What will the post-work city look like?

This article is part of a series which investigates the future of work and what it means to cities.

Many see a 40 hour work-week, two-day weekend, a two-week annual vacation and a life in retirement after 65 as something their parents did but is now out of reach.  Off-time used to be defined by what it was not: work-time. People's identity was defined through their work. "What do you do?" meant work, not a personal interest or "what do you like to do?"

Coal miner: Work and rest

Much work was hard and taxing, a drudgery which required 8 hours of sleep to recover leaving barely enough time to organize the private life of eating, shopping raising children, or keeping up with the household. Age 65 was just about as long as such a schedule could be sustained. Having fun wasn't part of that schedule, nor was adventure, exploration, continued education or strenuous activity.

Such a binary world of strictly separated work and narrowly defined "leisure" is becoming quickly obsolete for most, even for workers that are still location-bound or work in an environment with a command-structure. For most the demarcation between work and leisure becomes fuzzier all the time; "leisure" has become more fine-grained and interspersed into the work schedule in smaller increments. Leisure now has its own set of demands from lifelong learning to staying fit. One could say work intrudes into leisure in many ways but leisure also intrudes into work. Witness the ping-pong tables and pinball machines at start-ups. Meanwhile leisure also has become more like work: Structured, organized and using the same tools, namely electronic devices.

Vacation: the absence of work

Many jobs, of course, have to be performed at a single location: a factory, a hospital, a supermarket, pub or wherever. The people who make these places function have to “go to work”. But gradually the proportion of tasks that can be done wherever there is a broadband connection is rising relative to those that are location based. (The Independent)

It's not only the much bemoaned electronic devices which blur the lines but the fast pace itself which doesn't allow to carve out those fully protected blocks of weekend, vacation and even retirement which need to be planned far in advance. This isn't bad for the lucky few for whom work is stimulating, diverse and represents their interest and "vocation" instead of the need to make a living. But it is also increasingly the mode of life for folks that hate their work and have to sprinkle bits of fun into any part of their work-week, before, after or in between work.

Leisure and work now frequently fall into the same geographic space, certainly that is the city, sometimes the home or the office. No longer do people routinely flee the city on weekends for the beach or the mountains or in the summer for a road trip to another place. If trips happen, they often have another city as a destination. All this puts the city on a path to being a perpetual playground.

• The further back breaking labor has moved into a distant past for most, the more physical activity has become an attraction for leisure time.
• Free time is no longer the fruit of the struggles of the labor movement but it is what productivity consultants advise.
• Increasingly people chose their home by the "lifestyle" choices they are offered rather than strictly the jobs that are available and not by their profession but by their interest
• In the new work-play lifestyle entertainment plays a dominant role 
• Cities become lifestyle centers, less defined by production, work and distribution than by entertainment and the play quality of their setting

Downtown Baltimore in the 1950s

Urban expressions of those shifts are ever bigger, more elaborate and more numerous museums, concert halls, sports arenas and convention centers; the proliferation of ethnic restaurants, brew-pubs, food-halls, boutique hotels, and festivals of all kinds. Trails, marathons courses, sailing schools, climbing and wildwater rafting are no longer the domain of the open landscape but have their urban representation, often indoors, sometimes in re-purposed industrial facilities. When it comes to providing "lifestyle experience" the list is of possibilities is endless and outdoor are often moved right into the middle of cities by uncovering urban streams, creating green-ways, linear parks or even city beaches changing the appearance and functionality of the city in the process. Urban festivals are perfect destination for the new fun culture that can be injected into the schedule with a day-trip here and there. Jetting to them, conventions, concerts or just a day at the beach, sometimes all across the continent, has become common for those with the needed discretionary dollars

South by Southwest may have defined Austin as a destination more than that the Dell headquarters which are also located there. Similarly Nashville's recent boom is driven by its reputation as a music city. San Diego is no longer just a Navy base or biotech center but a lifestyle magnet for its beaches, surfing and hang-gliding opportunities. Denver may have once thrived because of its military installations but it wouldn't be the fastest growing city in America without the Rockies, skiing and the active lifestyle that has made Colorado the healthiest state in the nation.

South by Southwest: Austin party-town

Established old legacy cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Baltimore or Cleveland are in danger of being perceived as places of industrial grime, cold weather, grayness and dour attitudes, unless they enter a race with the sunbelt cities to prove otherwise. Often legacy cities use their established educational institutions as a springboard for innovation and branding. "Pittsburgh instead of Paris" doesn't mean any longer steel versus "high culture" in a time when Pittsburgh sports a green convention center and is fueled by foundations and universities doing future research for things such as the self driving car.  Can such a race against sunbelt cities benefit the less educated populations still reeling from sudden and massive de-industrialization?

