We are all prisoners of a future created by the infrastructures of the past.

In the mid 19^th Century London was arguably the greatest city in the world. However many of is citizens were poor and their life expectancy was really affected by sanitation. There is evidence to suggest that if people got past the dangers of infancy, they could expect to live somewhere between 17 and 45. All that changed for the better under the genius of the civil engineer Joseph Balzagette. He oversaw the development of the first large scale sewerage system and the beginnings of the London underground. From then on, the design of modern cities was tied to large scale distributed systems linked to quality of life as we know it. Utilities of all kinds including electricity, water, transport and telecommunications have all developed from the same model. Their success as ‘open systems’ is tied to large volume use. We use them all the time every day. We never think about them at all unless they fail to deliver, or access to them costs us more than we can afford. They are for the most part designed to provide us with the 'necessities' often for at least 100 years. They are so inextricably entwined in how we work, live and play, that we don't often see that in their size, scale, and reach, they imprison all of us in the future they have created.

Rapid urbanisation, environmental sustainability and advancing technology is challenging this paradigm. There is now the opportunity particularly for domestic and small scale industrial operators to deploy ‘closed systems’ that allow them to use the immediate environment and free energy like, the sun, to deliver in cheaper and more sustainable ways the utilities that make life comfortable. Most of these systems are lighter in environmental terms than the industrial strength utilities we now use.

These emerging closed systems challenge the very basis of how we design cities and create communities. They have the potential to significantly impact the vested interests of governments and large utilities. Importantly these systems allow people to move from a dependency to an interdependency relationship with utility providers. While open systems will always be important they are becoming increasingly costly in both financial and natural terms. This shift seems to be producing an uncomfortable tension between the pro-environmental rhetoric of governments and their mindset as owners and builders of large scale infrastructure. Of course while they continue to think in silos the inconsistencies are easy to gloss over!

Could it be that perhaps for the first time since the Romans and the Incas we have the opportunity to rethink the systems that support intensive human habitation? Could it be that an over investment in open systems is dumb, not smart, design? Is it possible that the very systems, that have until now been linked to quality of life and life extension, might in fact lock in an unsustainable world that creates the exact opposite? Critically, are there enough people that care one way or the other anyway?