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Charles Montgomery is the Vancouver-based author of Happy City, a book that looks at how urban design meshes with the wellbeing of inhabitants of dense cities around the world.

He is on the opposing end of the work-at-home panacea. He doesn’t like it.

“What’s striking to me is, many more people glamourized the idea of working at home before the pandemic than are doing so now,” he says.

“I work with a team of 10 and we miss each other terribly. We are less productive, and more anxious and more prone to conflict now, than when we were able to work face-to-face.”

It may well be true that we should be decentralizing the core of large cities, he said. (The cost of housing, of downtown office space, the pressure on transit, may well be doing this for us.) Then why not more “complete neighbourhoods,” where residents can live, work and shop within a 15-minute walk?

Montgomery says economies that are growing these days are ultimately in the “idea business,” whether in technology or different types of media. And ideas, he said, can pop up in interactions that are serendipitous.

“Ideas come, often by accident, and frequently through light, social encounters with others.”

This is why high-tech workplaces, commonly, are more like clubhouses, rather than cubicle farms, he said. “Above all, the workplace is a social venue.”

He says he actually feels a physical chest pain from a combination of “digital overload,” isolation and Zoom fatigue. “The more time we connect with others online, the more distant we all seem, even when we’re talking to each other.”

Interesting insight.

I think we know this already, though. There are many smaller companies, service providers or associations that have expensive office space and are feeling a triple-whammy right now — revenue down, rent due, staff cobbling it together from home.

So, when the storm passes, the experiment ended, is it time for smaller, cheaper, more flexible work digs?

To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-291-6265 or email kegan@postmedia.com

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