Won’t you be my neighbour?

The landscape of cities and where people choose to spend their time and money is shifting. As the experience economy rebounds, there is renewed emphasis on transforming established areas into vital, animated, mixed-use hubs. Will Craig, who leads our Commercial Sector, speaks to Chris Fair, CEO of Resonance Consultancy, to explore the challenges, opportunities, and unintended consequences of coming closer together.

In recent years, places like Nashville and Austin, fueled by an exciting, vibrant and affordable lifestyle, have benefited from migration patterns swinging towards emerging cities and away from global centres. With flexibility in employment arrangements on the rise, it follows that the urbanization of smaller centres and edge communities may continue to rise as well.

Chris Fair, CEO of Resonance Consultancy predicts a flatter future, where suburban areas benefit from a renewed influx of people and consumer spending, fuelled by millennials and flexible work opportunities:

“What we’re seeing now isn’t a decline of cities, but a new city order that benefits so-called second-tier cities and a reorganization of how people live, work and play within them.”

 

In terms of people’s preferences, it appears that while the pandemic may have caused people to put a greater emphasis on parks, outdoor activities and healthcare than in the past (see Resonance’s Best Cities Report), things like jobs and exciting entertainment and nightlife are still among the top things that people aged 25-34 look for when finding a city to live in.

Resonance observes that for US cities, the number of recommended nightlife experiences for a city on TripAdvisor has one of the highest correlations with the number of jobs created by foreign-owned enterprises – second only to the number of Fortune 500 companies.

To read the full article, visit: Won’t You Be My Neighbour? — Placeonomics