CHAPTER SIXTEEN
People, Work, and the Future of the City
IN 20 YEARS JAPANESE office workers may still commute, packed shoulder to shoulder, to downtown towers. But no one else in the developed world will. Office work, rather than office workers, will do the traveling. Tomorrow’s big city is no longer going to be the office center.
The exodus is already under way. Citibank handles credit cards in North Dakota, clears checks in upstate New York and Delaware, and is moving data processing across the Hudson to suburban New Jersey. A large Boston-based mutual-fund group, Colonial Management Associates, has moved nationwide customer service and customer accounting to a Denver suburb. Insurance companies are rapidly shifting their labor-intensive work—claims handling, customer correspondence, record keeping—to the outskirts of metropolitan areas. And office parks especially built for back-office operations are now springing up in the suburbs as fast as shopping malls sprang up there in the ’60s and ’70s.
Acquiring Wheels
The modern big city is the creation of the nineteenth century’s ability to move people. Everyone in Dickens’s London walked to work except the owners, who lived over their shops or their countinghouses. But then, beginning in mid-century, people began to acquire wheels—the railroad first, then the omnibus and the streetcar (horse-drawn, of course, for many decades), the subway and the elevated train, the automobile, the bicycle. Suddenly large masses of people could move over great distances to where the work was. And the elevator added vertical mobility. It was this ability to move people that, more than anything else, made possible large organizations, businesses, hospitals, government agencies, and universities.
By 1914, every single one of the means to move people into an office-centered large city—and to enable the office workers to live outside it—had been developed. But they did not have their full impact until after World War II. Until then only two cities had skyscrapers—New York and Chicago. Now every mid-sized city worldwide boasts a “skyline.” And even in mid-sized cities people commute.
This trend has clearly reached its end, has indeed widely overshot the mark. Tokyo’s office workers have to live more than two hours away just to get a seat on the morning train. In Los Angeles, traffic at six every weekday morning is bumper to bumper in all directions—people trying to get to their desks by 8:30 or 9. Things are not much better in Boston or New York or Philadelphia. London’s Piccadilly Circus is chaos 24 hours a day, and so are those marvels of nineteenth-century city planning, the Grands Boulevards of Paris. Rome and Madrid are worse still.
Office workers in the world’s big cities do not have eight-hour days; they have 12-hour days. And all attempts in the past 30 years to relieve the traffic jams and their frustrations through new public transit have been total failures despite countless billions spent on them.
Yet none of this is necessary any more; indeed, commuting to office work is obsolete. It is now infinitely easier, cheaper and faster to do what the nineteenth century could not do: move information, and with it office work, to where the people are. The tools to do so are already here: the telephone, two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, the modem, and so on. And so is the receptivity: witness, for example, the boom in fax machines in the past 18 months.
We already know how office work will be done in the future. Contrary to what futurists predicted 25 years ago, the trend is not toward individuals working in their homes. People greatly prefer to work where other people are. But even in Japan—where the need for community and companionship at work is greater than in the West—the exodus of such clerical work as data processing from downtown has begun.
But, equally important, clerical work increasingly will become “uncoupled,” the way much physical office work—cleaning, maintaining equipment, running the cafeteria—already has been. Rather than being employees of the institution whose office work they do, more and more clerical workers will be employed by specialized and independent contractors. A growing amount of such work already is being done by people hired, trained, placed, and paid by temporary-help firms—with more and more of the “temporaries” actually holding down full-time, permanent assignments in the client companies. A good many of the new type of office parks provide a trained clerical force and the supervision for it. They provide office work rather than office space. And, according to some reports, that is where the demand is.
Office workers doing clerical and maintenance work are the largest single work group in the developed world’s big cities—accounting for as much as half the working population. What, then, will the city of tomorrow look like when it is no longer an “office city”? It will, one can safely say, be a “headquarters city.”
Twenty-five years ago a number of large U.S. companies—General Foods, IBM, General Electric—moved out of Manhattan and into suburbia, lock, stock, and barrel. At that time we did not know that we could move information. Thus, to free office workers from the need to commute, companies isolated top management people and professionals and imposed on them constant traveling into the city for business meetings.
Big companies tomorrow are almost certain to keep their management people—at least their senior ones—where other senior management people are: in the city. And so will government agencies and other large organizations. But this means that the big city will also house the purveyors of specialized skills and knowledge—the lawyer, the accounting firm, the architect, the consultant, the advertising agency, the investment banker, the financial analyst, and so on. But even these people will have their office work done outside the city.
A very big law firm is completing plans to have only one law library, in one suburban location. It will serve all 10 of its offices in the U.S. and overseas through a computer network supplemented by fax machines and two-way video. Within two or three years the firm expects to vacate all the space now occupied by the current 10 libraries—two floors each in every location.
We may be at the very end of the tremendous boom in office construction and office rents that was triggered when Napoleon III created the modern city’s prototype in 1860 Paris and which has reached such a frenzy in all major Free World cities these past 20 years. (I, for one, am perfectly reconciled to the Japanese buying up more and more of the large office buildings in downtown America.) The big city of tomorrow is far more likely to resemble the preindustrial city than the nineteenth-century city that still shapes today’s New York or Paris.
But will even those who work in the urban headquarters live in the cities? Where will the largest number of them—managers and professionals in particular—make their homes?
In continental Europe, where middle managers and professionals still tend to live in the city, the shift from office city to headquarters city may well prevent their moving out. But it is doubtful that the exodus to the suburbs will be reversed or even greatly slowed in the U.S., in Britain, or in Japan, where middle-class people with children have already moved out of the core cities. And surely the headquarters city will have even less work for the poor and unskilled than the office city has. This will be a particular problem in the U.S., where welfare payments have drawn so many of the least-skilled and least-schooled into the inner-city jungle.
What will the tax base of the headquarters city be, and can it remain a commercial center? Luxury shops do not depend on the office worker. But most other shops in the city do, especially department stores, and only in Japan do people not working in the city regularly come in to shop there. What about restaurants and hotels? Will theaters and opera houses become transmitters of shows through videotape and cable TV rather than places people go to? Will the big-city hospital become a center of teaching, of information, and of diagnosis for the suburban and exurban hospitals where the patients will be?
A Lecture to 10,000
And what about the large university? The costs of higher education in all developed countries are nearly as out of control as the costs of health care. The only way, perhaps, to cap them may be to convert the university into a place from which learning flows to where the students are—something already done by the successful Open University in Britain.
Several times a year I lecture to 10,000 or more students, yet fewer than 100 are in the room with me. The rest see me via satellite in more than 100 “downlinks” and discuss their questions with me via telephone.
There is a great deal said and written these days about the technological impacts of information. But perhaps its social impacts are greater still, and more important.
[1989]