With over half the world population in lockdown at the time of writing this home working has become the new normal. It has been stated multiple times that ‘It is hard to know how long it will be before normality returns … or what normality will look like.’. This seems to summaries the mood of the moment. Regarding high-rise, Covid-19 has the potential to revolutionise the sector, especially with regard to the commercial sector. The majority of London’s tallest and most expensive buildings are designed as commercial office space.
In April 2020, statistics released by the UK’s Office for National Statistics showed 49.2% of adults in employment were working from home, because of the social distancing measures introduced in response to the coronavirus. This causes great concern for commercial office space, an enterprise that tends to occupy high-rise developments prolifically.
It could be predicted that this number will only grow as business adapt better to getting there employees set up for home working. This is only going reduce demand for high-rise office space; the question as to whether these workers will return to the office should be asked. Why would a business pay for a physical space when their workforce is already working effectively from home? Office spaces could potentially experience a considerable fall in demand as the effect of the pandemic becomes more apparent. The crisis is rapidly changing, and current research is not adequate to understand how the commercial letting sector is going to be affected; therefore it has not been considered a factor in the findings of the research.
In terms of residential high-rise, the UK has set itself a target of building 345,000 new homes every year. Many councils, especially in the Greater London area, see high-rise as the most effective way to meet these targets. However, the UK has not been able to build nearly enough housing in Greater London, let alone its other major cities even with the economic growth of the last 10 years. The result of this in the capital has been dramatically increasing housing prices making it nearly impossible for average people to live and work in the capital. When the producers of HBO’s Westworld wanted to portray the city of the future, they did not film in Seattle or New York or London, they went to Singapore. To facilitate similarly forward-thinking city-scapes in the UK, planning regulation needs to be reduced but will this put the beauty and heritage of our cities in jeopardy? Converting many of the high-rise commercial blocks to residential could provide a small solution to this growing problem. But the way many high-rise commercial is designed does not promote flexibility in their design. So how easy this would be is unclear.
What is clear is that COVID-19 will sooner or later lessen, and there will be a certain euphoria surrounding that event. There will hopefully be a culture of rebirth and renewal, as the challenges and tragedies of the fatal outbreak trigger not only a more effective way of working, but a much more efficient way for populations to live and work in. The proper use of high-rise buildings that are, adaptable, viable and implementable, may help to solve that next challenge.