pence. at noon eastern president trump will participate in the memorial day ceremony at fort cannery to honor heroes who sacrificed their lives. watch live, monday on c-span and c-span.org or listen on the free c-span radio app. host: joining us from california this morning is joel, he is a fellow in urban futures at chapman university. good morning. guest: good morning to you. host: explain the type of research and -- that you conduct and the writing you do. tell us more about what you specialize in. guest: what i really look at is the impact of change on class relations in taking a look at that over time. i also do a lot of work on the changing urban form. this has been a very interesting time to observe both. in theou wrote an op-ed

hill where you talk about the new geography of america, post coronavirus. how are cities likely to change in the future, based on this pandemic? guest: first of all, a lot of the trends i've talked about were already happening. we already saw the populations of chicago and new york were all dropping before this happened. this is very important, because the trends were, people were beginning to move to the suburbs and, interestingly, not just to big sunbelt cities, but now within two cities with under one million people, many of which for 50,ing population 60 years, now beginning to gain. i think technology is allowing us to spread employment out. people are looking for other options. we were in this direction, that

the pandemic has sort of accelerated it. it has accelerated everything. it has accelerated the classifieds. it has accelerated where people are living. it has accelerated almost every aspect of our life. knows,t will end, nobody but this is an extraordinary time to observe the differences in how people live, on what class relationships are going to be like in the future. host: you do make the point, you write for a generation a procession of pundits and speculators have promoted the notion that our future lay in dense, blue urban centers largely on the coasts. with the pandemic heavily concentrated in these urban centers, the case for first densification seems increasingly dubious. go ahead and tell us a little bit more. guest: what we've had for years is, this is very common, particularly in the east coast, but also out here.

is the idea that people, anybody who has their act together is going to want to live in five or six major metropolitan areas. basically, everybody else's like those biblical stories about the left behind, sort of, this is where the losers are, that anybody who had anything going for them was going to live in the cities. there's certainly a great appeal -- you can tell from my accent i am a native new yorker. i have lived in southern california for 45 years. but i do think there has been a change. in which people begin to say, who i really want, for instance, be on the train, be on the subway, ba in crowded places? it seems to be one of the drivers of the pandemic and one of the reasons why you have, sort of, unequal distribution is exposure.

what we call, density exposure. how often you are forced to be close to somebody. that seems to be a factor. poles, are seeing from but we are seeing from surveys is that people are saying, i'm going to look for something a bit more spread out, a little bit more space. also, being stuck in the studio apartment seems worse than a single-family house. host: we are taking a look at the future of cities and american geography in general. work, life amidst this pandemic. is caulking. tkin.. ko live in the eastern or central time zones, call (202) 748-8000.

alton and pacific time zones, (202) 748-8001 is the number for you to call. we look forward to talking with you. we're also talking about politics, because you wrote additionally in that health piece that what is likely to emerge now as the pandemic accelerates migration of people and businesses out of these blue cities, may be the birth of a new american center in american politics. what does that center look like, where it is, and how does it vote? guest: i think ultimately, and bookis my hope because my really warns against a very stratified society. if people can move about, more people can own property. more people can have a middle-class life. i think that is what is going to sustain a truly democratic republic. right now we are headed towards the decay of the roman empire at its very end and the beginning

of feudalism. and this has to be reversed. as long as we are going to concentrate all power in those places in the country that are extremely expensive, we are going to build our society increasingly into a hierarchical structure. this is what is already happening. this dispersion i'm talking about is one of the ways to counteract it. >> here is a little bit from the book. what does the topic neo-feudalism mean? way, ann a remarkable expansion of the middle-class around the world, certainly in western countries and parsed -- parts of east asia, has seen the dispersion of property and really unprecedented wealth by a lot of people. in the last 10 or 20 years we have been moving increasingly to

concentrations of wealth and power haven't seen for 100 years. polarizedsingly politics, which is obviously not going to work well in terms of maintaining a republic. our real challenge is now that the middle class, with the small property owner, has been really under pressure. one of the great tragedies of the pandemic has been the wiping out of millions of small businesses, small landlords. one been doing phone calls the ground in southern california, but also in houston and other places, where small businesses are being wiped out. bet we find is, what used to property-owning middle-class people, day, and particularly their children, are becoming what i call service,

and the sense that they will ve