Towards a post-COVID geography of economic activity: Using probability spaces to decipher Montreal’s changing workscapes

Abstract

In March 2020, many workers were suddenly forced to work from home. This brought into stark relief the fact that urban economic activity is no longer attached to specific workplaces. This detachment has been analysed in research on organisations and workers, but has not yet been incorporated into concepts used to document and plan the economic geography of cities. In this article, three questions are explored by way of an original survey: first, how can a shift in the location of economic activity be measured at the urban scale whilst incorporating the idea that work is not attached to a single location? Second, what is the nature of the shift that occurred in March 2020? Third, what does this tell us about concepts that have underpinned the study of urban economic form by geographers and planners? Applying concepts developed in organisation studies and sociology, we operationalise the idea that economic activity happens across multiple spaces: it occurs within a probability space, and since March 2020 it has shifted within this space. To better understand and interpret the longer-term impact of this shift on cities – downtowns in particular – we draw upon interviews with people working from home.

La géographie québécoise d'hier à aujourd'hui

“…Au cours de la dernière décennie, la géographie au Québec a grandement évolué, tant sur le plan des approches et des techniques d'analyse, que sur le plan éducatif ou professionnel. Parallèlement, le territoire s'est transformé, notamment sous l'effet de la pandémie de COVID-19 et des mesures sanitaires en découlant (Shearmur et al, 2021;Vachon, 2022). La recherche en sciences géographiques et l'exercice de la géographie appliquée doivent également se déployer par l'intermédiaire de nouvelles conceptions du vivre-ensemble, de même qu'à travers le pluralisme idéologique, voire la contestation des valeurs et des pratiques sociales (Bureau, 2023 identitaires aux territoires des différents acteurs se métamorphosent, de sorte que s'opère une diversification des modèles d'aménagement et de développement des espaces de la vie quotidienne.…”

Urban public health emergencies and the COVID-19 pandemic. Part 1: Social and spatial inequalities in the COVID-city

“…(Martı´nez and Short, 2021: 5) While it saved lives, it was often argued that prolonging curbs on urban in-migration and movement impacted negatively on urban productivity, to the extent that the economic raison d'etre of some major cities was brought into question. With many in the financial and media sectors switching moreor-less effectively towards online working (Shearmur et al, 2021), commercial real estate in major world cities began to collapse in value, and predictions of the decline of 'alpha world cities' began to circulate.…”

Working From Home and Covid-19: Where Could Residents Move to?

“…On the other hand, there is considerable potential for cost-cutting since office rents and commuting costs can be reduced, as Haag (2020) discusses in the case of New York City. The situation for employees is more ambivalent, as Lord (2020) describes, because some prefer to separate home and work physically and are keen to meet colleagues in person, while others value saving the time and costs incurred by commuting and are therefore attracted to WFH (see Barrero et al, 2021;Shearmur et al, 2021).…”