People have always moved — through war, trade, climate, education, capital, ambition, fear, curiosity, love. Human civilization itself is, in many ways, the history of movement.

— What is changing today is not mobility itself. It is the architecture surrounding it.

Since 2020, one thing has become increasingly difficult to ignore: globalisation no longer functions as the relatively open system many had quietly assumed it to be. In 2020, global passenger traffic collapsed by roughly 60 per cent — the sharpest contraction in the history of commercial aviation. Mobility later returned, but not in the same form. Routes became longer. Logistics less predictable. Movement more expensive, more conditional, more unevenly distributed.

According to UNHCR, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide surpassed 120mn by 2024 — the highest level ever recorded..

The world did not freeze. It entered a new phase of motion. But motion itself became asymmetric.

Some people move because they are trying to escape instability. Others move because they are building new configurations for life and work — new markets, new jurisdictions, new operating environments.

Some are trying to preserve continuity. Others are redesigning the geography of their lives in real time.

I see this through development projects and international networks. After 2022, air routes between Europe and Asia were redrawn following the closure of Russian airspace. Travel times increased. Costs shifted. Established business corridors lost their old simplicity. At the same time, I watched founders, investors and specialists begin restructuring the architecture of their lives: distributed teams instead of centralised offices, secondary bases in Asia or Latin America, companies operating across several jurisdictions simultaneously.

This does not yet feel like a new world. More like a prolonged phase of recalibration.

Globalisation is gradually turning into a more complex infrastructure of access. Remaining mobile now requires more than purchasing power. It requires legal literacy, logistical awareness, technological fluency, psychological adaptability, and the ability to function across multiple contexts at once.

And somewhere inside this transition, another thought becomes visible.

• The people who continue moving forward still exist.
• They have not disappeared beneath the weight of anxiety. They have simply become harder to distinguish within the noise of permanent crisis.

The current period does not resemble a conventional crisis. It is not one war. Not one recession. Not one pandemic.

It is a simultaneous restructuring of production, labour, communication, governance, mobility and economic organisation. Artificial intelligence, automation, distributed work, digital assets and machine-assisted decision-making are no longer futuristic abstractions. They are becoming part of the operating layer of daily life.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, nearly 40 per cent of core professional skills are expected to change within the next few years under the pressure of AI and digital transformation.

Older models of stability are beginning to lose effectiveness.

For decades, it was possible to build an entire life around one profession, one geography, one institutional system. Increasingly, that model struggles to absorb the speed and volatility of the current environment.

This is where the divergence in reactions begins to matter.

Some attempt to preserve familiar forms of stability and wait for turbulence to pass. Others begin adapting themselves to the new velocity of the world: learning technological systems, operating across multiple markets, building distributed structures, expanding international networks.

I see both reactions inside the development industry.

• Some people experience movement as a forced necessity — a response to pressure, instability or uncertainty.
• Others continue building through instability itself. They launch companies, create international partnerships, connect markets, test new formats of living and working. For them, mobility is tied less to escape than to maintaining a developmental trajectory.

That distinction is quietly becoming more important than many traditional social categories.

A particular type of person is becoming increasingly recognisable.

— I call them progressivists.

These are innovators and early adopters in the diffusion of innovations model. They create and strive toward the development of themselves and the world by their nature. They move the world toward progress.

— For me, this is not an ideological category, nor a “new elite”. It is closer to a behavioural pattern.


These people tend to share several characteristics.

• They continue building in unstable conditions. They absorb new technologies quickly. They create international relationships naturally. They adapt without losing internal direction. They think beyond a single political cycle or news cycle.
• For them, internationalism is not a lifestyle aesthetic. It is a functional way of existing.
• Home is no longer only a fixed location on a map. It becomes the ability to preserve rhythm, focus, safety, relationships and quality of life across multiple geographies.

I have a close example in my own work — my partner Cedric Bell, a Canadian entrepreneur building an international real-estate investment project while moving continuously between countries. What strikes me is not mobility itself, but the logic behind it. He does not think in terms of “where to wait things out”.

