Can cities survive without offices? From London to Milan: mix-used neighborhoods and the compact-living principle might be good solutions

The skyline of the city becomes the mirror of a dead, unreal calm; the abandoned skyscrapers of the City, illusions of an avant-garde future that has crystallized; the deserted bridges and squares, the tree-lined avenues populated only by a few solitary cyclists; the mega screens of Piccadilly Circus that continue with their succession of images, colours and claims for a ghost audience. 

There's also another trend highlighted by the pandemic, that of micro-economies within the city. The principle of compact living became crucial precisely in the months of the pandemic, and should also remain crucial in the design of the cities of the future, not only because it is a sustainable practice in every sense, but because it allows every neighbourhood and every area to forming microcosms in which each inhabitant is "self-sufficient". In the hardest months of the lockdown, it has become clear how each neighbourhood must be able to offer everything the citizen needs, and it is therefore equally clear why the large conglomerates of offices and studios have become ghost towns, and why they risk remaining so for a long time. A clear division of spaces, both from the physical point of view, but above all from the point of view of function, is no longer a winning model for many cities. To avoid apocalyptic escapes to smaller and more human-sized locations, larger cities must be rethought, focusing above all on multifunctional districts and for these practical ones, close to the everyday life of the citizen. 

As already happened in other sectors and areas, the pandemic offers the opportunity to relaunch a vision for the future broken by the health emergency, but that has the possibility of being rewritten in the light of this new normal.