Farhad Manjoo: Why should we ever return to living and working so close to one another?

Cities, you may have heard, are toast. The argument is straightforward and seemingly incontestable: The coronavirus thrives among close clusters of human beings, and nowhere are humans clustered closer than in big cities. The virus’s toll seems to make the connection plain. New York City, the most populous and most dense urban area in the United States, was also the first to be devastated by the virus.The pandemic will pass, but many fear that our response to COVID-19 may have ravaged urba