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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBII Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. The kind of work we do has always been linked to

where we live from the days of the farmers living, well on farms,

to the sailors, longshoremen and financiers in the port cities that first powered global trade,

to the assembly line workers and tradesmen and the factory towns that drove the

industrial age.

Intellectuals, artists, and knowledge workers, what our guests today calls the creative

class, have meanwhile long clustered in big urban centers like London and New York. of But how is the rise of remote work and its accelerated adoption through the pandemic change that?

Now that technology allows us to work from anywhere, are big cities on the decline?

Richard Florida is a professor of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto

and his latest research conducted with Boston Consulting Group paints a more nuanced picture.

He's co-author of the new HBR article The Rise of the Medicity and he joins me now.

Hi Richard. Hey Allison it's great to be with you and thanks for having me. So I explained a bit in the intro, but give us your quick version of why cities have always been a hub for

commerce and the creative class. If you think back for all of the millennia before now

a city a human settlement a place where people and businesses and economic activity

gathered was always physically delimited.

First, it was bordered or bounded by how far we could really walk, and maybe then how far we could ride an

animal, a horse or a mule. And then we began to develop these technologies, a horse-drawn

streetcar, and that expanded the boundaries of a

...