“You can only make marginal improvements by adapting an existing model.  To really improve something you must build a new model that makes the existing model totally obsolete.”                            R. Buckminster-Fuller

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come”. Victor Hugo

Of all mankind’s countless innovations which have made our lives easier, safer, more exciting and generally more fulfilling, perhaps the most intrinsic is the one that shapes our everyday lives and which has been virtually synonymous with the concept of “civilisation” itself for the past 5000 years.   And yet, despite an enormous avalanche of technological progress that has made almost every physical facet of civilisation better, cleaner, safer, more compact and much more efficient, CITIES – the very bedrock of civilisation – seem to have missed the off-ramp to evolutionary advancement.   Of course they have expanded in extent enormously but, in the process they have become FAR more wasteful, less efficient, less attractive, more crime-ridden, and much less pleasant places in which to live and bring up a family.

Despite being forbidden to “fat shame” in our touchy-feely feminist nanny-statist political climate, I need to speak my mind because – although we bite our tongues – obesity is extremely unattractive, unhealthy, unfit, wasteful (on welfare and health services), and far less efficient (at work and play) than a slender person. The growing (no pun) Obesity Epidemic is a very serious matter for society and, ultimately, for civilisation itself.

Although they are never described as such, it is an equally serious matter – both for society and civilisation itself – that cities can also be described as obese.  So, in effect our cities have become Obese Cities, or OB-Cities. My mission is to introduce a new city concept that I call Oasis Cities, or OA-Cities, the concept of which I have been gradually fine-tuning over the past 30 years. OA-Cities will save energy and resources whilst enabling us to live in greater harmony with the environment and with each other. If or when this idea takes-off, it will change the world as utterly – and perhaps even more rapidly – as the railways did 200 years ago.