In 1997, a 60-year-old Japanese electronic engineer and longtime executive at Hitachi, Tsugio Makimoto, quietly published a book called Digital Nomad. In it, he described a coming revolution, when ubiquitous new technologies would ‘unleash the ties of geography’.¹ Smaller, cheaper, and more powerful personal devices, transmitting over high capacity wireless communications networks, would deliver the ability to work and live on the move to millions of people. According to Makimoto and his co-author David Manners, after ten thousand years of settled human existence, we would soon be faced with a simple question: do we stay put, or do we roam? Twenty-three years later, we are not living in a new age of migration. The proportion of the world’s population residing in a country outside their place of birth (three percent) has barely budged, despite six decades of unprecedented global integration through trade, investment, and information flows.²

What has spiked in the last two decades, however, is the number of highly skilled migrants, as well as the shorter-term and non-linear mobility patterns that have come to define this professional class. Despite online boosters hyping ‘geoarbitrage’ life hacks, and the ‘belong anywhere’ mantra of technology startups targeting a new group of itinerant professionals mixing work and travel, digital nomadism is also yet to go mainstream. But migratory lifestyles have seeped into the wider global culture. From social media fuelled romantic dreams of the open road (#vanlife), to the cold realities of twenty-first century labor markets (the growth of freelancing and ‘alternative work arrangements’), mobility is at once a perceived antidote to life in the rat race, and a non-negotiable demand imposed upon more and more workers hustling to stay afloat in the modern economy. ‘Roaming’ may offer an escape route, but it is also the cost of staying put.

What does this have to do with architecture and urbanism? In comparison to biological processes of bodily decay, our cities are built to endure. Yet contemporary life—and especially contemporary urban life—is shaped by the collision of large-scale economic, social, and technological forces: corporate desires for nimble workforces drawn from a global talent pool, the gig economy explosion of independent contracting, and the more generalized shift to remote work, enabled by the widespread adoption of digital workflow practices in knowledge and service-based industries. Even before Covid-19 transformed overnight the way we think about formal divisions between work and home, and the role of spatial proximity long understood to define what it means to be urban, our cities were already being remade by the migration of humans and capital, influencing everything from the financialisation of housing, to the reprogramming of the built environment through lean digital platforms like Airbnb.

Until the logistical feat of a worldwide coronavirus vaccine rollout enters an advanced stage, the open borders and free movement that furnished the invisible infrastructure of 21st century migration will remain frozen. But while the crisis conditions of 2020 can appear to have trapped us in an extended liminal state—we can no longer return to the world we left behind, and the exact contours of our ‘new normal’ have yet to come into sharp focus—the pandemic is accelerating shifts that will have profound spatial implications, with the possibility for parallel new approaches to emerge in the way we design, program, and experience cities. Much commentary has been devoted to the potential for Covid-19 to foster a new localism, as the ‘biggest working from home experiment in history’, together with the forced rediscovery of our immediate neighborhoods during lockdowns, is expected to lead to a revisiting of deadening commuter rituals and the received wisdom of centralized urban forms.

Yet once we are untethered completely from deep-rooted patterns of physical proximity, where do the new limits lie? Visions of a hyper-connected network of urban villages could be accommodated by everything from a garden city to mega city.³ But when corporations like Twitter and Microsoft announce that their employees need never work from an office again, we appear one step closer to the ‘permanent nomadism’ of Superstudio’s Supersurface, albeit absent that world’s radical liberation from labor and consumerism.⁴ Even as the shift to working from home has increased the agency of those with the capacity to benefit (while exposing the structural inequalities that have long constrained others), it has also revealed the extent to which countless jobs could be performed from anywhere with acoustic separation and high-speed internet. Researchers had begun to speak of ‘virtual labor migration’ as early as 2006—it is not a leap to suggest that the growth of this kind of labor mobility will exacerbate existing trends towards insecure work and the precarious lifestyles that accompany it.⁵

