Flexible Working Needed More Than Ever to Save Our Cities and Dying Country Towns

Shôn Ellerton, Jul 7, 2024
Congested cities and dying country towns will be a thing of the past if we get our act together and embrace better flexible working.

“The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” — Thomas Jefferson

During 2022, I wrote a piece titled, Is Working From Home as the Norm Sustainable?, which outlined my thoughts with the then paradigm shift of businesses adopting more flexible working arrangements for its employees to work from home on a more regular basis. Remember, this was during the aftermath of the novel coronavirus which landed on our shores during early 2020. In conclusion, I devised the most sensible solution would be to adopt a common-sense approach by balancing the needs for flexible working-at-home arrangements and the necessity to bring people together in the flesh.

Two years later, there has been a strong push by businesses to bring people back together in the office despite a growing resistance by many employees to do so.

There are four main reasons that sprung to my mind.

Firstly. City trade had been dying. Apart from the large store chains and supermarkets, which had enjoyed immunity from being closed during the pandemic, smaller businesses had suffered miserably during the pandemic.

Secondly. Office space became vacant within city centres. This became a problem for business investors but considering their significant influence amongst corporate and political circles, they were largely successful in promoting the need for people to return to the city. Not only would office space be in demand again, but the local businesses would also flourish as well.

Thirdly. The lack of human contact by working remotely made it more difficult to corroborate, socialise, and to mentor. Communication is far more effective in the physical presence of others. Being able to socialise with others strengthens the bond between employees. And mentoring online and remotely is far less engaging than when in person.

And of course, the fourth point, being that of the trust reposed by the business that its employees are working rather than skipping and taking the day off.

Each point is valid and understandable.

However, I think we are running into some major problems by returning to the old world of inflexible 9 to 5 office hours, a model that is fast making a return into the white-collar workforce.

Post-pandemic, we have seen an alarming rise in cases of unaffordability for those living and working in our major cities across the Western world. In addition to this, there is the scourge of heavy traffic, pollution, and overcrowding. Along with the widening gap of rich and poor and the inability for those to live a reasonable comfortable living are catalysts for the rise of crime.

Think about this for a moment and look at the big picture.

Isn’t it absurd that we haven’t progressed past the model of stuffing millions of white-collar office people in metal tubes, cars, and buses every day so they can sit at a desk in front of a computer? Not just that, but stipulating that they work from nine to five?

Now, not everybody has that luxury of being able to work remotely. There are those employees who must be physically present to get the task done. There are those occasions where employees must physically meet. However, think of the unnecessary volume of human traffic entering and leaving the city because of those who do not need to but are forced to come in and just sit at a desk in an office.

Many businesses have returned to the full-time 9 to 5 bums-on-seats model for no other reason but that it was always done that way in the past and it has always worked. However, many of those who support this line of thinking tend to forget the great leap in technology that we have which enables us to work remotely. We simply could not do this in the past, without printing reams of material and working on it manually out of the office.

It was a different world back then.

What kind of emerging technologies do we have which enable us to work effectively remotely?

For a start, the ability to virtually sit with others using VR glasses. This hasn’t really taken off in force yet, but in the near future, I predict that many remote meetings will be held this way. For example, by putting on a set of VR glasses and having in front of you, a round table with others who are doing the same. I’m not entirely sure how facial expressions would be registered with a VR headpiece, but I daresay, the technology will have a workaround to make this happen. Further down the line, we may all have access to holographic projections. Imagine projecting invites to a meeting straight to your dining room table.

Interacting in the two-dimensional world of Teams and Zoom is limiting to say the least. Observing body movement isn’t really possible. Cameras are switched off, whether by choice or through lack of bandwidth or some other technical difficulty. And, of course, the issue of garnering undivided attention. I’m sure that many of us, at some time, had been preoccupied with doing something else during someone’s turn in the online meeting. I’ve been guilty of it now and again.

Let’s look ahead at some of the benefits of integrating our new and emerging technologies with the working-at-home model.

Just to preamble, there is the obvious need to balance out the working-at-home and the working-in-office model. We will still need to maintain some physical presence, but for many white-collar workers, especially those glued to a screen, that is not the case for much of the time.

The biggest benefit is a long-term vision of how we can drastically improve our living conditions. However, this needs great vision, inspiration, and most of all, a change in the way our politics work to achieve a long-term plan.

The biggest setback for all to maintain a good quality way of living is forced urbanisation. I’ve lived in both country towns and cities, and most assuredly, I see there are, in general, happier people living in the countryside. The very fact that we have slums and ghettoes is a major social failure fuelled by politics, greed and corporate shenanigans. We have forced most of our population out of the countryside and into the cities.

Just to find work and jobs!

But now, with our technology, there are no more excuses for forced urbanisation.

Recently, I’ve been on a few trips to the country around Adelaide in South Australia.

South Australia is a stunning place with lots of beautiful scenery, clean skies, lovely heritage towns, and dazzling beaches. I can’t get any more pleasure than being out in the countryside. Not one traffic light. No queues of cars on motorways. No crowds. Little or no crime. Friendly people. Beautifully maintained public parks. And best of all, many of these towns have all the basic things you need.

What more does one need?

Oh yes, I forgot. Jobs!

Therefore, our young people leave their friendly country towns to go to the city in the hope of finding some dingy office job just to be able to live. They struggle to find housing. Pay nearly all their wages on rent, and ultimately, not much to show. Many would have been better by staying in their country towns.

Going back to my history books, the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, had an interesting love-hate relationship with cities. He dubbed them the scourge of the earth and a breeding place of pestering sores and other nasty diseases. After all, many cities during the late 1700s in the Western world were not particularly clean environments. However, Jefferson found some degree of fascination of exploring cities, being centres of cultural and historical significance.

