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If New York City is "dead forever," as the despairing author and comedy club owner James Altucher recently declared, why has Facebook just agreed to lease a 730,000 square-foot space in Midtown Manhattan? And why is Amazon expanding its offices in New York and five other U.S. cities, adding thousands of corporate jobs?
After all, in a post-Covid world, no two companies are better placed to abandon cities altogether and keep their people working from home, given their virtually unlimited computing power, bandwidth, storage capacity and general technical wizardry. Amazon owns almost half of the worldwide public cloud services market. Yet there they are, signing up for some of the priciest real estate on the entire planet. The reason is obvious, although perhaps not to New Yorkers who may be too traumatized by the catastrophic death toll America's biggest city has suffered, or made miserable by the absence of live music, theater and dance. The fact is cities are where ideas germinate and spread, and ideas drive business progress and human development. The pandemic can't stop that.  The Roman Forum Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe This week in the New Economy
There is simply no substitute for the face-to-face interactions that are the heart of an innovative society. New York will bounce back, just as cities have done for centuries following devastating plagues, pestilence, fires and wars.
Indeed, to give up on cities is to lose faith in civilization itself. When Rome fell, rural stagnation followed, notes Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser in his book "Triumph of the City." From the ancient world to now, he writes, cities have made the human connections that spark ideas. Job-hopping millennials who crowd into modern metropolises both acquire and disseminate knowledge, like urban bees pollinating intellectual flowers. This endless process of creation is accelerated by density. Our planet is spacious (all of humanity could theoretically live in Texas, if the whole state was as dense as New York City) yet humans choose to pack themselves into overcrowded concrete corridors, regardless of high costs. Almost 250 million Americans live in the 3% of the country that is considered urban. And thank goodness they do: their discomfort is the price society pays for the entrepreneurialism and productivity that drive the modern economy. Of course, from time to time populations trapped in cities yearn to break free and breathe fresh air. We're in just such a moment: Rich Manhattanites are snapping up properties in the Hudson Valley (moreso than usual) and San Francisco tech workers are heading home to places like Ohio. But as Annalee Newitz, a science journalist writing in the New York Times points out, previous urges to spread out have had baleful consequences. The Great Depression spawned a movement for "garden cities" that became a template for the suburbs: stretches of strip malls, ranch-style homes and fertilized lawns that put us at greater risk of fire and flood. They are also utterly dependent on smoke-belching vehicles. "The answer to our current problems isn't to run away from the metropolis," writes Newitz. "Rather, we need to build better social support systems for people in cities so that urban life becomes healthier, safer and more sustainable." At the Bloomberg New Economy, we couldn't agree more. We're bringing together some of the best urban thinkers in the world to reimagine cities. Just as cholera and yellow fever spurred urban renewal in the mid-19th century—New York built Central Park, London installed sewerage systems, Paris tore down dingy tenements and transformed itself into a fountain-filled City of Light—we believe that Covid-19 is an opportunity to rebuild.  The James A. Farley Post Office building in New York City. Photographer: Bess Adler/Bloomberg To be sure, some of those who fled cities this summer will never return. Even as Facebook takes over the grand James A. Farley Building in Midtown Manhattan, the company is extending its work-from-home policy until July 2021, with plans for some permanent remote workers. Our concern, though, is for those who don't have the option of leaving if they wanted to: the urban middle classes and the poor. Their lives will be fundamentally reshaped by two megatrends: The digitization of everything from health care to goods delivery; and decentralization that will, if cities get it right, bring back local neighborhoods and even local manufacturing. Our bet is that we'll be hearing a lot more about the "15 minute city," an idea developed by Professor Carlos Moreno at the Sorbonne to make all the essentials of life, from shops to clinics, easily reachable on foot or by bike. No, New York City isn't dead. But like other megacities around the world, it may be about to shrink into a thousand smaller spaces. And that would be progress. __________________________________________________________ Like Turning Points? Subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. Maps reveal and shape the space around us. Sign up for MapLab , Bloomberg CityLab's biweekly newsletter that decodes maps' hidden messages. Download the Bloomberg app: It's available for iOS and Android. Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can't find anywhere else. Learn more. | 
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