigate this we'll be able to set up the technology provide the support staff at home but you know there'll be 66 of the workforce that falls further and further behind and uh without real strategic and intentional action those divides are going to widen you know we may see a boom an economic boom but just like the pandemic the beneficiaries of the boom have been the one percent and then the advantage third 25th to the third everyone else has fallen further behind that that will continue i think one other thing that's just worth mentioning i think there's been far too much uh conversation about the decline of big urban centers you know london new york berlin i could go on have survived far worse than this and have come back i i think it's smaller places you mentioned at the outset suburbs traditional generic suburbs not wonderful rural places with coastlines and mountaintops where people can connect from and want to live i think the generic places smaller places will be hit a lot harder than people think and that both large cities and small places with special amenity there will be a an enormous premium for amenity people in choosing where to live and work will say i can choose to live and work in a place with a lot of urban amenity or i can choose to live and work with a place with a lot of natural amenity and there'll be premium but 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 yeah and so back to what you said earlier about the central business district then it sounds as though you think the big cities with amenity will survive and some of the rents in the center may drop and actually that will also suck out from the suburbs presumably so the suburbs are left kind of stuck in a slightly unattractive place i think i think mayor heldago in in paris has been very prescient with this seeing the refashioning of the city or metropolitan area less is a place which separates work and home into specialized areas and you know whether you like morano's notion of a 15-minute neighborhood i i like to think of it as a complete community a community where you can live work send your kids to school and everything can be done in a somewhat more circumscribed radius i think that affluent cities will move more towards that model there will be more ability and i think in terms of the distribution of work you'll see a redistribution you'll see some of the work that used to be done in the central business district move out whether that will be private office or co-working space or neighborhood third places who knows but there will be enormous opportunity to decentralize the places of work closer to where the people where people live and i do think certain suburban and rural areas that are linked by transit or quite lovely or or quite demanded they will become much more integrated complete communities or 15-minute neighborhoods so we'll see some kind of rebound the good thing of that is that could reduce commuting that could reduce energy use that could reduce pollutants so that that could be a net positive right there's a that's fascinating there's a lot in here i mean i should you want to respond to any of those points i mean i you know i'm i'm interested in your views on both the kind of what employees want are going to want and and what impact that's going to have on the geography of all this i think it's really interesting that we have been talking about remote work in context of you know the pandemic and the fact that who will benefit from remote work and who won't but really the bigger picture is automation so what is really going to move the needle for workers regardless of whether we're on zoom or not they're need to upscale they need to move away because all their jobs are going to get automated we have uber drivers delivering food that when you have self-driving cars or taxis that's going to go away they're still going to need to have find a way to enter this knowledge economy and if anything this may have you know been the nudge unfortunately that that many people needed to start that adaptation journey now in singapore and in some other country there's been a very you know it's always long-term planning and there has been a very systematic effort to upscale people to subsidize them so even while they they get on the job training and subsidies from the government it's a small country we can afford to do that and make sure that we take everyone along this path but this requires a great effort and policy by the government to actually help those people who will be whose tasks will be automated to find new ways of finding their own place in the digital economy i think that's the bigger picture and that means that whether we can meet in person or not we're still pretty much going to be in increasingly digital environments and the environment will look very different if you look at facebook at work it was such a boohoo you know love they bought Oculus nothing ever came out of it poor things but actually VR is really coming into its own slowly with facebook at work when you put on the VR you're not in some cartoonish space the idea is that you're much more seeing just like we're seeing each other and because of haptic technology i could shake your hand if i'm wearing that glove and because of haptic sensors i can hear you from my right or my left creating a much more authentic experience um i certainly don't think it replaces human interaction but for those who are you know in in locations i think we need to 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 so i think that we will see more of it now one can never talk about technology or data or AI without the word governance in the same sentence because one without the other is ridiculous what i fear even i though even though i build those machine learning models is uh what are we doing when we're this this webinar is being recorded