Enjoyment in the millennial city after COVID

The urban millennial bourgeoisie are suddenly forced to turn away from their “open,” “flexible,” “shared,” external lifestyles and make a hasty retreat into their domestic, inner worlds.

This was a draft of a piece I was asked to write at the very beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic for The Breach online publication, which had not yet launched. It was turned down initially because it was not enough of a “materialist analysis”—fair enough. The German counterexample is simply because of my personal exposure, and I wasn’t interested in g…