Pre-covid market-led housing typologies like co-living sought to capitalise on the emerging plug-and-play lifestyles of an unsettled generation. In their most luxurious form they represent an uneasy mash-up of decades-old Nordic co-housing ideas, traditional serviced apartments, and flexible short-stay accommodation. In their grimmer expressions, they can reflect a cynical zero-sum exercise in space versus yield. At the same time, projects like Andrés Jaque’s Rolling House for the Rolling Society have explored how many of the same forces that gave rise to co-living were already transforming the way shared domestic space is informally occupied and adapted, through the melding of online and offline architectures. As Jaque wrote a decade ago about the reality experienced by more than 80 million people across the European Union alone, single-family residences occupied by aggregates of unfamiliar individuals had already come to demarcate a society shaped by transience.⁶

Speculating on the future of work, researchers tend to focus on the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence on processes of automation. The ‘defensible space’ for humans is typically framed as jobs that require creativity or personal connection—from highly paid medical specialists, to low-wage workers in the service economy. Again, the pandemic has exposed the fragility in entire sectors like hospitality that are intrinsically linked to how we experience cities. This is not a question of building back stronger after a societal force majeure. The rise of online meal delivery services predated mandatory shutdowns. In the United States, ‘off premise’ restaurant spending had been expected to overtake ‘dine-in’ revenue in 2020 for the first time on record.⁷ The result has been the ‘logistification’ of urban food systems, spawning phenomena like ghost kitchens and virtual food courts, while hospitality staff cast adrift by restaurant closures are left to become frontline components in this on-demand infrastructure of seamless movement.⁸

One could argue that the ‘great pause’ of 2020 might ultimately be understood as triggering an even greater state of perpetual movement, defined by virtual and real labor migration in a despatialised economy, the precarious and contingent living arrangements that result, and the parallel hollowing out of ground-level urban spaces of sociality as our mediated retail and hospitality interactions are bookended by glowing touchscreens, real-time tracking, and contactless pickups. As evident in the earlier shift from the industrial to the post-industrial city though, the ruptures caused by wide-scale societal changes create opportunities—however fleeting—for new ideas, practices, and cultures to emerge. The task for architects in the post-pandemic environment is how best to contribute to holistic design responses that reassert the urban quality and collective values that continue to attract people to cities, and underpin our ability to address the deeper imperatives of escalating inequality and climate emergency.

Architecture alone is not the answer, especially when it elevates spatial conditions above all else. It is tempting to conclude that life on the move—whether literal or symbolic—demands mobile architecture, from fluidly modular or flexible interior spaces that optimize and economize, to updated hippie-era nomadic living units, which unlock a technology-enabled migratory urbanism at scale. But in the same way that Covid-19 has demonstrated how curbing lifestyles shaped by paradigms of infinite growth produces immediately tangible environmental benefits, understanding the physical form of our cities as the visible expression of a more complex ecology suggests that an enduring design challenge will be found in the need to reimagine a new life for vacant or partially-tenanted office buildings. The added layer in this challenge will be to do so in a way that ties the fate of such structures into a low-waste, zero-carbon urban future.

The pandemic is increasingly being discussed as a smaller crisis within the larger crisis of climate collapse. Perhaps fittingly, the last time the global population worked from home en masse was just prior to the introduction of wage labor in the bleak early factories of the Industrial Revolution. The broad sweep of history that followed—from cottage industry to the ‘electronic cottage’—is what brought us to this moment.⁹ The agglomeration effects of industrial capitalism (and subsequent modernist response to urban overcrowding and squalor) left an indelible mark on the design of cities that is still evident today. If we are to learn from this history, rather than respond myopically to the immediate problems of the present, we must harness our proven capacity to take collective action—the most heartening outcome of 2020—to support a form of strategic design that engages with the underlying drivers shaping our urban system.

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1. Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners, Digital Nomad (1997). 

2. World Bank, Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets (2018) 1. 

3. See Dan Hill, ‘From Lockdown to Slowdown: Tokyo as Slowdown City’, The Slowdown Papers (April 2020). 

4. Superstudio, Supersurface, first exhibited at Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (MoMA, 1972). 

5. See A. Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (2006).

6. Andrés Jaque, ‘Sheltering the Rolling Society: A Post-Typological Urbanism of Non-Familiar Shared Homes’, Volume (December 2015) 86. 

7. Derek Thompson, ‘The Booming, Ethically Dubious Business of Food Delivery', The Atlantic (August 2019). 

8. See Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics (2016). 

9. See Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (1980).