what are you going to do with this where are you going to put it are you listening to the way i'm breathing are you watching the nerves and the blood vessels in my face i'm sure lsc isn't but maybe it is where where is that agreement and this is the kind of stuff we need to pay attention to amazon now has an app called halo you can download it it analyzes 18 features of your voice your tone your pitch your volume and it tells you whether you're in a good mood or you're feeling low energy or high energy and now if alexa is listening it knows what to sell you or maybe your boss knows whether you're happy or not which is terrible you know i mean it's so inclusive and this can happen in a physical or virtual or hybrid environment in my opinion these are the conversations we need to have because the train has left the station and then going back um and i think it's kind of not really about new york and london i totally agree with richard those cities are amazing they're not going anywhere but our and work environment is getting a lot bigger a lot more complex yeah i mean that there's a lot of very useful thoughts in there and actually goes back to something that yunina said about the fact that you know we had the bosses standing around five computers away and thinking they were controlling people and actually really not having a clue and what you're saying is we can find out you know you don't have to be standing on the same in the same room to find out a vast amount of probably too much about people um yunina do you want to pick up any of those points i mean there's a lot of them yes and i think it's like you know the comments that we had and also some of the questions that i at least was like slipping through in the in the chat is we have the tendency to always like think you know very much in silos and not really complaining i mean so for example what's the challenge of like what richard said is like urban city centers and then remote places and small villages and i actually making that comment of like she would actually find talent that she hadn't found before because suddenly they were available and it didn't really matter anymore whether they were close i think you have to take all of that together and then take the advancement of technology and to say is like if we feel that we're missing the social interactions would there be a moment where we're taking all of that that people can feel which move we are even though we only see on a screen would that actually be a helpful or wouldn't it and on top of that human beings we do not all want the same we are living in different conditions we are different you know in terms of like what we like and taking all of that into consideration now having said that most governments at most organizations always try to have that one fit all approach i do not believe that we will ever work remotely forever and forever at not all of us but i definitely hope you know with the reduction maybe of office space that richard said in his very first statement we will come to a combination of more flexibility sometimes there is moments that you come together and sometimes it's absolutely not necessary and we know that and then with the advancement of like also learning different didactics didactics of virtual collaboration we could make use of it and i think that is what i would like to see more that we have those combinations of technology of advancement of like what we know plus everything that we also have known from the past we don't speak about it anymore but reskilling and upskilling the gap that we see in the workforce automation digitization will not disappear it's only that for the last 10 months we haven't been speaking about it but now it would also be the time to invest exactly in the upskilling and the reskilling of people that lost their jobs i mean you could see the latest report now with the closing of the end how many people have lost their jobs have you seen any government saying is like okay that job is lost maybe we'll never recover and we'll never go back are we starting to retrain people for others where we know we have a gap of skilled workers now i don't want to blame governments but at least coming up with a strategic plan on how to move there is something that i have hardly seen and the same also matters for organizations because the the gap for skilled workers has been a gap already and they'll remain a gap so we will have to retrain people not even having mentioned the social impact right if there is a much bigger divide we will always i mean we will also result in a situation that i don't think would be acceptable for many societies yes so a conversation that began about work and cities is is morphing into a very important conversation about skills and education and isha i mean i know you sit on singapore's technology board and you mentioned some of what they're doing could you tell us a bit more about singapore's i think it's the skills future program isn't it i mean it's a it's a very very ambitious program and what kind of skills is singapore trying to bring to its population yeah so the skills future program i was on the committee that the steering committee that led to that and you know within a year they went they came up with a plan to have more integration between industry and academia so that the so that we could move towards innovation and new industries like biotech food tech agri-tech robotics you know all of the industries that we associate with the fourth industrial revolution much more quickly and that education was just not theoretical but was but in every program there were apprenticeships there was time spent as part of the curriculum with the different kinds of cutting-edge businesses and companies so the idea really is that before this when somebody is hired they hit the ground running and that is the number