Abstract

This paper, written in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, observes the changes it has brought in order to discuss to what extent the effects of the pandemic are likely to affect cities over the long term. It will be argued that some of the phenomena that are commonly claimed as consequences of COVID-19, such as e-commerce, remote working and recent residential preferences, actually have been in place for years, just patently revealed or accelerated by the pandemic; which is not the forge of new processes, but rather the breeding ground where their signals become empirical evidence.