From a lifestyle point of view, Jefferson had a vision of Utopia by mixing an agrarian lifestyle with the convenience of living in the city. He proposed a simple and effective solution by planning urban living in the style of a chessboard. The squares would be separated by a grid of streets. The black squares would contain individual houses with ample garden space. The larger squares would, itself, have an inner shared garden space. The white squares would be public parkland containing not only greenery but also municipal sporting fields, swimming pools and children’s playgrounds. In essence, everybody will be looking across to either woodland, parks, or the above mentioned municipal centres.

The model was put in place in the small town of Jeffersonville on the banks of the Ohio River. Now a suburb, it has been swallowed up by the city of Louisville which straddles the river. And sadly, through greed and politics, the parkland spaces in the ‘white’ squares of the chessboard had been developed into more housing.

Returning on the subject of country towns, in my case, being those in South Australia, the population of most of them have declined during the last twenty years. There were, once, many passenger railways connecting these country towns to the city of Adelaide. For example, the lovely country town of Gladstone, a three-hour journey from Adelaide had its last passenger train departing its platforms in 1987.

It is incredibly sad to see the working population of these country towns decline. The average age in many of these towns is a staggering sixty years of age according to suburb profile hosted by one of Australia’s property websites, Domain. Which suggests that many buyers into Australia’s regional towns are either retirees or shrewd investors, many of which do not even possess Australian citizenship.

Buying or renting in the city of Adelaide has become notoriously expensive. However, that’s where the jobs are. And businesses forcing their employees to come into the office nine to five for jobs they clearly do not to be doing so are exacerbating the problem. They are also contributing to the problem of discouraging our younger working population of leaving the country towns and add to the already congested problem of working in the city.

South Australia is a very interesting model.

The largest city is Adelaide has nearly 1.5 million people and yet, it’s second largest city, Mount Gambier in the south, has only 25 thousand people. Other larger towns include places like Port Pirie, Port Augusta, Port Lincoln, Naracoorte and Renmark. They are all far smaller than Adelaide and yet, they have potential for being lovely cities in their own right. But they seem to be ageing and dying and only to serve as a refuge for retirees wanting to sell their overpriced property in Melbourne or Sydney and move to the country.

Australia has destroyed most of its national passenger rail service, much like what Britain did doing the 1960s. Australia has made many improvements in its road service, which is admirable. However, it is railways that really connect communities and cities together. Sure, one might have a car and never use the service, but that is not the point. The fact that one could hop on a train to get to the next town is a powerful symbol of advanced society. Railways are like the nerve links connecting our people across the land both in terms of passenger movement and freight.

The conservative capitalist often argues why the people should pay for a railway network which may not pay its way in terms of ticket sales. They are entirely missing the point. Completely! The movement of people and freight into the regional areas prevents the decay of country towns because when these towns die, the cities become larger which generates a slew of other economic and social issues. New businesses struggle to survive. There is an increased amount of crime. Housing stock is overpriced. Bad health due to an unhealthy and strained environment. The list goes on, including some of our weirder and more inflammatory first-world social problems promoted on social media which simply do not exist in the rural environment.

Connecting larger towns using high-speed railway links is, of course, an expensive investment. However, by doing so, it opens up so many opportunities to revitalise these towns. Take Port Pirie, a three-hour journey to the north of Adelaide. For those driving to Port Pirie from Adelaide, there is not much in the way of any significant town size, the largest probably being Port Wakefield and Snowtown. If compared to being in Europe, it is quite a lonely drive, dotted here and there by road trains, caravan tourists, and the occasional car. A high-speed train connecting Adelaide to Port Augusta in the north passing through such towns like Port Pirie, would, no doubt, spark significant revitalisation in terms of industry and population. Port Pirie, despite, its waning industry in smelting has a future in the world of critical minerals.

However, we are so damned blind insofar that our cities are becoming overcrowded and too expensive. Remember, South Australia harbours one of the most mineral-rich supplies we can dream of. Our short-sighted governments would never dream of building such a project because, no doubt, it would not pay its way in the short term. However, the long-term prospects are good because people can quickly get from A to B, perhaps, even commuting from these locations into Adelaide, much like someone commuting from Peterborough to London, a distance of 160km, in the UK. A father of a friend of mine in the UK used to do this commute and it only took an hour because it was the fast line from York, and the bit from Peterborough to London was non-stop.

The cost of building a high-speed train line is not so significant as one may think. According to ex-colleagues I worked with at the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator (ONRSR) in Adelaide, the cost per km for a high-speed rail line would be something in the order of US$27 million per kilometre. Therefore, a 300km line to the north would set back the state around US$8 billion. It’s not a small amount by any means, but nor was the building of a new hospital in Adelaide which cost a staggering AUD$2.4 billion. 300 kilometres of ultra-fast track connecting South Australia’s biggest towns compared to 800 new beds and swanky facilities at a new hospital? Food for thought.

Going back to the topic on working remotely and how we should change our way to adopt a better flexible approach on where we work and when we work, we really need to take a seriously deep dive into all the topics I discussed above.

We have entered a new world with new technology. A technology which enables us to connect with each other through technology rather than physical distance. Most of our cities have failed to keep overcrowding, overpricing, and the rise of crime in check. We are destroying our lovely country towns because we have disconnected them by removing our once-loved railway networks. And worst of all, many of our white-collar industries are governed by a generation of die-hards believing that productivity can only be achieved if everyone returns to the office Monday to Friday nine to five. But, be assured, when the corporate dinosaurs retire from their pedestals of yesteryear, there will be a near era of near-virtual interaction and a time where many can live where they want and be able to interact with others as if they are really there.

And all this and be able to enjoy the dream! A dream currently shattered but, piece by piece, to be restored to its full glory.