Climate change will be one of the main drivers for change in the workplace over the next decade, restricting the freedom to travel and raising the cost of transporting goods.

Companies, especially global corporations, will have physical economies that are much more local, but with a superimposed knowledge economy that is free from the limitations of geography.

People will move to places that offer the facilities they need or aspire to. Having a good range of schools, shops and healthcare facilities within affordable range will become vital, leading to the resurgence of the old market towns as hubs for the local physical economy.

Each market town will have a specialisation to attract residents, such as a top theatre, a world-class sporting venue or an artists’ colony. This process is already emerging, with towns such as Ludlow becoming famous for its food, or Brighton for its night life.

Most market towns already have railway stations, which will become the preferred method of long-distance travel. Most are also historic centres of food production, which have been left high and dry by the supermarket revolution — but already the localisation process is starting with the rapid growth of farmers’ markets selling local produce. There are even signs that the headlong movement of manufacturing to the developing world may be about to reverse.

But market towns will only appear to be local economic centres in the physical world. Most of the global economy will by then be operating in the virtual world, with practically all commerce taking place online and most workers logging on to join teams in cyberspace to create the software, games, information and entertainment that will be the real moneymakers in the future economy.

It would be a mistake, however, to believe that all the people labouring at their computers in their home offices will be engineers, marketing people or creative types.

Many will be working in a distributed sweatshop, answering sales calls or providing technical help. For them, output will be monitored and regulated just as fiercely as it was in the days of Victorian mills.

Others will continue to travel to work (but increasingly by bicycle or shared transport) to offices in the market town that act as nodes in an international company — as if the current mega-headquarters buildings have been split into many small parts and deposited around the country.

One of the main losers in this scenario is national government, which will have its workforce distributed and its borders made largely irrelevant, except for the control of population movement. In a world where everything physical must be within cycling distance and everything else is global, national governments will look more and more irrelevant.