Zevi Lonely in the Crowd: Plugged or Remote?

Global Cities and the Challenge of Hybrid Work
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 979-12-5600-436-2
Verlag: Ledizioni
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 186 Seiten

Reihe: Pubblicazioni ISPI

The Covid-19 pandemic forced cities to shut down and citizens to stay home, disrupting economic activity and social life. The crisis pushed companies to adopt remote work, transforming it from a niche practice to a widespread norm, altering the balance between work and personal life. This shift created inequalities across sectors and influenced the ability of 'global cities' to attract talent in a globalized labor market. Now, as the pandemic has receded, many companies are reversing course. This Report explores how remote work has impacted cities and citizens, from mobility to urban planning. How can remote work reshape global cities? What strategies are available to local authorities? Is remote work still the future?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zevi, Tobia

Leseproben

1. Remote Work: Here to Stay?

Tobia Zevi, Giovanni Maria Della Gatta

This chapter introduces a report dedicated to the various implications that the widespread adoption of remote working has had for the urban environment. While, on the surface, remote working could be perceived only as an innovation within the traditional labour framework, its ramifications impact many other areas linked to workers’ preferences and attitudes. New mobility patterns have had an impact on emissions and pollution and given rise to new conceptions of public space and the work environment. Renewed interest in the work-life balance, changing trends in the housing market and a re-distribution of population within the urban environment are other developments deriving from the adoption of remote working. Though the phenomenon presently affects only a minority of the population, to some extent it represents the work paradigm of the future, and this is one of the main reasons why the topic should be studied in greater detail.

Cities are places where human beings live, grow and express their potential. It is only logical, therefore, that as people’s needs change, cities must evolve to meet them. As with all opportunities, this change comes with embedded challenges for companies, citizens and urban managers that cannot be overlooked without increasing inequality or losing attractiveness. This is especially true for Global Cities at the forefront of innovation, whose advantage is based on the ability to attract the best human capital on the market through the many opportunities and amenities they offer. A city’s failure to exploit this phenomenon properly might mean losing its competitive edge over other destinations, which now abound in the global labour market.

In 2023, most of the world’s population (56% or 4.4 billion people) lived in cities, and this figure is expected to double in the next 25 years when 7 out of 10 people will live in urban areas. This means that cities need to evolve alongside their communities in the management of public spaces and human capital. In order to do so, Global Cities need to retain the ability to identify and embrace new trends, and welcome innovations, including those stemming from crisis.

The global pandemic of 2020 affected many aspects of everyday life. One of the biggest changes was definitely represented by people’s perception of work, its location and ways to perform it. When the pandemic struck, the vast majority of jobs were performed in presence with just a small fraction of employees able to work from home, and even then only for a limited number of days a week. According to US Census Bureau estimates, in 2019, before the pandemic, only 5.7% (around 9 million workers) in the US worked primarily from home. By 2021, only two years later, this number had tripled to 17.9% (27.6 million).1 Delving into the spillover from this shift in urban and metropolitan areas, we see that average commuting time to work decreased from 27.6 minutes in 2019 to 25.6 in 2021, with evident benefits for the environment. This drop was possible due to the lower percentage of people commuting daily. The number of workers travelling to work by car dropped from 76% to 68% (a difference of around 15 million people) while the number of those commuting on public transport almost halved in the same period. Of course, this shift towards remote working did not affect urban and rural areas in the same way: while in 2019 the percentage of people working from home was pretty much comparable for city dwellers (6%) and non-city dwellers (5%), after only two years the groups assumed highly divergent trajectories, with roughly 19% of the urban population working from home compared to only 9% outside urban areas.

We see a similar trend if we look at the European context. As reported by the European Data Journalism Network, according to Eurostat, people working from home regularly or occasionally made up 14% of the employed population before the pandemic.2 Two years later, this percentage had risen by around 10%, touching a peak of 40% at the height of the pandemic. The figure for those regularly working from home rose from 5.5% in 2019 to 13.5% in 2021. To grasp the significance of this shift, it is sufficient to realise that before 2019 only 15% of the employed ever worked from home. While employers initially saw this as an inevitable reality, the shock of the pandemic forced them to adapt in order to continue to do business.

