Anyone old enough to be reading these words has lived through an unprecedented era of cheap, fossil fuel-driven transport. Like the rest of the carbon economy, this has been made possible by market signals that fail to account for the negative externalities of greenhouse gas production.

In order to avoid a climate catastrophe — which, sadly, is far from a sure thing — carbon emissions will inevitably have to be taxed at something approximating their true cost. This will leave two options with regard to transport: option A, in which we discover a new high-speed/low-carbon propulsion system, or option B, in which a few hours of airline flight costs a few months’ salary. In the first scenario, we’d carry on with little change; in the second, we’d lose the luxury of jetting halfway around the world without a seriously good reason.

While our ability to transport ourselves would be reduced, advances in communications technology will make it easier than ever to interact with one another at a distance, moving far beyond a glitchy Skype call and deep into the realm of haptic interaction. Objects in virtual reality will feel physically real—yet another reason to never leave our city, or maybe even our homes.

A change in how cities buy and/or produce energy is also underway. In America, large metro areas are beginning to take greater control over their energy investments, putting larger sums of money toward shifting the locus of energy generation closer to home. (For additional background, an article published here under last month’s energy theme, by Mimi Onuoha, takes an intriguing look at the complex dance of energy purchasing and distribution in New York.)

Taken together, these trends point to a picture of the city as a more insular ecosystem than we’re used to experiencing — on a physical level at least—where we’ll try to keep as many urban life support systems inside it as possible.

At the same time that global warming makes it harder to justify shipping goods over long distances, a revolution in the way we produce them in the first place is just around the corner — ushered in by the likes of Flashforge, RepRap, and MakerBot.

If you don’t recognize these names, then you’re not familiar with 3D printing — yet. Within the next decade, you won’t be able to escape them. The rapid development of affordable, consumer-grade 3D printing has such potential to upend conventional manufacturing practice that former Wired editor Chris Anderson labeled it “the next industrial revolution.” It’s a revolution in which we will all be capable of creating physical objects on demand—using raw materials, digital blueprints, and just a few mouse clicks—almost anywhere. It really is like something straight out of a science-fiction film.

Building daily-use objects in our own homes, claimed Anderson in a talk he gave as part of the Long Now Foundation’s seminar series, will “reverse the arrow of globalization,” halting the constant search for lower labor costs involved in the race-to-the-bottom of outsourced manufacturing, and bring in a renaissance of small-batch fabrication. Like local energy production, it will also steer cities toward self-sufficiency, as the convenience of either making goods yourself or obtaining them from a fabbing workshop across town will outweigh the cost of shipping them in from elsewhere.

If the above turns out to be true, the effects of the shift will run deeper than just the way we physically organize our cities. To borrow from the always-relevant doctrine of Karl Marx, a change in the dominant mode of production that underpins a society will inevitably alter the social structure itself, giving birth to new forms of social relations while sweeping aside the old.

CEO of the robotics and 3D-printing company Robosavvy, Limor Schweitzer (whom I called to get a second opinion on Anderson’s grand vision), echoed the sentiment that a change is coming. Schweitzer, though, is actually more skeptical that 3D printing will replace mass production any time soon. “It’s one of those things that mostly sounds like a nice idea, like eating local food,” he said. Instead, he thinks profound changes are likely to come with automation of the workforce, which will afford us the free time to become more engaged citizens: