It used to be that we were logistics-mad.

Everything we bought was made somewhere else, usually a long way off. That’s the way the shipping companies boomed in the ‘flat world’.

It was very seldom that we ate local produce. If a spinach farmer in California had e-Coli bacteria appear in his crop, people in states across the East Coast got ill!

Tesco got everyone to eat the same three species of apple simply because it made logistics sense. More than 100 species of English apple were lost in the race for efficiency. They are back on the shelf now.

Our daily commute used to get us down. Drop the kids off at school. Sit in stationary traffic to ‘rush’ to the office. Drive to gym for a lunchtime game of squash. Back to the office. Pick up the kids and take them to soccer practice and ballet. Shop while they do their thing. Pick them up again and travel home before the energy fades completely. All in all a one hundred mile round trip.

Last weekend I took the family to our favorite ‘Fun Mall’. We paid to get in, and had serious fun. We played games, laughed and screamed. The kids learned a lot. And, we didn’t even have to shop. No shopping trolleys or stuff to carry. Great!

High Tech City Villages have fixed the shopping, logistics and commuting hell of the early 21st Century. At home, all you hear is the quiet hum of ink-jet printers in the den.

ANALYSIS >> SYNTHESIS: How this scenario came to be

2012: 3D Ink-jet printing goes mainstream
HP and China’s DotSung dominate the consumer market for 3D ink-jet printers.
At US$150 each, these printers have become a standard feature in all middle-class homes, much the way that ink-jet photo printers were in the early 2000s.
The difference is that these 3D printers manufacture stuff, on demand, from digital blueprints downloaded via the web. Everything from T-shirts to shoes, from underwear to haute couture.
You don’t feed these printers cartridges of ink – you get cartridges of nylon, ‘leather’, ‘cotton’ and ‘steel’ – all nano-particles manufactured to mimic and improve the performance of their ‘natural’ equivalents.

2014: India and China catch the ‘Print Me’ bug
In villages all across China and India the PrintMe Corporation has installed more than 100,000 print shops to enable local people to get access to the power of 3D printing.
The franchise operation has been hailed as one the best examples of human economic empowerment since community banking, and its CEO is in line to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
The lack of rural infrastructure has created a massive demand for these local low-priced services that give people direct access to the world’s best products – wherever they are.

2016: City Villages catch on
In a reaction to commuting times that seem to stretch ever longer, developers find overwhelming consumer acceptance of the City Village concept. This becomes the boom sector in construction and development. All the technology infrastructure and access of the city, right here in the country – or wherever you choose.
Underpinned by new communications and manufacturing technologies, City Villages promise:

• You no longer have to commute to work every day. Our free wireless broadband networks cover every part of the village and deliver access to work, global television and entertainment.
• You no longer have to take your kids to schools that are like factories – our technologies allow access to great teachers in local schools with small classes, right here in your local City Village.
• We provide free 3D ink-jet printing facilities in all our homes, high street shops that sell fresh local produce, venues for social interaction and leisure pursuits.

City Villages offer a lifestyle experience that can’t be beaten.

2020: Traditional Flat-World logistics companies crumble
It seems that the ‘local’ revolution is creating some serious economic waves.

The worldwide logistics industry has been hit by a tsunami of mergers and acquisitions in the past year, consolidating the top five companies into just two.

Development of new mega malls is estimated to be down by 50% over the next five years. Commuting has become an archaic term.

The people have spoken; the idea of City Villages is the new lifestyle fad.