Remote Work And The Future Of Cities

The Great Remote Working Experiment gives us a glimpse into the future of our cities.

- Poon King Wang

As many workers worldwide work from home, a popular prediction is our cities will shrink. It takes little to imagine this – just look at the half-empty offices, and the shuttered retailers and restaurants.

While this prediction seems self-evident, it also seems to miss recent and historical lessons of the nexus between city, work, and technology.

When we consider them, we find two different trajectories.

The first is our future will revert to the past.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)’s recent experience is the perfect example of why.

The NYSE still uses a trading floor where traders buy and sell in person. When the pandemic hit, they closed the trading floor for two months. Floor traders were forced to work remotely and trade fully electronically.

The Washington Post and Financial Times report that during this time, performance suffered. Traders set more ‘wrong’ and ‘worse’ prices. This was because in a fully remote and electronic system, buyers and sellers set prices independently, and the system searches for a match to execute the trade. Each buyer cannot see how many sellers want to sell to him at the price he set. Similarly, each seller cannot see how many buyers want to buy from her at the price she set. The cumulative effect is traders tend to over-price or underprice.