Waiting in line is now urban infrastructure

In recent years, the queue has become a permanent feature of the global urban landscape. Its meaning, however, has shifted: it is no longer tied to exceptional demand pressure or to a city’s specific configuration. Instead, it now appears with the same regularity in historic centers, mid-sized cities, peripheral areas, and tourist destinations. This shift has been observed particularly clearly in the United States, where the term anywhere cities is increasingly used: places that differ in history, scale, and density yet end up producing identical behaviors because they are governed by the same consumption protocols.

In the United States, lines for store openings are no longer concentrated in major symbolic hubs. European and Asian chains generate anticipation not only in regenerated downtowns but also in Midwestern towns and outer suburbs, where pedestrian density is not structurally high. The opening no longer responds to a specific context but introduces a standardized sequence: announcement, waiting, threshold, access. The city, consequently, does not interpret — it executes. In this sense, the queue does not reflect local demand but the efficiency of a model that operates regardless of place.

Southeast Asia shows the same mechanism on an even more evident scale. In Bangkok as in secondary cities across Malaysia or Vietnam, waiting for new openings follows timelines and choreographies that are nearly superimposable. Differences in climate, density, or urban structure produce no significant variation in behavior. The queue becomes a synchronized practice, enabled by commercial spaces designed to accommodate it: recessed entrances, widened sidewalks, and time-management systems.

A particularly telling case is a Swatch watch model sold only on days when it snows in Switzerland. The product is not tied to a fixed occasion but to a meteorological condition. When snow falls on Swiss soil, selected Swatch stores release the watch and — predictably — a queue forms, whether in Zurich or in Venice. The same dynamic is replicated in other countries, where snow carries neither the same symbolic weight nor the same frequency. The waiting line does not arise from the climate itself but from the transposition of an arbitrary rule that turns a natural event into a commercial threshold. The queue forms because the device works, not because the context requires it.

This example clarifies a central point: the queue is no longer an emergent phenomenon but a variable embedded in the design. It is activated by artificial, temporary conditions often independent of place. Whether triggered by snowfall, an opening, or time-limited availability, the outcome is the same. The city reacts predictably because it is built to do so. In Europe, the phenomenon inserts itself into a traditionally more stratified geography but produces similar effects. Queues are no longer the preserve of capitals or high-density districts. They appear along ordinary retail corridors, in mid-sized cities, in contexts that only a few years ago would not have generated any waiting. The distinction between center and periphery is losing operational relevance. What changes is not the scale but the replicability of the scene.

Even the Winter Olympics in Milan are unfolding as an urban choreography that has little to do with sport and much more with waiting outside experiential pop-up stores (such as those by Airbnb and Esselunga), country-specific fan houses, and a constellation of temporary architectures distributing gadgets embedded in the city’s very structure. The YesMilano pins, for example — each dedicated to a different neighborhood — have already generated the longest lines of the entire Games.

Within this framework, the queue becomes a precise indicator: it signals that consumption has stopped adapting to places and has begun treating them as equivalent surfaces. It does not narrate a specific desire but the capacity of a space to absorb a standardized behavior. Cities continue to differ in form, but increasingly less in response. It is in this gap between morphology and behavior that the most significant transformation occurs: not the loss of identity, but the loss of reactivity — the ability of places to produce different responses depending on the conditions in which they operate.

For a long time, a new opening generated different behaviors depending on whether it occurred in a metropolitan center, a mid-sized city, or a peripheral context: waiting times varied, public space was used differently, and the audience profile shifted. Today, similar stimuli produce analogous reactions everywhere, because spaces of consumption are designed to activate predictable sequences, independent of density, history, or local habits.