In the beginning

That this book exists is a testament to the power of face-to-face (F2F), and the fact that, for work of a certain complexity, meetings can accomplish things that no amount of phone calls, friendly emails, and plans to collaborate via Dropbox can. That this book was finished is a testament to the power of communications technology to substitute for F2F when we need get things done without meeting up at all. The rest of this book is about unpicking that apparent contradiction. We started on this journey nearly eight years ago – although the ideas, we felt, were timeless – but we finished it as the UK emerged from its first lockdown, a process that ‘stress-tested’ our ideas, sometimes almost to destruction, but also brought some of them into much sharper focus by providing us with a chance to go back to our interviewees for their experiences and intuitions about the future. At the root of it all, though, remains the shared interest in the fact that although we are both devotees of modern mobile technology, we’ve been struck by the extent to which place – and the opportunities that it presents for meeting up in person, be it in a boardroom or a bar, to talk shop – still matters to work in the 21st century.

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

This is a book about cities, and people in cities. It can be difficult to remember just how dire the situation for cities – and especially those built on the Anglo-American model – was in the 1970s when the headline ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ dominated the New York news and some cheeky estate agents advertised on a billboard ‘Will the Last Person to Leave Seattle Please Turn Out the Lights?’.