Tales of the unexpected: The year when our cities turned to ghost towns

No-one could have imagined the hand dealt to cities this year.

Imagery of vacant major cities where we wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen tumbleweed blowing across streets flooded the internet. Wildlife took over. People, business and the hustle bustle disappeared. The rulebook on what a city was, was torn up.

That was cities during the pandemic. But what will cities look like and how will they operate in a post-pandemic world. Will the hustle and bustle come back as quickly as it disappeared, or have cities changed forever?

In the third of EG’s four part series looking at the lessons learnt out of the forced changes we have all had to make during the coronavirus pandemic, EG editor Samantha McClary chats to Sophie Chick, director of World Research at Savills, Henry Pelly, senior sustainability consultant at Max Fordham, Andrew Rich, fund manager at Nuveen and Susan Samuel, real estate partner at DLA Piper about what a re-imagination of our cities will look like and what city investors, developers, dwellers and workers have learnt from this most unexpected of years.