The pandemic has given rise to a massive work-at-home experiment — the house a test tube, pyjamas a lab coat.

It’s early days, but what should our workplaces, our companies, our urban landscapes even, look like when the dust settles and all the swab kits and masks are put away?

I was struck by the utter desolation of Tunney’s Pasture the other day, while walking alone in a ridiculous wind. Acres of quiet asphalt, floors of unused desks, elevators going nowhere in towers of sealed, fluorescent emptiness. (There was, in truth, a smattering of humans here and there.)

Think of it. If we can empty an office campus of 10,000 employees, shutter all those cubicle farms — and still do the bulk of the work — what does this say about how we design work, and workspaces, in the post-pandemic world? Or how we plan roads or transit, or site “employment nodes,” as the laser-pointers like to say?

A neighbour put it this way: we empty the suburbs, clog our roads and highways with commuters, to gather in expensive, tax-funded skyscrapers for eight or 10 hours a day, and not on weekends, to accomplish what we might do from desks in a spare bedroom.

And on a massive scale. Public Services and Procurement Canada houses about 260,000 public servants across Canada, in 1,500 buildings, with seven million square metres of space, about 40 per cent of which is, on a typical day, empty.

Maybe, stuck at home but making the essential bureaucracy work, we’ve arrived at this moment in time: is there a better way to work?

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