Under these circumstances, cities need to change, and in big ways. Now that they are unlikely to recover their heyday as corporate centres, their best course may be to become centres for entertainment, tourism and culture – confirming HG Wells’ vision of the city as primarily ‘a place of concourse and rendezvous’. Some of the youngest workers may still want to rent temporarily in big ‘gateway cities’, but people will be less likely to be frog-marched into cities for economic reasons. If they come it will be out of choice. People and companies will be reluctant to go to cities if they are dirty, dangerous or over-regulated.

If the progressive drift towards chaos and ever-higher government costs continues, we could see a repeat of the long decline that impacted cities from the 1950s to well into the 1990s. But the rise of moderate opposition to progressivism, in the form of Rick Caruso, Eric Adams and others, provides some hope that the urban core can reinvent itself as a viable place for new investment and families.

‘A great city’, noted Aristotle, is not to be confounded with a ‘populous one’. Successful future cities should focus more on neighbourhood life and less on grandiosity. They can only compete, as cities have in the past, by providing a more dynamic, vital alternative to the periphery or small towns. Rather than trying to force people to live there, they need to become more human-scaled and inclusive. Technology may drive future dispersion, but it also has the potential of creating new, more people-friendly metropolises. Our cities will have to be liveable again if they want to fulfil the promise of wealth creation and security that has defined them since ancient times.