one gap that most employers face when and even we hire very talented students from graduate programs but we always have to have these three four months of training and if singapore as a country can produce graduates that already had been understanding about the business context of the theory that they've studied whether it's mechanical engineering or biotech it makes them all the more attractive to different companies and makes them better entrepreneurs that is one part of it the other part of it obviously is that the singapore government spends a lot of energy attracting some and investing in some of the most cutting-edge companies inviting them to set up the headquarters here the industries that we're interested in as a country are both those for which we see demand in the world but also those that we need ourselves the pandemic has shown us that we need to be more food resilient we import all our food and so we have this 30 by 30 that we want to be able to make 30 percent of our food by 2030 so we have some great startups that we're encouraging we have programs in food tech that are coming up and I think that is really motivating some of the young people as well because there is the pandemic has made us realize that to be resilient not just economically successful we need some of these new technologies so it was very nicely timed luckily that the skills future had started a few years before so we're already on that path yeah you know what some of what you say I mean I really admire Singapore's approach to this because it has the long-term view as you say and it's very practical and whenever I've met people in the Singapore government they have looked around the world and learned from other people's mistakes which a lot of western governments I feel don't really do but in a way what you're seeing you know it's a real failure on the part of our education system to be honest if we are churning out graduates who can't hit the ground running I mean that is a really shocking indictment of our education system in a way and we should have done that a long time ago I mean you know if it's about integrating business and academia more closely that is something that we should have already done and I wonder why we haven't done it I mean it's the remnants of the industrial revolution right they put them all in factory-like conditions so parents can work from nine to five but unfortunately now it falls on us Camilla and us mothers a year and fathers a year to make sure that while the education system catches up painfully slowly we are introducing them to the basics of computational thinking I think not coding but understanding how machines work as a just computational thinking is as important as reading writing and doing math it would be so ridiculous if our children went to school and they said yeah we're not going to teach them how to read it's the same idea 10 years from now we would you know never send our kids to such a school but what's interesting to me in Singapore like any other country struggles with this and Yannina pointed it out as well it's not just about young people I'm on the neighborhood watch and you know they're people of all ages and we get together and patrol the neighborhood and I get to talk to them and some of them are in their 50s and they are late 40s and they wonder can they learn these new technologies where is their place and they also struggle with the virtual work even though they're knowledge workers in the traditional sense they're project managers and we haven't quite figured that out anywhere and in Singapore's trying other countries are trying as well but that idea of how do we help those people adapt and find meaningful work in an age of increasing digitization and automation that is the question that that I think about quite a bit I think what Aisha is saying about automation AI and education is something that we just need to highlight I think that we have a big disruption in work but I think the even bigger disruption coming is to education I should just point it out that we have a legacy system from the industrial age let me give you three examples that I think might shed light on this one because of this we put our kids in a pod school with four other families none of us wants to go back to regular school now we're all advantaged we all can afford but when we look at the cost of education in an American context or a Canadian context that pod school is delivering so much more of a bespoke education to our kids that no one wants to go back and I'm hearing this conversation not just among our four families but amongst people who I thought were believers true believers in the need for a traditional school environment that's one number two as a result of this pandemic I bought myself a peloton bike what I learned on that peloton bike is that all of the things I thought I needed to pay for in terms of personal training I don't have to pay for the instructor says to me via my screen I can deliver you personalized training with metrics at scale that's what my peloton instructor says to me that's how if you can deliver physical fitness and professionalized personal training at scale which is a very hard thing to do you can deliver and then finally I taught my class on zoom this summer as an MBA intensive I brought in this group of people from all over the world I received my highest instructor and course ratings in the history of me teaching over four decades and I said to my teaching assistants I said to my teaching assistants we can do this 10x so instead of teaching one in two courses a year we could easily do this 10 times if I can deliver that course 10 times I could probably actually deliver that course 20 times what does that mean for the future of education I think we are seeing and Aisha I'm sure knows much more about this than I do the disruption