>>I don’t see a situation where power and water are shut off, but the coaxing of citizens into urban hives will certainly continue.
I work in the utility industry. It won’t be shut off. It will fail. Nobody sees the massive infrastructure that delivers power and water and takes the sewage away. But it’s there, crumbling to dust, as the money goes away a little bit each year.
Here in the northeast we have an aging infrastructure that occasionally leads to power outages or water restrictions; they are always addressed because BUSINESS can’t deal with unpredictable services - and when businesses leave there really is nothing left.