The UK’s largest cities and towns are where we come together to work, live and play. The pandemic has reminded us that, with the benefits that come from city life, there also come risks. But the lessons from the 6,000-year history of the city are clear: they survive, adapting to and overcoming the challenges of disease, conflict and economic change.
Our research has shown the extent to which the pandemic has impacted people’s day-to-day lives, demonstrating that those living in cities and large towns have been hit the hardest by Covid-19.
Centre for Cities’ most recent three-part event series looks at the future of cities from three perspectives; working from home, city living and city leisure time, exploring how the pandemic has prompted changes in these areas and debating what this will mean for the economy and society going forward.
The rise in home working due to Covid-19 may have weakened the link between a person and their place of work, but our sense is that the notion of the city as a place to live has both survived and flourished during the pandemic.
As the long-term impact of Covid-19 becomes clearer and the nature of work changes to adapt to it cities must change too. This will have implications for the economy, working and social life, infrastructure, planning and design.
Panel speakers at our recent event in partnership with L&G made the following key observations when exploring the potential long-term impact of working from home:
The proportion of people able to work from home is often overstated. Our estimates suggest that people able to work from home are a minority in every single city and large town in the UK. London, Reading and Edinburgh have the highest shares of workers able to work from home – more than four in ten. Meanwhile, in Barnsley, Burnley and Stoke just two in ten people can work from home.
However, it is likely that the pre-lockdown working practices will change, with many people continuing to work from home for at least some of the week. However, this will not be a cost-free decision; many city centre shops and restaurants depend on custom from office workers and are likely to struggle if their weekday sales shrink.
While many have adapted smoothly to working from home, the benefits of face-to-face interaction are hard to replicate and working remotely means that we miss out on the spontaneous flow of ideas and the sense of camaraderie that being in an office creates. We will continue to need spaces to come together, collaborate and build relationships. Offices and co-working spaces are natural places to do this and city centres remain the most convenient places to locate them.
The beginning of the pandemic back in March 2020 and subsequent introduction of national lockdowns saw a dramatic fall in mobility and public transport use in UK cities as millions of office workers quickly shifted to working from home.
Since then, many city centres have struggled; high street footfall plummeted and sales in the retail and hospitality industries fell, which put millions of local service jobs at risk.
That said, and while it is too early to predict the long-term effect that the pandemic will have on urban places, we consider the recession brought on by Covid-19 to be very different to previous ones and so we should expect the UK economy and many of its cities to experience a sharp bounce back.
Now, with the economy gradually starting to reopen and restrictions lifted it’s likely that we’ll see changes in UK cities over the coming months.
Covid-19 has undoubtedly shaken urban places to their core, but we should be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that the pandemic signals the death of the city.
Cities have always been centres of disease as well as prosperity. Density has its downsides as well as upsides and yet historically cities have survived and thrived, continuing to function as places where people gather to do trade, to learn and to have fun.
While every part of the UK has been affected by Covid-19, UK cities and large towns have been hit the hardest, becoming unemployment hotspots. For this reason, they will play a particularly important role in creating jobs as we emerge from the pandemic.
Our research with HSBC UK examined growth patterns within the UK’s seven-year jobs miracle to inform how new jobs can be created as the Government looks to build back better and level up the country. This research identified that if patterns of the past persist, cities and large towns will be our main job creators post-Covid.
There are several things that national and local government can do to support their areas’ economic and social recovery from the Coronavirus pandemic.
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We hosted the final of our Future of Cities events.
A summary of observations from our second Future Of Cities event, which probed whether Covid-19 has changed demand for city living
Centre for Cities tracks the recovery of high streets in Britain's cities and large towns from the Coronavirus pandemic.
Reflections from the first of our 'Future of Cities' events, in partnership with L&G
The Levelling Up White Paper is due out before the end of 2021 - here's everything you need to know
How public transport reforms in Portugal could be replicated in Greater Manchester and other UK city regions.
We hosted an event on the future of working in cities
COP26 comes to an end with a crucial discussion on the importance of cities in the climate agenda.
Poor access to public transport effectively shrinks the size of our biggest cities. But trams and tubes alone won’t solve the problem
There were still 1.1 million people on furlough in September, and almost one third of them were in London, Birmingham and Manchester.