potentially to education and the kinds of inequality for those with means versus those without means some people can't even have a computer in the home is going to be I think the biggest legacy of this will be even more so than work the beginnings of this disruption and creation of new educational models Janina do you want to comment on that no honestly there is nothing to add because I think that is you know the question is always like what's the result if the segregation of society will continue because I think when we when we think also you know what's what's else important to life right it's a question of like can you live in peace can you feed your family members and all of that right let's for a moment not only think about like working life but think about everything else where would be the ideal situation to live and if we then see the segregation in the world and if we would like build on what Richard very very truly said is would it actually increase the segregation of many of the existing societies it would and then what do we do for everyone else to actually manage to manage you know to to to mind they have to close the gap that's the I don't have a solution if I had you know it would be brilliant to really bring it up but I think there is ways to to close that gap or to make it more narrow if we do not start about again here the schooling thing is also does it always have to be a central approach or could it also be tailor made depending on which community you're speaking of right not everyone exactly needs the same thing and for me it seems a little bit like that and all of that thinking in digital age will foster and will will challenge us more in having more flexibility in our decision making and more flexibility in our thoughts because if you think at most of the decisions that we have been taking be it at a university in an organization on a country level in a state level it has always been one decision for everyone yes but it has not always been that that one decision was equally fair for everyone but to have that flexibility and especially in a democratic approach you know of a democracy will become really challenging because most of the human behaviors is like always defending the past and not always exploring the future yeah I mean strikes me that you're all talking about some shifts which are very potentially very empowering very democratizing very exciting for one particular group and for another group really very scary and and I mean Richard mentioned support networks the lack of support networks which are beginning to be exposed and I just wondered if you all want to address that a bit more you know what from the different places that you sit what kind of support networks do are we going to have to provide to help well I think Richard thought it was the 60 percent I mean you know the people who are going to find it very hard to adapt I mean Eric Schmidt always does the at that speech where he says you know I'm looking to hire people who can invent their own job and half the audience is thinking great I'm at Stanford and I'm going to invent my own job and the other half of the audience you look at their faces and they're thinking oh my god I just want someone to give me a job and tell me what to do so so what do you all think about you know the kind of support we need in this in this new flexible world well I think we just need this I have to tell you I I'm so excited by the disruption and education because it is going to let more people in than leave people out yeah I have people I have clients in Africa and Indonesia see I'm literally dealing with emerging markets and they are so hungry for knowledge knowledge now that is free that you don't have to randomly go to and you know get into an Ivy League University and have access to those courses and they are doing it my team members people I know I go nine I and they're like on Coursera taking courses and so infrastructure telecommunications infrastructure and mobile phones the decreasing cost of computation on the phone and the decreasing cost of smartphones is going to revolutionize access to knowledge right we don't need to give people money we need to educate them and that is why I come back to the same point you know the only people who are at risk are those above a certain group a certain age because the other is when you're even 30 or 40 or 50 and even you know 70s if you're it's okay if you're in that mode of learning and adaptability you never had more opportunity if you think about Pakistan 220 million people um you know average age is 22 the third largest free land digital free land so market in the world that's unbelievable if you look at the educational level compared to other countries where are they learning this certainly not in the schools and they're earning dollars they're going to platforms like Upwork there's a marketplace out there for people and um you know they're the same people they have cars now they have bicycles they can afford fridges and TVs this is and they can have hope for their children I see this every day I don't see as much in Europe and in America like Richard and Yannina because I'm not there but I do see the incredible empowerment of the poorest but but really awesome group of people that have not had access to this before yeah first first principles to build on that I think there are three initials that we need to etch into our brains called UBI universal basic income that what we are seeing now is an incredible socioeconomic disjuncture if you look at the two major movements we've seen around the world today the rise of populism or trumpism and the black lives matter movement they they are both in very different ways a response to people being shut out of the future folks minorities less advantage people saying we're being shut out we want opportunity and and for the