After Covid-19 the lack of need for offices can change cities

That is what I think, and I see that many others think the same.

The fact that many people can work from home online means that much less office space is needed, so that many of the buildings that we have today in large cities will have to find other alternative uses.

And if many people (many thousands of people who today live in the vicinity of large cities) no longer need to go to the office every day to do their work, it is possible that many of them consider the possibility of living in another smaller city and less expensive, where life is a little more comfortable and more affordable.

Therefore, it is possible that in the coming years (as online work becomes more widespread) thousands of people will leave the big cities in which they live today to settle in other places a few dozen kilometers away from them, or maybe even further.

That can significantly change the demographics of cities and benefit those that are smaller and until now their lives revolved around larger ones. Because they would receive new citizens, some of them with a high purchasing power, who would revitalize commerce in those smaller cities.

What I say is starting to happen. In the surroundings of large office buildings we have seen that catering and leisure businesses were created because they had many potential clients in their proximity.

After the confinement of Covid-19 and as a result of the online work of many of these clients, some of those businesses have ceased their activity due to the lack of customers. There is not enough public for all of them to live as before.

Technology changes the ways of working, and this change has come suddenly, because although technology allowed work on- line, we continued with the customs of before. Covid-19 has changed that forever.

Companies have found that if their employees work online they need much less office space and much less “business” trips with the associated costs.

Now those employees go to the “office” one day a week and the spaces are shared among the assistants that day, as people have their work tools on their personal computer.

ALL businesses in cities and beyond will adapt to the new circumstances, and those that do so first will be able to survive, and those that do not are doomed to disappear sooner or later.

This has always been the case and will continue to be like this.