Richard Florida and his wife and children spent most of lockdown in their apartment on Miami Beach. When they returned home to Toronto, the city had changed. “When we left, you couldn’t get stuff readily delivered here,” he reports over Zoom. “I literally pressed the Instacart button five minutes before I connected to you . . . and [my order] will be here in half an hour.”
Florida is the urban theorist who coined the term “the creative class” and spotted its takeover of the world’s city centres. He’d barely thought about pandemics before, despite being born during the great flu outbreak of 1957 — his parents never mentioned it.
During lockdown, he read up on how pandemics change cities, and concluded that the effects were modest but real. New York, for instance, boomed after the 1918-19 flu. Florida rejects both the dystopian and utopian urban forecasts now being bandied around. He thinks cities will thrive post-coronavirus, but with younger populations than before, more housing and fewer offices and shops.