populist the the white middle age male worker saying my future has been cut off too so we need some new kind of social safety in it and I think that's something like a universal basic income which provides some sort of seed capital or funding and and also not just money I think Aisha so importantly said this it has to be something which gives people purpose and what's happened with education it used to be that if you went to school at the end of school there was a job if you went to the LSE or the University of Toronto or Harvard or Stanford there was some sort of job there's not necessarily a job at the end of that anymore even even a professional job is not necessarily a guaranteed good life so I think we need to create mechanisms and you know one of the things you see that the more affluent folks in society doing is saying I'm going to make sure my kids have enough money to do whatever they please they don't have to go into the family business they can work on civic problems they can set up a philanthropy they can work on social justice issues because I can provide that seed capital for them I think we need to think long and hard about what a social safety net or social support system and I think we start with a universal basic income hinge to giving people the support they need to find the kinds of work that gives them purpose and meaning in their life if we don't do that if we don't provide some kind of social safety net for this new age there will be hell to pay I I think what we've seen in terms of the backlash on both the left and the right will grow and grow yeah I mean the universal basic income concept as you know is I guess some people are concerned that you lose that exactly what you lose the sense of purpose of work because you end up paying people not to work and so while I'm with you halfway I'm worried that you would end up you know you would end up accepting automation and and giving people just enough to get by and losing that sense of purpose and you have to hinge it to purposeful work you can't just hand people money because I mean look people have to cover their material needs that's base one but in order to live a fulfilling and decent life people have to have purpose so that some kind of social supported UBI like mechanism has to be hinged to finding people's purpose whether that is neighborhood and community work whether that's having a startup whatever that is but Camilla you're 100 right we just can't go into a kind of Kurt Vonnegut world where people have no purpose and meaning and just and we found one of the things we found is that people can't fill themselves up by consuming right we know that now about the advanced world consuming more doesn't make your life better so finding purpose and meaning is important for everyone maybe if I jump in there I mean Finland has been running a trial on the UBI right and for those of you that are interested I think it's interesting to actually see that there were some people taking the time to do something else you know explore new businesses another so now that obviously is at the heart of social security Europe which a lot of Western European countries have and it doesn't apply for all of the other markets but I think there is one very important thing is like and I'm happy to hear you I should being so so positive and like all of the opportunities I unfortunately always also see 80% of the people in the world and sometimes even more I'm not knowledge workers and for them that time and that future doesn't really look as brilliant and if you for example see a lot of countries have been have been pushing equipment out to his pupils right at least that they could attend the digital classes if they happen at all and we see that they're not capable of using them they don't have wireless access back home so you actually see that the infrastructure doesn't really work like that and I think the very important topic here is purpose and the meaning of purpose I think is a different one for everyone academic academic rates are not going to be the solution for having a social welfare all over the world and not everyone will be you know either driven nor will he or she be possessed with the capabilities to actually go that way and I think that is the question that we sometimes have to watch out that the discussions that we're having and I know that this event is about knowledge workers but it doesn't really become the bubble discussion where those that are having a privilege and here I think it's very important to understand privilege is not only the question whether you're white or black or whatever privilege is the question also do you have access to education you have access to the minimum education at all because if you don't have that you cannot explore and you cannot use you know for example the fluid like Richard is teaching everywhere right 20 classes for free which of course would be a liberty but I should also sad but you need to have the minimum standard and I think that is the world that we have to cover and that we have to see that we're not making a bigger disperse very good point now there's a lot of very good questions I can see coming up I'm going to break for questions in a minute just before I do I wanted to give each of the panel a chance to just say what the key takeaways are for them so far just quickly from this debate Richard what what do you feel the key thing is you've heard today so far well I think we're going through a huge disruption which as you said at the outset is an acceleration of already in place trends a rapid acceleration and I think what we're hearing is that when most people talk about changes in where we live are am I going to live near a mountaintop am I going to leave London or New York am I going to live near a lakefront or small cities that those are important changes but the bigger