Amazon's is requirement to work from the office will not solve the problems of the American downtown that blew up with Covid, the need for cities as places of interaction and innovation notwithstanding.
"Amazon is reinforcing the importance of its headquarters' location in Seattle and signaling that its mission to embrace and foster innovation is not a spatially distributed endeavor but a socially dependent activity tied to a place" (Uwe Brandes, Director Urban and Regional Planning Georgetown University).
The issue isn't "the city" but the American Downtown
Brandes is right, innovation is a socially dependent activity but misses the issue at hand. The future of cities is not in question but the future of the American downtown is. As it is explained in Downtown: A Short History of American Urban Exceptionalism, the American downtown is not the same as centre-ville, Innenstadt or centro historico in France, Germany or Italy respectively. It didn't start of ancient ruins, had no protective walls and no particularly high density. It eventually morphed into what became a term for cities core areas worldwide, namely a bunch of office towers forming a "financial district". Even US cities that have lots of space or
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects