Weak signals hinting a reversal were already in place before Covid-19
It has been a megatrend to move into the large cities for many decades. When I read about the real estate market when it comes to rural areas bad news has been the staple for as long as I can remember. The only weak signals I've seen have been stories about the odd family that has moved back into rural areas where they spent their childhood. Some people who have had enough of the rat race in the big cities have managed to carve out a living in the sticks while raising the life quality. Stories like that have been in the media.
But even without the impact of the pandemic, I believe a tipping point may have been reached. Already four years ago, the average home price in Greater London was £500,000. There were stories in the press about even well-paid professionals moving out because they couldn't afford starting a family.
The costs of living and operating in big cities are high
It's not that people don't want to live in a big city, particularly young people. There are considerable advantages to living in very large cities. The service sector is typically very well developed, very diverse, very specialized and capable of offering very good value for money. For couples and families, living in a big city offers plenty of career opportunities without either of the adult in the family having to make sacrifices in that regard. In big cities, all possible tastes and interests are catered to. But it tends to be extremely expensive. Affording a spacious home in good condition is not easy for a lot of people.
But what is will increasingly drive people away from big cities is the cold business logic in a lot of industries that don't involve face-to-face interaction. So far, the advantages of being able to easily and cheaply arrange meetings in physical spaces has had no viable alternatives. The pandemic has forced companies to mass adopt video conferencing technology. That technology has been around for quite some time but only the pandemic has pushed companies and individuals to adopt it and I don't think there world will be going back to the old ways. That is especially true when the cost of bandwidth is dropping like a stone as are the costs of processing power and memory. Augmented reality will greatly enhance the experience and allow for completely novel ways of interacting with non-physical objects and make meeting physically not only unnecessary but awkward.
The pull factors will be weakened, too
Many of the upsides of meeting in virtual spaces will apply not only to business applications but free time activities, although businesses will be the early adopters of these technologies owing to the high cost of the first generations of them. Thanks to the rapidly diminishing cost of IT, mass adoption is inevitable as the cost effectiveness of virtual experiences improves while the use of physical resources may not.
I know some people will say this is unlikely to happen because as embodied beings physical contact will always be vital for our well-being us whether we acknowledge it or not. But what our senses feed our brains is information. Given sufficiently advanced tech, it will be possible to create virtual experiences that are equal or superior to physical ones.
Whether or not that is likely to result in our lives being engineered for being profited from and exploited even more that they already are will depend on whether or not these technologies are built on open and public protocols or siloed technologies controlled by a small number of entities.