changes will be one in the way we work that that is a fundamental one and one that's not receding and little accelerate creating advantages for some the privilege and disadvantages for others creating a bigger divide and then secondarily I think our great insight has been that that perhaps the even bigger shift looking out further because it's a it's a smaller piece to begin with but it could be a bigger disruption is to education and human development that that these technologies that automation that these trends may very much for the first time in say a couple of centuries begin to erode and disrupt the model of education that we inherited for the industrial revolution there's a bright side to that there's a very bright gleaming side of that especially for those who are advantaged but there's a downside of that if we don't take intentional and strategic action many many people can be left behind brilliant Aisha quick takeaway from you I think it's been interesting to think about cities what I think is going to happen is that the large cities will still be very attractive and great places with high quality of life but you will have little clusters of mini cities now all over the world and they will be ones in which people will be you know interacting in in doing virtual work and they may not have great theater but with virtual reality and others they will enjoy that great theater they may not have great restaurants but they'll have terraces in their apartments that are primed for drone delivery and they may not have a fabulous gym nearby but they'll have a peloton like Richard and an AI trainer with tonal and that is going to be really interesting where will these mini cities come up these mini clusters and people will think their quality of life is just as good and this is what I found that I now talk to people in Jakarta and Mumbai and Lahore they don't want to move to New York and Paris even I'm shocked I think I'm old I'm actually shocked because like who doesn't want to they're perfectly fine where they are they're enjoying life where they are and that is what we'll see more of and I think that's a wonderful friend and so it's kind of a win-win yeah and it's probably good for the global climate as well let's hope I think it's like bringing those different perspectives in there right I mean climate different types of job urbanization versus like the remote cities everything that we spoke about you know types of different work and thinking about what would be the huge opportunity if it would take all of that thinking together in one approach and then if I take you know that old sentence I think education is basic is the basic for everyone but we have to think about like education doesn't stop when you're 20 or in your early 20s but education is a lifelong approach and we also have to come up with solutions to actually put all of that together so great thank you very much and for a very rich discussion now I'm I'm going to take some of the questions I mean I think you can all see the questions too so I will pick some out but feel free if there are any that particularly excite you to to respond to those and one I thought was very interesting from Thomas Mendoza he's saying do you foresee any impact of salaries with the rise in remote working a San Francisco employee is currently definitely more expensive than employee say Nebraska or India who would like to answer that let's start I think what we're seeing among the capitalist class if I can use that word is an attempt to radically alter the terms of work I think it's on two fronts I think there is a manipulation of remote work to say we would like you to move from high paying places to low paying places and we will pay you less I mean Facebook is on record and other companies are on record of saying if you move to one of these less expensive places we will pay you less at the same time in the United States there is an incredible whipsawing of jurisdictions there is a move now on the part of the right the right wing part of the capitalist class to say to jurisdictions like San Francisco and New York that are progressive that vote liberal or democratic that pay have higher minimum wages and better social safety nets better social programs if you don't cave into our demands we are going to move to a low tax tax destination like Miami or Austin in the states of Florida and Texas and this is what people don't see they see this is oh the rise of the rest it's a wonderful flourishing of places in fact it's elements of the business community saying to places we want less taxes we want less social programs we want less regulations in places like San Francisco and New York and if you don't abide by this we will pick up and move ourselves and our companies to less tax less regulated less progressive jurisdictions and this is something that that is escape it's for some reason escaping the view of most commentators on contemporary urban affairs fascinating do either of the other two do you want to answer that or should I take another question you know I would agree with Richard I mean on the one hand you know the labor arbitrage advantage for digital work is real and we I certainly take advantage of it and so does everybody else and that is very capitalist but there's no there's no you know it's not a sense in that sense but I think the bigger issue is that I have heard companies are doing exactly this they're kind of trying to force people their wages down trying to tie it to location more than the value that they're 100 company and that is demoralizing to people who are working hard I think that's the problem we need to kind of decouple location from the value and the hard work somebody's doing and give them that value but will there be overall a depression in wages and more emerging markets come and are able to you know give the same skill