To move forward, do we have to start over?
Indonesia's innovative new capital, reinventing downtowns, and how remote work is changing American cities.
Topics:
Building sustainable cities
Placemaking in urban cores
Imagine if your neighborhood was sinking. That’s what’s happening in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia and home to more than 30 million people. The island nation's bold plan to design and build a new walkable, tech-forward, and sustainable capital from scratch could be interpreted as a promising sign or a bad omen of how our cities will combat the ravages of climate change.
Change always comes with a cost, and the hardest hit are often those without resources. How will Jakarta’s poor relocate? What happens to the city once so many of its buildings lie empty and unused?
These are hard questions to answer. They echo, on a much grander scale, the dilemma of what to do with our own cities. Some have suggested that reshaping our urban cores requires us to first tear them down, but how do we deal with the fallout?
We’re faced with tackling a glut of unused office buildings as remote work soars in popularity. NYC office space alone is expected to lose 44% of its pre-pandemic value by 2029, for example, with occupancy growth seeming to stall at around 50%.
That level of vacancy is difficult for our downtowns—which were largely designed with on-site work in mind—to deal with on such short notice. It does, however, provide developers with a great opportunity to address the ongoing housing crisis by converting some of that underutilized office space into multifamily…
… but first we have to lure rent-weary workers back into the city.
- John
