Office workers: should you go into the office next week to keep your town or city centre alive? Here are a few thoughts. [thread]

1 The reason for having offices in city centres is not to serve the food outlets, pubs, cinemas and restaurants that are there. The services locate there because that’s where the people are. If the people and demand move elsewhere, we can expect the services to do so too.

2 The reason for working in an office is a) for the convenience of the employer and b) the practicality of doing the work (or impracticality of doing it elsewhere). This year has demonstrated that for many people home working is entirely practical, with no loss to employers.

3 If it’s practical and efficient to work from home, it reduces costs, pollution, carbon emissions, congestion, and stress. We could all do with less of all of these. Against that are the merits of getting a decent coffee (but see point 1, or make your own).

4 Going back to the office isn’t ‘going back to work’. People who’ve been working from home have been working as hard, or harder, as they did when they were in offices.

5 If it isn’t practical and efficient to work from home, we need places where people can work effectively. These might be offices. But they could also be co-working spaces, cafes, libraries and a host of other venues.

6 But what about our sad, dying town and city centres? I’m all for saving town centres (I wrote a book about it).

7 We don’t save our city centres by propping up a failed model designed mainly to meet the needs of property developers and old-school civic boosterists. We need to redesign towns and cities as greener, less congested, healthier places where people will want to live.

8 Making city centres places where people want to live demands imagination and attention to detail, not the quick fix of allowing developers to turn unwanted offices into shoddy flats without planning permission. There is no ‘fast track to beauty’. It will be hard work.

9 But we have a real opportunity to rethink the way we live in our cities and at the same time reduce pressure for more shoddy housing developments on the edge of towns. We should focus on that, not on hectoring people about which workplace they should go to. [ends]

Thanks for all the engagement with this - it obviously struck a chord with a lot of people. There’s clearly a lot more that can be said about it, and we need to make sure that whatever we do to redesign work and space reduces rather than increases inequalities.

But let’s start thinking long term: what kind of places, and what kind of workplaces, do we want to leave to the generations after us? And who do we want to benefit from the way they evolve?