at a lower price that's a different trend and a different kind of thing to think about but but there are two different issues and I think that they both need to be addressed and we've seen this movie before you know let's let's call it for what it is a race to the bottom a race to the bottom that's what we have unleashed at the local level now in in contemporary capitalism a race to the bottom and we saw what happened when that this happened in the industrial revolution places like Pittsburgh which were had labor organization and progressive government or Detroit business moved en masse relocated plant auto industry steel industries move them en masse the suburbs the sun belt and overseas to undercut those wages this is a contemporary digital capitalism version of it and what we're seeing around the world this is kind of a celebration the rise of the rest the rise of these communities the movement and people cheering I mean it's so bizarre for me to hear people cheering the decline of San Francisco cheering the decline of New York cheering companies moving out not anticipating the fact that a large part of this is a reduction in wages and working conditions and an erosion and attempted erosion in regulation in the social safety net that in a place like the United States has been highly localized. So I just like to that there's a question that relates directly to this from Cristobal Diaz Martinez who's actually saying you know is there a future for unions because clearly you've suggested as she says we're losing our agency's workers if we're just adapting to these dynamics so how do you radicalize democracy and I suppose part of that is you know what is the role for unions or I would ask what is the role for government. Well I think when it comes to unions I mean they have been thinking because what Richard said is like we have seen those trends due not to digitization but to other facts and globalization already happening before I see that unions are struggling of like knowing whom to represent because unions traditionally have been representing those people working in a plans you know very clear shifts and it was a very clear picture of like what to protect but I believe that the democratization or how should I say is like giving more powers also to those that are the workers is going to be a struggle saying that unions could use it I don't see that they can because they are pretty much like defending their past and I have always been saying in my formal rules that is also what they are there for okay if you go into a union if you become a member you want them to protect your job so I think you always have to see why that is happening nevertheless I think it comes back into not only seeing that one moment but like looking at the past and looking to the future of like seeing is like what is the impact and what is going to be the aftermath of like taking some of the decisions but if we go that far then we also have to think about like as long as our listed companies and many of the large companies are listed have to come up with a quarterly result that is always about growth and those of you investing in results you want to see your stock price going up then of course it's a little bit more tricky to bring all of the other goals and the purpose targets into the same picture yeah I do think I do think that unions are rethinking their role if you take a look at what people like Tom Coak and at MIT have been thinking about a long time post-Fordist or post-industrial union organizing that said I agree with you Nina that that it is more likely that we need new models additional new models of collective action not only at the workplace but in the community level and one thing I've been right about in for the past 20 years that that I think we need more research on and more argumentation and more discourse on is the fact that in the industrial age the factory of the corporation was the arena of class struggle I think you could argue now that the city or the community is the arena of both innovation of productivity increase and of class struggle so it may be that the new arenas for collective action and bargaining are not necessarily only factory based or corporate based those are important but that we have a new moment where collective action at the community level or at the city level at the metropolitan level becomes more important I think that's an area where you need and I just said something very powerful governance I think this question of governance and the scale of governments from the local to the provincial to the national to the global those are questions that we're only beginning now to think about and and if the struggle is actually at the city level or the regional level as you say and it's not within the walls of the factory who are you negotiating with you're organizing collectively and I think this is what's so interesting you're you're you're organizing with corporations you're organizing and and negotiating with startups you're organizing and negotiating with city government the issue with that is then it becomes relatively easy for business owners to say okay you've established a progressive beachhead let's use the example of san francisco or seattle you've established a progressive beachhead in seattle you've increased the minimum wage you've created better rules and regulations you've established say a universal basic income in finland and then the business owners say the hell with you we're going to move we're going to move to a less costly less regulated and if you don't come in line we're going to do I hate to say this amazon hq2 and we're going to create a second headquarters outside of your higher wage highly regulated more progressive jurisdiction I think that's the dilemma of contemporary capitalism that's what we're up against brilliant we have a couple more