Urban life has always involved waiting. As human geographer Doreen Massey[1] writes in Space, Place, and Gender,[2]'Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the First World, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes.' Meaning the promise of transformation inherent in modern urban life is never as evenly distributed, let alone as equitable, as planned. Today, in the platform city, that wait for a bus invariably would include passing time by looking at the news or social media on a smartphone, and eventually looking for the late bus's location on a 'smart city' municipal transit app. Of course, in frustration, waiting for a bus could turn into hailing a vehicle through a rideshare app like Uber or Lyft and paying the premium to get home and out of the rain. The potential of the digital augmentation of everyday life rarely lives up to its promise.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began last spring, waiting has taken on new qualities. Since many people are working from home, public transit ridership has dropped enormously, reduced to the essential workers who must still commute to their jobs. But we have all been waiting, each minute of every day, for a post-pandemic future to arrive in the form of a widely-available vaccine. For many of us, waiting was augmented by the platform technology services that have rapidly transformed urban life. We have compartmentalised our dwellings into new roles as offices, classrooms, gyms, movie theatres, and the spaces of socialisation previously occupied by restaurants, cafes, and bars. Socialising, learning, and working largely occur through video conferencing services like those offered by Zoom, Skype or their competitors. Our physical need for groceries, meals, and other goods are met through logistics and delivery platforms like Amazon or Walmart (and their delivery sub-contractors), a plethora of food delivery services, and more-established logistics services like UPS, Fed Ex, and the postal service. Now we wait for the packages to arrive, occupying our time with online obligations such as meetings, conferences, remote happy hours, and so on. Increasingly, the packages arrive very quickly, within a day or two for material goods, and within minutes or a few hours for a meal or groceries. But we still wait.

These technological shifts in urban life lead me to reflect on a comment from documentary filmmaker and urban scholar Patrick Keiller (incidentally, also a collaborator[3] with Doreen Massey), who writes in 'The City of the Future' (included in The View from the Train,[4] which was edited by a fellow contributor to this book, Leo Hollis):

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there seems to have been a relatively widespread expectation that new technologies and social structures would – or at least should – give rise to a radical transformation of urban space in the decades that were to follow. In retrospect, however, despite slum clearance in the 1930s, bombing during the Second World War, and the reconstruction and redevelopment that followed, city life has probably changed much more in other ways, often ways that involve people's perceptions. Technology has radically altered the way we communicate, but the technologies of building and construction have changed much less.

Although writing about an earlier era, Keiller's point still stands: the material form of the post-pandemic city is unlikely to change significantly. Some of the 'tactical urbanist' pivots that municipal officials have made could last, whether they entail allocating more space for outdoor dining or prioritising pedestrian and bicycle traffic over private automobiles, but the structure of the city will remain rooted in the existing built environment. Wireless, pocketable personal communication devices – aka smartphones – form the basis of platform cities: the technology of the platform city is constrained by visions of privatised urban life, designed, built and connected by global firms unable or unwilling to envision a more common, more civic technology that could give rise to the radical transformation of urban space. This is a radical transformation that has never arrived, either during the post-war era of high modernity or in our present era's embrace of personal, pocketable technologies, to the detriment of investment in civic and municipal tech, let alone more mundane developments such as giving precedence to bus rapid transit systems over private automobiles.

Beyond the obvious need for immunisation to allow for a return to the sort of face-to-face interactions that make up urban society, we do not know what the post-pandemic city will look like. However, the use of personalised, mobile technology such as smartphone apps and related online services in the platform city will not diminish. The capacity of platform technologies to change urban life has been subsumed by the mundane realities of moving digitised bits of information around the world fast enough to ensure there is (for instance) no lag in a video conference between people dispersed across multiple continents (assuming everyone's internet connection is sufficiently fast and free of glitches). Beyond these workplace or social conveniences enabling dispersed communication in real time, the other foundational capacity of platform technologies is logistical: organising and tracking the movement of goods around the world, also in real time. This digital backend manages and monitors goods as they move from their place of manufacture to regional distribution hubs, to the box vans that bring them to our homes, where we wait, ensuring a distance of at least six feet maintained from the face-masked delivery driver when collecting that package left on our doorstep.

Technological changes are embedded in the shift in habits and routines promoting a reliance on platform services in place of face-to-face exchanges. The shift to the post-pandemic city is only likely to reinforce this urban transformation. Nine or so months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the city of the vaccinated future remains unknown, but it is likely to be one primarily serving the wealthy, with the poor pushed even further out to the fringes, where municipal services face severe funding cuts, [5]where restaurants are transformed into delivery-only ghost kitchens, and independent, high-street retail establishments become a thing of the past.[6]

As we wait, the platform city is reconfiguring itself around us. We are waiting for an uncertain future: a different city, unsettled, likely damaged but hopefully retaining enough of its character and opportunity to return to a degree of vibrancy. We do not know when we will arrive at this vaccinated, post-pandemic city, nor do we know how dire the pandemic-caused municipal and public transport budget cuts will be. Nonetheless, in the vaccinated and platformed urban future, Massey's emblematic city dweller at the bus stop is no longer waiting in the rain with her shopping, because the shopping has been delivered, and the bus route has been reduced even further, so she will have resigned herself to walking home in the rain.

The photos included in this post were taken by the author while on long, socially-distanced walks documenting the change of seasons since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts.