The spatial fix is in.
Urbanist Richard Florida's research focuses on the importance of space and proximity for promoting innovation and economic growth. The theory is that the density of cities creates lots of connections, both social and professional. Ideas travel with less friction, and we see remarkable development.
The evidence for this value of proximity shows up even in small tech businesses. Patrick Campbell of Profitwell liked to stir the pot at entrepreneur conferences by showing charts on the improved performance of co-located companies. Many of the attendees were "believers" in remote work, making this observation controversial.
Brad Feld and David Cohen's work in startup communities (including a book of the same name) similarly focuses on bringing geographically co-located assets together to promote innovation and progress.
Florida points out in The Great Reset that the best measure of proximity is how long it takes to get from one place to the other. In other words, we measure proximity with time. Thirty miles is twice as "far" in traffic congestion.
He observes that as a population grows in and around an urban center, the traffic grows worse. Roads are slow to build, and cars are easy to drive, leading to a supply/demand imbalance on the transport routes, effectively increasing the distances between, say, work and home. This friction reduces the opportunity for more serendipitous communication because one spends time in a car instead of a cafe. And the cost of human misery is not to be discounted - sitting in traffic is not my idea of a good time.
His solution is dense housing and high-speed rail. Dense housing speaks for itself. Rail can carry more people into where they work and where they live in a much shorter time. Since time is distance, we are effectively closer together. And since density breeds innovation, etc., etc. Bonus: the energy per passenger mile is tiny compared with an individual car.
His theory is further that high-speed rail can connect secondary cities to their hub, increasing the flow of ideas and culture.
High-speed rail has been a long-running political friction point in the United States. The technology is not new, but it does require precision and allocation that is not common in America today. Requiring engineering, capital, and the use of land is both expensive and prone to corruption. The use of it pushes against the individualism of American citizens as well, especially in the cultural norms of the past seventy years.
On the other hand, high-speed communications have grown wildly and are the basis of many companies that have started working on going remote over the past two decades. The trick has been primarily leveraging existing infrastructure. High-speed internet connections mostly came over legacy phone lines and later over legacy cable lines. These brought tens of megabits per second to a meaningful majority of households for the last decade.
The world with this high-speed access is further expanding with improvements in DSL technology to reach further-rural environments and clever wireless technologies like StarLink.
So, broadband expands geometrically by the year with far less physical dislocation instead of decades and land disruption through high-speed rail. None of which is perfect, but it is at least a 10x improvement in velocity.
Political types have heard the call for "broadband access" for at least the last two decades. We made progress! But the habits of work and location did not change as much. We continued to move physically to our offices, and when we started in closer proximity, work was effectively less expensive.
Some companies - in my experience, smaller technology concerns - took advantage of this tech to go fully remote. They pioneered many working patterns. But like many city folks looking at pioneers, many of us running companies with an office did not envy the challenges of the remote work firms. The value of proximity was still high, as Campbell's slides pointed out.
Then came the pandemic. Everyone went home, and we scrambled to keep business going and our employees safe at the same time. A newer set of technologies showed their mettle: Zoom, Slack, and their ilk. We were all forced to figure out better how to operate remotely, but these tools made the transition easier. Certainly not perfect - Zoom burnout is a thing - as is the seeming ubiquity of Slack notifications.
But the application stack on top of the network stack works well! And many of us have learned how much we can create and do through the proximity of video communications. I can work with anyone in my organization not by going to their office or invading their space, but through a video call where I can equally naturally look at a shared document or other vital information to drive value.
The communication costs also plummet outside my organization. My average remote conversation is higher bandwidth thanks to Zoom and Google Meet. Instead of using a phone, I can see the other person.
One remaining problem is that the spaces we live in are not designed to support concurrent living and work. A few people - usually single - have a home environment more akin to an artist's studio, in which their work, play, and living all share a space. Think of the gamer rig that is also a workstation in the studio or one-bedroom apartment.
But for those of us with families, the situation is more complicated. I have not had a door separating my workspace for the entire pandemic. Productivity has been challenging. My experimentation has been applying a temporal fix: I start my day before dawn to have these few hours of quiet before my sons come thundering through, bringing me joy and ending my work window. I am grateful to technologies like Krisp that could filter out most of that noise for work later in the day - but the lack of a barrier is still challenging.
I recently looked for new housing for my family. I wanted us to be safe, happy, and productive. I found a few key considerations that I think will be more important in the post-Covid era.
First, most homes were not built to support professional work in the home. A "home office" for squeezing in off-hours work in the previous thirty years could be a small-ish or sometimes airless spare room. But an office as a first-class consideration has not been a consideration for decades. Most houses maximize living space, with the potential for more storage space.
The allocation of space to knowledge work as a first-class consideration will become essential to the usability and saleability of non-urban homes. When I looked, I sought space where I could imagine working 70 waking hours per week and being productive and happy. Separation from the main living area would be necessary - as would the airflow quality in the room.
Second, homes further from major urban centers will work just fine. If I have to drive a few hours to reach an international airport, that's a relatively minor tax. The key is reliable connectivity, the ability to stay there in happiness, and access to the amenities that will fulfill family members and residents.
What I found exciting about this next phase is how much return we can get for so little investment. Renovating residences is much cheaper than laying rail lines. The major innovation in communications technology has been at the application but is about to go to the organizational layer. The question before us is managing an enterprise with innovation and productivity in this new order.
I look forward to this challenge. We are going more remote and working closer together than ever before.
Photo by Euan Cameron on Unsplash