Almost 60 years ago, American journalist and writer Jane Jacobs published her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She wrote about urban planning in the 20th century with the dramatic increase in automobile traffic and the urbanistic ideology of modernism, which separated the uses of cities by highlighting individual autonomous buildings, which would put an end to urban space and city life, resulting in lifeless cities, emptied of people.
The concept of city is something that has become faithful in human evolution and it is in clusters that they manifest themselves. These clusters emerged in the distant Neolithic period (between 8,000 and 4,000 BC), but only took on major proportions with the phenomenon of the Rural Exodus, which occurred more intensively in the second half of the 20th century, always accompanied by the individual need to combat misery, hunger and thirst.
After many years, in 2020, we returned to talking about migration, this time from the city to the countryside. With the Pandemic, remote work rebuilt global economies and gained strength, becoming increasingly common in Brazil and around the world. Several surveys already indicate that in recent months there has been an increase of at least 300% in the search for rural properties and the tendency is for the population to migrate not only housing but perhaps businesses.
During the isolation due to COVID-19, many companies announced working from home, a decision that would most likely not have a profound impact on the development of some sectors of several companies. After some time, when the contagion curve was flattening, other ideas emerged and an example that caught my attention was that of XP Investimentos, which announced the departure of its headquarters in São Paulo to the city of São Roque in the interior of the state, 60km away. of the capital.
The Villa XP would be inspired by the offices in Silicon Valley, similar to the Apple campus in Cupertino, California (USA), it is worth remembering that Steve Jobs had the idea for Apple Park in 2006, with a project by Norman Foster in 2009 , where the building has 13,000 parking spaces, making it clear which main mode of transport will be used. As a result, spending on fossil fuels, increased CO2 emissions and the impact caused by pollution may not have been considered. In the current field of ideas, with existing technologies, this might not make as much sense. The motto used by XP to announce the change was “forget the chaotic routine of a big city like São Paulo”.
On another level, some companies chose to move to more central neighborhoods, reducing rental costs, for example. This strategy is already used by Google, where it occupies a 1932 building on an entire block where this headquarters alone has 7,000 employees and 280,000m².
If, on the one hand, leaving the large centers is a good option in this period of social distancing, it is imagined that on the other, companies play a fundamental role in giving back to the city some of what they earn.
What is not known is whether with this Urban Exodus, the cities will be emptied or we will have an even greater dependence on individual transport. Most likely, some less favored people will live in other cities because they do not have their own transport and depend on the company they work for. This could also mean that the more advantaged class continue to live in large centers and take their car every day to go to work without worry a lot about the impact of this action in the long term, after all, it will still be in the big cities that the entertainment of these executives will live.
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