minutes and I want to move there's quite a few questions about green growth and and I'm going to take one from alaya yaga I hope I've pronounced that right how might remote working in the consequent changes to city centers affect those cities transition to clean energy and infrastructure especially in lower income countries because this is surely an important dimension to this Aisha do you have a view I'm not really an expert on this but I do think that obviously it makes a difference and I think the more interesting thing from my perspective is when you have remote work you're using more artificial intelligence you're using data centers and data centers themselves are inefficiently using energy and they themselves become a problem as well so you fix one problem but you created another one which by the way is always the case with technology which is why we always have governance in the in the equation so basically I think the important thing is that they are both algorithmic and other ways in which we can you know kind of build these data centers including with microsoft is looking at having them underwater and their algorithms and ways to pull them for me personally that's very interesting and what I would hate to see is that we create a new monster by using this digital work in such a way that actually produces a problem for cities in terms of sustainability and I'll just end but I saw this very interesting pilot that's happening in Sweden where they're taking the heat generated from the data centers to actually provide heating to some of the residents in Stockholm so I thought that was kind of interesting I'll have to use that energy and not let it go to waste and that could be another dimension of Richard's community in a way I suppose you're just closing the loop um you Nina do you have any comments on the green pathway no I mean I was just thinking about the scene that Ayesha said there is another thing because we spoke about that also in the beginning if we think about all of the restaurants and cafes that were close to the office buildings the only way for them in the moment is to survive to go into the delivery but if you have looked at the numbers of the increase of waste um due to the fact that people are ordering food um you know waste of plastic and also paper goes on I think that is another thing that we created another burden without that we have resolved the plastic that we see all over the atmosphere and all over the world already so it's again here is always a balancing that out and and I think it's about thinking the entire circle and not like solving a problem or fixing a problem here and then creating another one with the same with the same move thanks Richard any thoughts on this I think inclusivity and resiliency and the green environment are the two big questions moving forward and will require strategic and intentional action at the global national local scale I think this is an area where the left just has to do better and make these issues more concrete to people I mean what we're dealing with at least up to now is that the global right has done a much better job like it or not of appealing to the base instinct of people and we've seen this populist surge you know I had to live in the United States well Canada but you know to see what Trump has gone going away but wreaked havoc on the United States look at Boris Johnson and we could go on the left has to do a much better job of communicating this in a way that that ties to average people's future ties to their ability to get a job get meaningful work see social mobility for their families not abstract issues like it I come from working class background my dad had a seventh grade education he worked in a factory they don't understand it's difficult to communicate issues like sea level rise or climate change in the and the distance of that from this person's life so I think the progressive left has it has an a big challenge ahead of it to re-engage these issues critical issues for our future in ways that motivate the working class and the service class and dispossessed and disadvantaged people to raise behind this big challenge I you know these are the things that keep me up at night these are the things that really keep me up at night well I'm very glad to know that you're thinking about them trying trying no I mean this has been a really stimulating debate and we've ranged much more widely than I expected actually and it's almost impossible for me to sum up but I guess we started with Richard's reminding us that zoom is now a noun and a verb which I loved and actually you know as we said zoom was around before but suddenly we've accelerated so we have been through this acceleration I think all of you feel that and it sounds like you all think that large cities are going to remain attractive New York is not dead London will continue and we may even be heading into the roaring 2020s but clearly automation is looming and that raises really big questions about not just the kind of work we do but how we upskill a large proportion of the population to do new jobs but also I think what you've all talked about is be adaptable and and adaptability and resilience are fundamental but but I think so far in our society we haven't been terribly good at doing that for people and and I think it sounds like we are going to need new forms of support networks new forms of community organization to potentially new roles for government to do that in the future but lots to think about there thank you all for a very stimulating debate thanks to the LSE and thanks to Alfred Herrhausen Gaselshaft and if you've enjoyed this one please do come to the next urban age debates which will include the mayor of Paris and leaders from Asia Latin America and American cities that's all from me thank you very much all of you for coming along