Pandemic, depopulation, rebirth (so is it history repeating itself?), Mutatis mutandis, perhaps.

Because if it is true that the contextual conditions have totally changed in terms of acceleration, impact and progress, it is equally true that the social and economic upheaval caused by Covid-19 is already leaving physical and emotional marks in the cities of Europe: the pulsating and busy neighborhoods of the past have emptied while people have chosen or been forced to work in different conditions (e.g. from home).

There is also reason to believe that this pandemic may have an even more lasting impact than historical precedents.

For the first time since the first cities emerged in the Fertile Crescent some 6,000 years ago, concentrated urban centers no longer have a monopoly on the economic and cultural connections that move civilizations forward.

For many workers worried about viruses and employers trying to cut costs during the economic downturn that followed, technologies like video conferencing, shared documents and instant messaging provide viable alternatives to the skyscrapers whose effectiveness we’ve all, to varying degrees, ultimately experienced.

Meanwhile, services like streaming video and social media and websites like Reddit and Twitter offer a taste of the cultural effervescence and sense of community in motion that has drawn most to large centers over the centuries.

Suddenly, everything that seemed to us to be electrifying about cities has lost its appeal and its exclusive physical dimension, both in work and in our personal lives.

On reflection, we wouldn’t even need a bar or a restaurant to meet our soul mate anymore: the Tinder algorithm takes care of that.

From Tinder to the non-places of Marc Augé, the step is short.

Non-places are born by definition as opposed to anthropological places and are therefore all those spaces that have the peculiarity of not being identitary, relational and historical.

Non-identitary, non-relational, non-historical: some would say this is the portrait of our infamous new normal.

But isn’t the new normal also a historical recourse? Nothing new under the sun, then.

Because of the new normal, dear Marc would have spoken of it in terms of supermodernism, that is, of the effects of that hyperconnection between social, intellectual and economic phenomena in complex contexts in continuous, rapid evolution.

In this 2.0 supermodernism of ours, there seem to remain some basic characteristics that we have had to come to terms with, even in our daily lives.

First, an excess of time.

The present temporality is crowded with events that soon end up in the oblivion of the past and their fleeting nature leaves no room for planning a long-term future.

Second, an excess of space.

The world is expanding its settled horizons and there are ever-increasing urban concentrations, relocations of populations and multiplication of installations and means of accelerated movement.

The Covid-19, despite a setback in the short term, seems not to stop this trend (in 2030, 70% of the world’s population will still be concentrated in large cities).

Thirdly, an excess of ego: the disproportionate increase in spatial and temporal references makes it necessary for everyone to search for a personal path that responds to the demands of contemporary dynamism.

Time, space, ego.

Raise your hand if you haven’t felt and then lived in this period a feeling of suspension in time, space, personal purpose.

In life as in work, in cities as in organizations.

As the boundary between these formerly opposing worlds becomes increasingly blurred, we sense that there is a correlation between the changing skin of cities and that of organizations.

The emptying of cities corresponds to the emptying of organizations.

If we try to demonstrate this assumption with the dynamics observed in recent months, we must accept that the meaning of “emptying” is not only physical and spatial.