In the first of four reports in Local Logic’s Future of Cities series, we look at the myth of the urban exodus during the pandemic and how city centres can get creative by levelling up to become 18-hour or 24-hour cities.

“On successful city streets, people must appear at different times.”

Urban theorist Jane Jacobs understood the many nuances to deeply livable cities, such as how energetic neighborhoods require diversity of use and function, why investing in public transit reduces traffic and promotes neighborhood activity, and how “flexible and gradual change” is almost always preferable to heavy-handed broad-stroke redevelopment.

What would Jacobs theorize about pandemic-stricken urban centres and the many challenges cities face in the coming months and years? She may wonder how to bring about that gradual change via intentional strategies that recapture the attractive characteristics of major cities, even as we make hard decisions on how to repurpose real estate for new applications designed to invigorate those areas.

Bridging the gap with the 18-hour city

Out of the ashes of pandemic-ravaged cities left empty by dusty office towers and restaurants resorting to curbside pickup could be the rise of the 18-hour city, a more tangible direction for some mid-size cities to progress towards. After all, 24-hour cities are rare—how many city centers could really elevate to the level of a London or NYC?

Example: The evolution of the Kitchener-Waterloo area in Ontario

Take the evolution of the Kitchener-Waterloo area in Ontario, which for decades was known as a quaint college town. But when major technology brands such as Research in Motion headquartered in the region, young engineers and labourers clamoured to the hotspot.

Despite RIM’s downturn over the year, the KW area is still relying on its technological backbone to carry it through into the 2020s. In November, Kitchener City Council approved a plan to allocate $8.5 million toward the University of Waterloo’s $35-million Innovation Arena, a cutting-edge research and development hub meant to churn out products to facilitate the digital transformation of Canada’s health system, as the Logic reports.

And turning south, Columbus, OH, is another 18-hour city that won such acclaim due to several factors: home to more than five Fortune 500 companies, a growing downtown population, and it “benefits from its ability to reach a large number of people by truck in a day, which helps to fuel demand for industrial distribution space in an era of rising e-commerce sales,” as Crowdstreet writes.

What helps all these 18-hour cities is establishing an identity and culture that sets them apart from lower-tier cities and shines a spotlight on how affordable and “up and coming” they are compared to 24-hour cities, such as London and NYC. That identity could be based on amenities (look at Las Vegas), the innovative companies appealing to young entrepreneurs (San Francisco, Kitchener-Waterloo) or its position as a capital and the jobs such a city attracts (Ottawa).

What about entertainment spaces?

Another creative direction for building owners to head towards could be repurposing office space that is often dark post-6 p.m. so certain floors could cater to crowds looking for, say, music or comedy stages. It won’t work for every office plan of course, but the right specs could be tweaked to usher in a new use for a building that could be beneficial for, say, 18 hours in total.

Today, however, tenants are hedging their bets by taking short-term leases on office space, Bloomberg notes, and quotes Frank Magliocco, national real estate leader at PwC Canada on how he expects a structural change in the way commercial real estate is addressed. “Employers are going to take a hard look at their offices and ask themselves what role that space should serve going forward,” he says.

Those 18-hour cities mentioned earlier could be the eye-catching opportunity for investors and residents who want to pass over the round-the-clock urban hubs of London and New York.

Over the years, the momentum these cities have accrued is gaining steam. “We’ve seen people move from those larger denser urban cities and move into secondary and tertiary cities that are more spread out and affordable and still provide the lifestyle people are looking for, such as Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte and Nashville.” Maffey says.

In 2019, Julia Georgules, Director of Research-Office, JLL, noted how 18-hour cities have strong development potential and “less competition among businesses for prime space and lower costs than the traditional, dominant U.S. cities such as New York, Chicago and Boston. For companies priced out of primary markets, these cities are becoming increasingly attractive, as reflected by rising rents and falling occupancy rates.”

Fast-forward two years and those remarks still hold true, even if rents have dipped somewhat due to the pandemic (but they’re expected to self-correct as vaccines roll out and the pandemic, hopefully, recedes as the year progresses). But it won’t happen overnight or with little foresight; city managers and urban planners have to be savvy in how they leverage areas such as public spaces in light of the pandemic’s many rotating lockdowns spotlighting their value to citizens.

Maffey points out the “real opportunity for cities is to invest in public placemaking in those public spaces and invest in the infrastructure of those spaces. For reasons other than leisure, these public spaces can be used when we consider how workers can move through them, especially as remote working offers people more flexibility on how and where they work. It could make sense to view some of these places as areas where people can meet for work, for example.”