Both towns offered amenities like electricity, pumped water at every home and better access to transportation, markets, schools and hospitals.
The best have mains water, electricity, pumped drainage, telephone landlines, satellite television, Wi-Fi and even parking spaces.
"They had to generate their own electricity, pump their own water, bury their own garbage and grow up to 40percentt of their own food".
At present, the electricity pumped along most of these lines is, like most of the rest of the grid, in a form known as alternating current.
Photograph: Tim Dowling 11.04am BST Tim Dowling: I did, naturally enough, peek at the Wattson from time to time over the course of the control week, and noticed that it fluctuated wildly: one moment it would say £270, and I would be quietly pleased with myself; the next it would say £3740, and I would imagine the walls catching fire from all the electricity pumping through them.
In this case, the datacentre can also become a provider of electricity, pumping unused electricity into the electricity grid and subsequently receiving a payment.
Five years later, KarmSolar (Arabic for fruit yielding vine) has expanded into other applications including a patented technological breakthrough that supports the use of solar energy in pumping water to farmlands at a fraction of the cost of currently used electricity powered pumps.
On a commercial scale, this often requires an energy-rich process of recirculation, plus the movement of beer between tanks, ultimately requiring the use of electricity for pumps and water for cleaning.
High-rise apartment dwellers around New York City, already sweltering in darkened rooms, also received a cruel lesson in the dynamics of urban water systems, as the lack of electricity for pumps meant that depleted rooftop tanks could not be refilled.