A Double-Edged Sword

Despite the fact that widespread adoption of remote working is a relatively new phenomenon, it is important to point out some of the pros and cons already raised by this new working paradigm. First of all, office spaces, often located in central business districts, are expensive for companies to maintain. Secondly, increasing traffic pressure and rising travel times make commuting to the workplace less appealing for employees too. Remote work tackles both these problems by relieving companies of burdening costs and saving employees time that they can dedicate to their tasks, while also offering them greater freedom in managing their spare time. Unsurprisingly, in the absence of clear and established boundaries between work and personal life, this can also make it more challenging for employees to disconnect from work, increasing the risk of burnout. Exploiting the possibilities offered by remote work, employees tend to organise daily or weekly tasks around their personal schedule, bending conventional working times. Problems also arise when companies take for granted that employees will be available outside of regular office hours.

For companies, remote working policies effectively allow the job market to become globalised, greatly expanding the available talent pool as employees are no longer bound by mobility constraints. This can boost innovation and competitiveness as teams become more dynamic due to greater heterogeneity in personal and professional backgrounds.

Companies must face two different challenges in order to exploit the full potential offered by a digital workspace. The first is to tackle the growing network security risks intrinsic to remote working: employees using their own computer and network equipment can be more easily targeted by hackers and cybercriminals due to overreliance on emails and other forms of digital communication. The second problem has to do with the suitability of digital infrastructure at the urban, regional and national levels. This issue, though not directly under companies’ authority or responsibility, can have a significant influence on performance. If we take Italy as an example, an ISTAT survey (conducted between December 2020 and January 2021) of people who continued to enjoy remote working even after Covid-19 restrictions were eased highlights the potential downsides identified above: the most common problem raised by respondents in dealing with remote work was inadequate internet connections (28.6%) followed by difficulty in concentrating (26%), overlap with personal/family activities (23.4%), inadequate space (23%) or even lack of space at home (21.3%)3. While most of these issues are not directly attributable to the companies concerned, they can nevertheless hinder performance and output. At least some of these issues need to be addressed by political actors at municipal and national level if we are to unlock the true potential of remote working, which has already become a phenomenon that can no longer be ignored. Despite its potential, many companies are now scaling down remote working due to concerns about productivity, inability to monitor employees, and the potentially negative impact of a blurred separation between personal life and work.

Undoubtably, Covid-19 accelerated changes that would have taken years if not decades to come about, even if the technology had been already available. While these changes affected mainly individuals and companies, they also had an indirect impact on city environments, changing demographic composition, population distribution, data flows and the management of municipal transport and housing. This becomes evident if we look at workers’ preferences. While the most historically successful cities used to attract talent and workforce because of the variety of opportunities they offered, both in terms of career development and amenities, the validity of this straightforward dynamic today can be questioned, as the constraint of residing near a place of employment is disappearing. Competition between nations and cities for highly-skilled and low-skilled workers alike might therefore become less and less dependent of economic factors and more on living standards and social conditions. The ability of cities to attract workers might also be impacted by other factors like the cost of living, green spaces, environmental sustainability, mobility management and, of course, the housing market. Tackling these different factors may be challenging for urban administrators but it could also prove vital: its population is the underlying strength of any urban environment and when a city is no longer able to attract new citizens, it is doomed to perish. As will be explained below, the new opportunities offered by these changes have not affected all segments of the working population equally, and this has created potentially dangerous diverging paths.

Remote Work: A New Route to Inequality?

Is it matter of skills?

Opportunities for remote working have not impacted the working population transversely; rather, they have created winners and losers in the transition.

In a study published in 2021, the OECD found a clear correlation between the skill level required for a job and its potential for...