He thinks in terms of “where to continue building”. He assembles networks across markets, works through distributed teams, and uses technological infrastructure as naturally as previous generations used offices and fixed telephone lines.


This, perhaps, is why such people increasingly resemble one of the defining portraits of the emerging era.

Not because they possess greater privilege. But because the environment itself is beginning to reward adaptability, learning capacity and constructive action under uncertainty more aggressively than before.

Fear exists for them too. It would be strange if it did not. But fear does not become the organising principle of their lives.

It is possible to interpret current events through the lens of conspiracy.

Migration flows can be viewed as managed redistribution. The pandemic as a rehearsal for immobility. Geopolitics as competition over routes, infrastructure and strategic control.

Such interpretations emerge naturally because the world genuinely has become less predictable.

— But another explanation feels more convincing to me.

Perhaps what we are witnessing is the reaction of older institutional systems to the speed of a new technological era.

The idea behind the Fourth Industrial Revolution has described this transition for years: technology no longer transforms only production. It reshapes the underlying structure of society itself. The IMF Global Uncertainty Index shows that levels of global uncertainty remain significantly above historical norms even after the acute phase of the pandemic.

Older institutions struggle to operate at newer speeds. Traditional governance systems function poorly inside distributed digital environments. Established assumptions around career, home, mobility and security begin to fracture under pressure.

In nature, complex systems rarely evolve in calm, linear ways. Periods of stress often produce chaotic restructuring. Under pressure, solutions emerge that stable environments would never generate.

Perhaps we are living through precisely such a phase. Not a particularly comfortable one. But evolutionarily dense.

And perhaps that is why it becomes so important, now, for people who continue maintaining a constructive direction to recognise one another.

Because the informational atmosphere is almost entirely organised around anxiety, destruction and reaction.

There was a time when global mobility felt almost frictionless.

You had a ticket. A passport. A destination. You moved.

That simplicity is fading.

Freedom of movement is increasingly becoming a competency in itself — almost a managerial discipline.

• One must understand legal systems, infrastructure reliability, healthcare quality, political risk, taxation, logistics, technological tools and the economics of time.
• One must learn to operate through distributed teams, AI systems, automation layers and global coordination structures.

Even the cost of movement is now deeply interconnected with geopolitical systems. Tension around the Strait of Hormuz immediately affects oil markets because roughly one-fifth of global oil flows through that corridor. Fuel, meanwhile, remains one of the largest cost categories for airlines.

Geopolitical instability increasingly translates directly into ticket prices, route availability and logistical predictability.

What once felt distant and abstract becomes personal surprisingly quickly.

And this is why voluntary global mobility — movement by choice rather than necessity — increasingly depends not only on wealth, but on one’s ability to navigate complexity itself.

This is not fundamentally a story about rich and poor.
It is a story about people who continue participating in progress in practical terms: building companies, developing technologies, connecting markets, creating international systems and adapting themselves to new realities without collapsing into paralysis.

For people who continue building, moving and adapting, a new foundational need is emerging.

— They need what might be called a global comfortable environment.

An environment where safety, healthcare, infrastructure, logistics, digital systems and quality of life remain stable enough to preserve focus. An environment where one can arrive in a new geography and restore a functional rhythm of life quickly rather than spending months fighting organisational chaos.

Research from Knight Frank and other global consultancies increasingly shows that internationally mobile individuals choose locations not simply for taxation or climate, but for a combination of safety, infrastructure, predictability and quality of environment.

This is an important signal for the future of development.

• Real estate is gradually becoming something larger than property itself. It is turning into infrastructure for continuity of life.
• A person building companies, technologies or international systems cannot endlessly spend cognitive energy overcoming friction. They require environments that preserve concentration.
• Service. Logistics. Security. Technological fluency. Community. Predictability.
• The ability to regain one’s rhythm quickly in a new part of the world.

This is where I increasingly see the purpose of my own field.
Not merely constructing buildings. But participating in the creation of environments where the constructive part of society can continue functioning.

— Without excessive romanticism. But without cynicism either.

If the world becomes more complex, someone will still have to design spaces of clarity and resilience inside it.