Throughout the Great Pandemic, I’ve been baseline skeptical of the notion that “cities are over.” Kind of a silly idea when you seriously think about it. Yes, countless news stories, columns, and hot takes on social media have explored the issue. But little of this speculation — including mine — concluded there would be some historic hollowing out of the world’s great urban centers. And “historic” is an apt descriptor. Even a cursory examination of world history suggests how unlikely it would be for cities to be over. As macro trends go, 5,000 years of urbanization qualifies as an awfully persistent one.
I start at a similar place when thinking about “globalization is over.” Nothing new about global flows of people, ideas, and goods. Another persistent macro trend. There’s been trade between cities, for as long as there have been cities. In the 2021 paper “Risks and global supply chains: What we know and what we need to know,” economists Richard Baldwin (Graduate Institute, Geneva) and Rebecca Freeman (Bank of England) observe that “internationalized production” is hardly a modern phenomenon. Archaeologists have found “stone tools in the Levant made of volcanic rock quarried in Turkey and long-distance trade in tin was common during the Bronze Age.”
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