by Andrew Laing PhDLaing re-examines the trends he identified in 2014 towards dense, collaborative technology-enabled urban workplaces or ‘work-scapes’. 
He argues that the post-pandemic workplace will reinforce those pre-existing trends but will, nevertheless, result in stronger preferences for certain kind of building types and urban areas. Four scales of impacts are explored: the shift to home working; changes to the office workplace; changes to building types; and the evolution of the urban ‘work-scape’. 
Cities will continue to provide unmatched value as workplaces but our ways of working and living in them will be different.

In my 2014 Work&Place article[i] , ‘The emerging workplace is urban’, I argued that the scale of the workplace was shifting to be urban; that our focus should no longer be on the office but on the city at large. I also argued then that our focus should not only be on the older form of bricks and mortar urbanism, but on the new kind of physical city that is imbued with information and connectivity, a powerful combination of the physical and the digital.
Is that shift to an urban ‘work-scape’ likely to continue? Or, in a COVID-19 world, or even in a post-COVID-19 world, if we dare to imagine it, do our concepts of work, workplace, technology and the city need to be re-imagined yet again?
To get a sense of where we might be going, I’ve looked mostly at articles in the press during the pandemic.  In this speculative update to the 2014 article, I argue that the directions of change identified back then are still largely in place; they are even likely to be intensified as a result of our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the logic of how this will play out is not straightforward; there are significant counter-vailing tendencies.
During the pandemic, people have indeed pulled away from cities, out of necessity, avoiding high density, physical collaboration and shared spaces. But, in the longer term, these countervailing tendencies will be overcome by the continued, attractive centripetal pull of cities that provide an unmatched value for working.
Nevertheless, the ways we work in cities, and the quantities and kinds of spaces and buildings that we occupy, will be radically different than in the recent past. Certain kinds of urban areas and building types seem likely to perform better than others.
In 2014, the direction of change seemed to be towards what I called ‘collaborative urban work-scapes’

Urban workplaces / workspaces that are hybrid, mixed use, connected and permeable – the opposite of twentieth-century Modernist ideas of strict segregation and zoning of activities in monolithic single-use buildings and areas.
More flexible and dynamic ways of procuring, obtaining, and using space facilitated by information technology – ways that challenge the traditional supply and demand economy of office real estate.
Continued evolution of mobile patterns of working and using technology.

The idea of an urban scale to the workplace was driven by the recognition that work was no longer contained within the confines of the ‘office’ prescribed by the iron rules of the old ‘clockwork’ city of centralized commuting. Single-use office buildings were being replaced by fluid and diverse modes of accommodating how and where work takes place.

The ‘clockwork’ city of centralized commuting and single-use office buildings was being replaced by fluid and diverse modes of accommodating how and where work takes place.

Yet, even as work has become dispersed, certain kinds of dense urban areas will continue to be the key places where people want to work and live, attracted to the volume, vibrancy, diversity, and range of activities, talent, and amenities available only in cities….