By Futurist Thomas Frey

Cities exist partly because people historically needed to cluster around jobs, stores, schools, hospitals, entertainment, and transportation. If those functions become mobile, autonomous, virtual, distributed, or delivered to us, we may have to rethink what a city is actually for.

For roughly six thousand years, the basic pitch of a city has stayed remarkably consistent: come here, and you’ll find everything you need within walking, riding, or driving distance. Jobs. Food. Doctors. Schools. Entertainment. Strangers who might become friends, business partners, or spouses. Cities were, in the most literal sense, bundles — a single geographic subscription that gave you access to dozens of essential services at once.

I’ve spent my career tracking technologies that unbundle things that used to come packaged together. Cable television unbundled into streaming apps. Newspapers unbundled into individual articles shared on social feeds. Banking is slowly unbundling into a dozen specialized fintech apps that each do one thing better than a traditional bank ever did. Now, for the first time in human history, the city itself is starting to unbundle — and almost nobody is prepared for what that means.

The Original Bundle

To understand what’s being undone, it helps to remember why the bundle existed in the first place. Economists call it agglomeration — the simple but powerful idea that when people and businesses cluster together, everyone benefits from shared infrastructure, easier collaboration, and the random collisions of talent that spark new ideas. A programmer bumps into a designer at a coffee shop. A supplier locates near its biggest customer to cut shipping costs. A hospital attracts specialists, who attract medical students, who attract researchers, who attract biotech startups. For thousands of years, there was simply no way to get these benefits without also getting the traffic, the rent, and the noise.

Richard Florida, the urban theorist, and his collaborators have described what’s replacing this old bundle as the rise of the “Meta City” — a version of urban life that adds digital connectivity on top of physical clustering, letting a city’s economic reach stretch far beyond its actual borders. As Florida and his co-authors put it, the places where we work and the places where we live have essentially become unbundled, with remote work alone tripling in America in just two years around the pandemic. That’s not a temporary blip. It’s the first visible crack in a six-thousand-year-old package deal.

Work Leaves First, Everything Else Follows

Work was the first major piece of the city bundle to come loose, and it’s still the most visible. Office vacancy rates in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have climbed past 30% and 22% respectively — genuinely historic highs that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But the deeper story isn’t the empty office towers themselves. It’s what those empty towers reveal: an enormous number of people discovered they didn’t actually need to be physically present in a city to do the economic activity that used to require it.

Once work unbundles from place, everything built around commuting patterns starts to wobble too. Downtown lunch spots that depended on office foot traffic struggle. Transit systems designed around a predictable 9-to-5 rush hour see ridership fragment into unpredictable patterns throughout the day. Some urban economists have coined a grim term for what happens next: the “urban doom loop,” where declining office occupancy shrinks the local business base, which shrinks tax revenue, which forces service cuts, which pushes out more residents and businesses, accelerating the very decline that started it. It’s the bundle unraveling one thread at a time, and each loose thread pulls on the next.

The city’s old advantage was proximity. Now work, shopping, healthcare, and education are escaping geography—and rewriting why cities need to exist.

Retail, Healthcare, and Education Are Next in Line

Work isn’t the only strand unwinding. Consider retail: you no longer need to live near a shopping district to get almost anything delivered to your door within a day, sometimes within an hour. Consider healthcare: telemedicine now handles a meaningful share of routine consultations that used to require sitting in a waiting room across town. Consider education: a curious teenager in a small town can now take university-level courses online that used to be available only to students who could physically relocate to a college campus.

Here’s a concrete example worth sitting with. A family that once might have chosen a specific suburb because it sat within a reasonable commute of downtown offices, decent schools, and a hospital system can now, in theory, choose almost any town with a reliable internet connection — work happens remotely, kids take a hybrid mix of local and online classes, and a telehealth visit handles anything short of a genuine emergency. The old package deal that made a specific location “worth it” has been quietly replaced by an à la carte menu that can be assembled almost anywhere.

None of this means cities are disappearing. It means the reasons people used to need a city are, one by one, becoming optional rather than mandatory — and that changes the entire negotiating position a city holds with its own residents.

What Still Can’t Be Unbundled

Here’s where I think the futurist conversation usually goes wrong: people assume that because so much can be unbundled, everything eventually will be, and cities will simply empty out. I don’t believe that, and the evidence doesn’t support it either.

Some things about cities resist unbundling almost entirely, because their value depends on physical proximity in ways no amount of bandwidth can replace. Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, has pointed out that most foot traffic in a typical downtown never came from office workers in the first place — it came from casual visitors drawn to a place that felt genuinely worth visiting. Serendipitous professional collisions, the kind that spark new companies and new ideas, still overwhelmingly happen in person. Live performances, packed stadiums, dense restaurant scenes, and the simple, irreplaceable experience of being around other humans doing interesting things — none of that transmits well over a fiber-optic cable.

What’s happening isn’t the death of the city. It’s a sorting process, splitting what a city offers into two categories: the parts that were only ever there because physical presence was mandatory, and the parts people actually want even when it’s optional. The first category is shrinking fast. The second category might be more valuable than ever, precisely because it’s now a choice rather than a requirement.

The cities of the future won’t survive by being necessary. They’ll thrive by becoming places people genuinely choose to be.

The New Job of a City

If a city can no longer rely on being the only place where jobs, healthcare, and shopping exist, its entire value proposition has to shift from “necessary” to “desirable.” That’s a much harder sell, and it demands a fundamentally different kind of civic leadership than the one that built most of America’s cities in the twentieth century.

Some cities are already responding well. Philadelphia’s Center City district has actually grown its resident population past pre-pandemic levels by leaning hard into livability — parks, culture, walkability — rather than trying to lure commuters back to empty desks. Salt Lake City saw downtown foot traffic climb nearly 140% above 2020 levels by investing in exactly the same kind of amenities. Cities that treat their downtown as a product people choose, rather than a destination people are obligated to visit, are the ones adapting fastest.

Other places are betting on a more radical response entirely: deliberate decentralization, spreading population and investment out into suburbs and satellite towns rather than fighting to preserve density that increasingly serves no one. Whichever path a given city takes, the shared insight is the same — a city’s old bundle of guaranteed necessity has expired, and every city on earth is now, whether its leaders realize it or not, running a retention campaign for its own residents.

My Prediction: Cities Become Curated Experiences, Not Default Containers

I believe the cities that thrive over the next twenty years will be the ones that stop thinking of themselves as infrastructure and start thinking of themselves as curated experiences competing for residents who could genuinely live anywhere. The city of the future won’t win by being the only option. It will win by being the best option among many, for people who no longer have to choose it out of necessity.

Think of it this way: for six thousand years, cities operated like the old cable bundle — pay one price, get everything, whether you wanted all of it or not. That model is gone, and it isn’t coming back. What replaces it will be built by mayors and urban planners who understand that they’re no longer managing essential infrastructure. They’re managing a product that has to earn its subscribers, one genuinely compelling reason at a time.

Related Articles

• “Expert Voices 2024: Remote Work’s Impact on Cities” — Penn Institute for Urban Research — penniur.upenn.edu/publications/expert-voices-2024
• “America’s Future Cities: A Case for Decentralization” — Pacific Research Institute — pacificresearch.org/americas-future-cities-a-case-for-decentralization
• “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse” — National Bureau of Economic Research — nber.org/papers/w30526

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