It is the future, and Nanofactories have removed the requirement to live in cities. Or townships, or tribes, for that matter. Now everyone can print any material, any sustenance needed, and supply chains are rusting away into disuse.

Humans have moved between smaller and larger communities throughout history. It would be extremely naive to say the trend to move to cities was only to make acquiring food, shelter, and other needs more efficient. But the opportunities brought by close-proximity division of labor has been a significant pull for thousands of years.

These days, we no longer need to order food from the supermarket. Those supermarkets, which received produce from the truck network, which shipped it from the suppliers and growers, and so on. These days, we all just print what we want, when we want it. Why are we still here then? Much like in Cory Doctorow’s novel, Walkaway, it seems almost like it’s taking society a long period of unlearning the habit of cities-for-supply-reasons, and for the majority to move to more decentralized living arrangements.

How could we describe the changes we are seeing on the fringes then? It’s no single thing or pattern – that’s for sure. My cousin’s immediate family moved off Earth a couple years ago, and are now exploring space in their custom printed ship. We still keep in touch, somehow even more now than we did when we lived in the same city. Many others do the same, caravanning across meteor belts. We hear of utopian Moon communes, micro-dynasties in private space stations, self-sustaining lone wolves propelled by solar sails, that one group at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, amongst many other stories.

I also wonder how dynamic residential population levels have become. Surveys of that past really assumed that a person had a single location of living, which is perhaps something we should no longer take for granted. Nanofactories have allowed us to generate all kinds of incredibly efficient transport, and so we are seeing more people moving to new locations every few days. I know I’ve spent two-to-three weeks doing that each year for the last few. My friends talk about the joy of spending time with their parents – in small portions. Two days with mum and dad, followed by another three in the isolated wilderness, I hear, is a winning cocktail.

Some argue that this Nomadism is not a new development. This is certainly true across history, and contrary to the popular perspectives of the 19th and 20th centuries, Nomadism never went away. There were nomadic communities firstly when we had not choice – for survival. Later, there were still nomadic communities when we had that choice.

And yet, cities do persist, even now when we “need” them least. This is especially so on Earth. I would ask why this is the case – but that feels strange when I consider I am writing this piece from with a large city on Earth too. It seems that in societies like this one, the idea of moving away permanently is somehow both common enough to not be surprising, and yet not talked about to the point that it still seems foreign.

I wonder if that is why people still choose to stay – to feel like they are still part of the conversation.