Telework as Behavioral Infrastructure: Rethinking Housing Resilience in the Digital City

The rapid normalization of telework has fundamentally disrupted the spatial logic that cities have been planned around for over a century -yet housing policy frameworks have been slow to register the consequences. This lecture treats digital work flexibility as a form of behavioral infrastructure: invisible, deeply transformative, and with profound implications for where people choose to live, how frequently they travel, and which neighborhoods thrive or decline. Drawing on research from The University of Hong Kong, it examines how telework is reshaping residential location preferences, commuting patterns, and the demand for housing types that existing stock often cannot supply. Cities that continue to plan as though the pre-pandemic spatial order is intact will systematically build the wrong housing in the wrong places -with consequences for both affordability and resilience.