What Will The Post-Pandemic City Look Like?

• Main Author: Michael Batty
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Findings Press 2021-06-01
• Series: Findings
• Online Access: https://transportfindings.scholasticahq.com/article/23581-what-will-the-post-pandemic-city-look-like.pdf

It is impossible to predict the future spatial structure of cities from our current models of location and travel behaviour for the forces that have previously determined where people locate, have been turned on their heads by the pandemic. The only way we can explore such an uncertain future is to build hypothetical cities on which we are able to experiment with different urban futures. Here we build a hypothetical, symmetric, monocentric city which we proceed to lockdown by moving 80 percent of its workers to work from home. We then illustrate how we can relax this situation, letting the city return to a new equilibrium and showing how changes in our travel behaviour can lead to very different forms of future city. We argue that only through hypothetical simulations can we explore this future effectively and we point to where we have applied the model to London.