Technology and the City

Technology built the world’s great cities. As Lewis Mumford chronicled in his 1961 opus, The City in History, technology played the central role in expanding the metropolis, beginning in the Middle Ages and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution. Technology’s net effect, Mumford wrote, “brought an endless flow of distant foods and raw materials into the metropolis, along with workers and intellectuals, traders and travelers drawn from remote areas.”

But will digital technology—specifically telecommuting, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—finally hollow out New York and other big cities? Certainly, without...