Dror’s Substack | Substack

The same thing will now happen to cities. A lot of the old dimensions have become "good enough" — you can access a decent job, get Amazon deliveries, have your artisanal coffee, give your kids good education.... in so many different places, easily.

And the "who else" can now be isolated. I don't need to live in a city of 8 million people in order to be close to 5,000-50,000 cool/smart/specialized people that are relevant for me and my work. It is now possible for all of us to live in a much smaller town, enjoy each other, and have access to enough big-city-caliber services to be happy and pro... See more

All these things are no longer "deal breakers", even if differences in quality persist between cities. The real differentiation then shifts to other dimensions of the "product": How walkable it is? How beneficial is the tax system? Who else is there?

What's interesting in the current moment, with the internet truly giving talent a CHOICE, is that cities will become more important because — working from home makes it even more necessary and fun to live in a relatively dense area.

My humbler assertion is that 2020 has punctured my confidence that the internet cannot encroach on the benefits of urban density and proximity. Going forward, many fledgling companies may agree, as they find that the city in the cloud essentially acts as a more accessible version of the city on the Earth, eerily reproducing its forces of agglomerat... See more

A building’s location is becoming less important and insufficient to define and defend its value. Humans can work remotely and many choose to do so, at least some of the time.