Industrial societies show deep fissures from those shifts in how work and leisure are now organized, fissures that are not only are visible in the former industrial cities of what used to be the rust-belt. While the fun-culture of the thriving cities in the sunbelt seems pervasive and effortless, the high cost of living, the orientation on tourists, day visitors and millennials cause serious friction nevertheless, even if high cost is offset by high salaries and job choices to some extent. In cities like Baltimore where poverty levels seem to be cemented above the 20% mark and many neighborhoods are highly segregated racial tension runs high while population and tax base continue to shrink.

Disinvested neighborhood: Sandtown in Baltimore

These conflicts are easily confused with the class struggles of the old relatively static industrial society. But the bike-sharing, Uber-hopping, latte-sipping millennials that draw so much scorn from civil rights and labor activists are not the new ruling class. Subjected to what has been named the gig economy, they are frequently in positions without any power, without the support of organized labor and with little else than their education standing between them and a jobless laborer. Their fun-loving lifestyle may make them look like first cousins of the bourgeois leisure class of old,  an Old World phenomenon from a time before work became the only ethic, something that barely ever took hold in the New World. This is why Richard Florida's term "the creative class" is so terribly misleading and unfortunate. (a quick aside looping back to my recent article on Richard Florida)

Instead those young people could be seen as the guinea pigs of a new work-order in which nothing is what it used to be, especially not the division between work and leisure. Given how drastic technology will upset any hope for a life-long job or profession even for those with a college degree, the experiments in testing how life can be enjoyable with less money sunk into costly assets such as houses or big cars appear to be potentially useful for all. Creating and engaging in what is called the sharing economy should be welcome, even though it currently can't be scaled up yet to work for everybody, especially those already left behind by shrinking industrial employment.

The beach in the city: Paris Plages

The gig economy for services, the maker movement, and the creatives making a living with entertainment should be seen as proof of concept experiments that test out new ways of making a living with what one likes and with methods that don't require the huge capital of past industrial production , a fact that kept the class of capitalists rather small.

There is plenty critique of the suggestion that these neo-liberal ideas of mass entrepreneurship would solve the modern urban crisis of sharply divided assets and ethnicities.

Still, there are promising elements: The lower entry threshold into making and creating for example, even if it isn't an open door for the masses, at least not yet. Being one's own boss works best for people with modest expenses and low needs that have a good education. It works much less for those who have to care for small children or elderly loved ones or have little education or are not tech savvy.

Taking care of each other, though, will most likely be one of the activities with pretty good resiliency against automation and technology. How the cost for caring can be carried or how many can be employed with a decent income remains an open issue in many countries and has to do how the respective social security, medicare and health insurance systems can be sustainably organized.

How much work will be eliminated by automated processes, robots and artificial intelligence instead of human work, is also a matter of dispute, predictions vary widely. Depending on the prediction, the role of leisure and the shape of cities would vary equally widely. A related question is how could people sustain themselves?

If much value will be created without human labor it matters even more how such value will be accrued. It is not only moral but also economically logical to assume that the created value cannot simply land in the pockets of those who own the robots. For a prospering economy such created value needs to be distributed, a point even conservatives occasionally agree as one can see in the debate about the universal basic income. It is one of the ways to distribute value created without human labor and has been bandied around for decades, most recently by Mark Zuckerberg at a Harvard commencement speech. The idea has been recommended and condemned by folks on the left and the right. Finland is preparing a proof of concept on a small scale, a bigger scale implementation was rejected in a recent referendum in Switzerland.  No matter where one stands on this, universal basic income is pretty much the only concept out there that addresses a post-work society.

Urban development used to be entirely defined by how work, production and transport was organized. Cities were primarily places of commerce and exchange. The first shift from industrial production to service industry brought urban centers to the fore which consisted mostly of offices, many in the south and west of the United States such as Charlotte, Miami, Austin or Phoenix.

waterfront promenade: Back River Boston

The second shift in which the city becomes a place of experience, discovery, adventure and active lifestyle combined with innovative, smaller and cleaner forms of making is still emerging. Much of how this will shape up isn't yet predictable, but it is obvious that cities are already reshaping their image and present themselves in new way.

The possibility that cities become large playgrounds has met much criticism, from possible loss of identity, authenticity to the laments about corporate power, displacement and gentrification. That those fears are justified can be observed in San Francisco, Boston or DC. But fear shouldn't be the driver of urban planning.

Visit almost any larger US city today and it will look cleaner, more attractive and livelier than 25 or 30 years ago when suburbia was thriving. Cities were never that livable before, not even in the 50ties when legacy cities boomed but were mostly grimy and gloomy, whether one looked at Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Diego or Los Angeles. Just remember the burning rivers.

