Everything Is Cancelled Except the Future

Sweatpants Are the New Pantalons

Who needs office buildings in a world dominated by video meetings? Or perfume? Or pants? A few years ago, a fraction of employees worked remotely at least some of the time. Look where we are now. Remote working is here for the long haul, the end of the big downtown office is near. The city as we know it becomes more and more decentralised. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, for instance, sees COVID-19 as the ultimate opportunity to turn the French capital into a 15-Minute City, in which everything citizens need can be reached within 15 minutes. Remote working will play a pivotal role in the creation of new communities at the neighbourhood level.

Rethinking Hospitality After COVID-19

Public venues are where ideas come to life, where love blooms, and where we taste things we never tasted before. Many bars, restaurants, and hotels were already facing serious challenges prior to COVID-19. Most venues had adopted a monofunctional, one-size-fits-all approach for too long, resulting in great overcapacity in off-peak hours. At the same time, many workers experience a lack of cost-effective alternatives to working from home or in a centralised office. In this context, the pandemic is the ultimate opportunity to rethink urban space as a whole.

Tomorrow’s Urban Space Will Be Hybrid

We believe that urban space will become increasingly elastic, hybrid, and multifunctional. The remote workspaces of tomorrow will appear as ‘bubbles’ integrated into already-existing, multifunctional urban spaces — inside retail stores, restaurants, bars, gyms, and hotels. We created this report to explore what this future holds for remote workers, for the hospitality industry, and for the cities we live in.