Entirely missing the point

There most certainly will be changes in working habits, in society, as a result of Covid-19. Many to most of them will be changes that would have happened - like remote working - over time but will now be accelerated. All of this is obviously true.

Then we get to the error:

City centres will struggle in the short term with the effects of the pandemic, and a great number of service workers will be unemployed. This is a tragedy, but it’s also an incentive to plan for medium- and long-term solutions.

We don’t actually know what the new equilibrium is going to be. Therefore, logically, we cannot plan for it. We must instead find out what that new settlement is going to turn out to be. This requires the complete opposite of planning.

We need to free the environment from the current restrictions - we can limit ourselves to freeing the urban one if we wish - so that market experimentation can take place into what is the best manner of dealing with this brave new world. For we don’t in fact know what it is possible to do with the new technologies, nor do we know what it is that people want done out of the new range of possibilities. The best - the only useful - method we’ve got of exploring where one meets t’other is to allow all to try out whatever. The things that can both be done and meet desires will be copied and thus we find out what that new settlement is.

It is precisely and exactly at the moment that everything is changing that we do not desire to plan. Instead we have to leave it to market processes for what will be that new settlement will be emergent from voluntary interaction. We’re not trying, if we’re sensible about it, to tell the future what it must be, rather ambitious to find out what it will be.