Spaces adjusting for leisure and fun don't have to be elitist or exclusionary, not overseas nor in the US. No matter how much those glitzy innovations are ridiculed by those decrying the very real and deplorable state of American urban ghettos, the transformation of traditionally stodgy and unhealthy urban spaces into entirely new forms of landscape architecture and design, new parks like the New York Highline, Chicago's Millennium Park or Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park has redefined park design, even if they are not yet fully democratized. The rejuvenation of legacy parks through new activities in Central Park (Manhattan), Prospect Park (Brooklyn), Druid Park (Baltimore) City Park (Denver) or Rock Creek Park (DC) serves broad parts of society and cannot be dismissed as elitist.

HarborPlace Baltimore

Baltimore has set a benchmark for urban entertainment with HarborPlace, the redevelopment of its Inner Harbor, a model copied from New York's South Street Seaport to Sidney. The place is overrun with tourists and avoided by many natives for its many chain establishments and  the lack of authenticity. Like San Francisco's Embarcadero or Chicago's Navy Pier it has become an example of poor programming, the dominance of national chains and of what to avoid.

But the 5 mile public promenade ringing Baltimore's Inner Harbor, Chicago's Riverwalk and experiments like a 4 acre pop-up park with Bocci courts and sandy beaches that will open this week on a former brownfield at Baltimore's Inner Harbor can serve everybody. Everything needs to be done that these installations allow free and easy access and don't fall into the private domain.

A passive open space at Baltimore's Inner Harbor has become popular for beach volley ball played by locals of the surrounding neighborhoods but is seen as a playground for hipsters. When Rash Field, where the sand court is located, gets redesigned, there is no reason why it shouldn't also accommodate the basket ball courts that are currently crammed away into a small lot across the street, a symbol of how designers can become complicit in systemic design of exclusion.

adult hopscotch in new Baltimore park

The utility of farmers markets and indoor public markets to combat food deserts is obvious. That they have made a comeback in many cities and are the model for the current wave of hipster food halls shouldn't make them less desirable. 

Complete streets with bike corridors and wide sidewalks have not only made public streets interesting places again, but are important elements of community health and safety.

Copenhagen's Gehl architects and others have refined the pop-up approach to low cost take-overs of neglected space. San Francisco born Park-ing  Day is an funcase of temporary conversion not lasting longer than a fruit fly but imitated nationwide. From it came event spaces like Paris Plages (downtown beaches on the river Seine) which have found imitators around the world. All this is humanizing the city and has found its own design term ("place-making").

The low cost quick pace approach of "pop-up" or "tactical urbanism"  has frequently empowered people to get what they need quickly or even stand up to development interest: When Berlin tried to redevelop its nearly 1000 acre abandoned airfield of Tempelhof it was rebuked by its citizens. Since then the since 2008 closed airfield  has become a huge playground of sorts with people flying kites, picnicking or sunning on the grass fields and riding bikes, skateboards and other devices on the miles of runways. A hangar has become the temporary home for thousands of refugees. Tempelhof isn't just for the well-to-do.

Baltimore fissures

The melting demarcation between work and play is also visible at traditional events such as conventions. Baltimore's largest convention wasn't some professional gathering with speaker after speaker providing continuing education and participants networking on the dime of their employers as part of work. Instead it was Otakon, a "celebration of Asian pop culture" that is hard to understand for anybody who is not an insider and as far from a professional convention as a bar crawl is from solving the New York times crossword puzzle or an old East Baltimore corner bar serving $2 Natty Boh is from a brew-pub with $8 craft beers. In other words, Otakon is in its own way a democratic "convention". Baltimore's largest urban festival is Artscape with hundreds of thousands of residents and visitors braving sweltering summer heat to experience it. It is by all accounts a pretty diverse and inclusive affair even though art had long been considered a luxury.

Clean local making: Under Armour shoe

Legacy cities are well advised to take advantage of those who seek out the old industrial centers for their affordability, authenticity and their tradition of making that is still so much part of their fabric. Legacy cities have a chance to become catalysts for overcoming the old divisions of class and race.

It is entirely possible that the legacy city provide better for its residentscan in the long run, for, it is more compact, sustainable and economical, has older institutions and a more diverse population with broader cultural roots and a longer history from which to learn than most currently booming sunbelt cities.

Artscape: Tennis in the street

The legacy city is already ground zero for the immediate  and urgent task of overcoming the persistent concept of supremacy, institutional racism, design of exclusion and social injustice that plague this entire nation.

It is probably no coincidence that these issues have been recently tackled in the most head-on and courageous manner in New Orleans, a legacy city in its own league: First in its struggles of rebuilding after Katrina and now in taking on Confederate monuments. Both have changed the conversation across the nation. Changing post-industrial life without a clear binary of work and leisure by making a better and juster city will take time, but it must be done. New Orleans has always shown how art, music and fun can be an integral part of urban life.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
the article was edited for various language and clarity issues Saturday 6/3/17 noon.

See also on this blog: Making Stuff in the Postindustrial World (June 2015)
Pew Scenario 8: The future of the Internet (2008)