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Dec. 14th, 2005 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynI have spare time today because I am home sick, which is not the most fun thing in the world. Am still trying to figure out what I should do with all these SIGHUPs, SIGQUITs and SIGTTERMs. Am also busy trying to make all this computer crap do what I want it to do. Nevertheless, I shall use this opportunity to taunt you with some math that I did the other day about the world's population problem.
This, by the way, is to me an example of the kind of mathematical computations that the average citizen should be able to do after graduating from secondary education, and that would help prepare them for making informed political decisions. It's not particularily useful, but it is helpful for trying to evaluate certain propositions brought to your attention. You shouldn't even need a calculator (well, except for the metric->standard conversions)
The question came out of a thread on IIDB (which I do not post on, but I read occasionally), concerning the amount of people that the earth can support. Debate over the number continues, but someone brought up the old saw that the entire population of the Earth could probably be crammed into Texas. Another asked if this were true.
This gets into the idea of megacities, science fiction constructions that house huge populations in close association with each other. Traditionally they are utopias for the elite few at the top, and distopias for the working class bums who get thrown into cramped quarters, locked into a world that cannot do more than oppress them, and are controlled by some sort of totalitarian government. Sci-fi in particular uses the motif of the super-advanced, and extremely dense cityscape to map out a future where individualism is lost in the crowd.
Throwing out that interpretation for the moment, I was curious to see if it was possible to design the basic idea for such a city that, while housing the world's population in a fairly small area, did not have to be ridiculously conformal. As to how I succeeded, you can judge for yourself.
Let's start with an apartment tower. Say it should be tall, perhaps forty stories of actual apartment housing. Now let's make it fairly large, a hundred meters on a side-a very large building for a skyscraper, but not out of reach of modern technology. For instance, the world's tallest skyscraper, Taipei 101, is 101 stories tall, and has an average of about 4,000 square meters of floor space per floor. My apartment building would have ten thousand square meters per floor, so it would be wider, longer, and shorter. Consider it for the moment a box stuck into the ground. Let's be generous and say that we have four of these boxes built per square kilometer.
Now, how many people live in a box? We have forty floors, each of 10,000 square meters of floor space. Assume that (just as a guess) 20% of the space is used up by hallways, conduits, pipes, and janitorial closets. This leaves us with about 8,000 square meters of space per level. I'm going to divide these up into apartments of 400 square meters, meaning that I can fit twenty apartments on a floor. Making another assumption (that an average of two people live in an apartment), forty people on a floor, and with forty floors, I have 1600 people living in a building.
Remember earlier that I said that there are four buildings in a square kilometer, so I house 6,400 people per square kilometer of residential districts. Rounding down to account for anything I left out, you have about 6,000 people per square kilometer of residential area. Now, let's just guess that for every square kilometer of housing, you need a square kilometer of commercial and industrial area in our megacity, which means that we get an average housing density of 3,000 people per square kilometer. This means that, for our megacity to house the 6 billion people of the Earth, we would need our megacity to expand over an area of 2 million square kilometers. That's larger than Texas, larger than Mexico, but smaller than Algeria. So, it's not too big, but it's big.
Now that we've done the first iteration, it's time to ask ourselves whether a city of this size would be livable, whether we could tolerate such a super-urban, dense environment, whether we could tolerate a little more compression to shrink the land area, in the name of conserving the Earth.
First, let's look at my apartment size. I assumed an apartment size of 400 square meters, with an average occupancy of two people. Is that accurate? No, it's a number I pulled out of my ass. For those of you who use Standard units, that's about 4,200 square feet. For reference, I pull open the Chicago Tribune real estate webpage and look for a home of similar size. So here's one, the closest I can find. Spacious. Sort of large. Four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms. There are a few other houses, one four bedroom, four bathroom, that are even smaller than this one. So perhaps 400 square meters, or 4,200 square feet, is a little bit on the large side for a family of two, although it might fit a family of four. So, let's replace half the apartments in the building with smaller apartments, 200 square meters, about 2,000 square feet, intended for couples without children, retired couples, and young roommates living together. Average occupancy for an average apartment is probably still about two, so now you have 2,400 people instead of 1,600 people living in the building. So, I've just upped my population density by fifty percent, and reduced my required land area to about 1.3 million square kilometers, probably without reducing living quality by much. After all, I wouldn't mind a 2,000 square foot single occupancy apartment.
Now comes the next part. Is there any outside? The visions that science fiction has presented us of the megacity is a pretty grim place, a jungle of buildings stretching toward the sky with the usual urban squalor at ground level. It's not a pretty place, and not the sort of place I would want to live in. Does this model suffer from that problem? So I proposed building four apartment buildings per square kilometer.
That's a lot. These are big, hulking buildings: forty stories is huge. It towers over the landscape, it dominates the landscape. You can't help it. These towers are bloody enormous. But then I think about land area. Four buildings per square kilometer. Each building is basically a box,taking up 100 by 100 meters of surface, which comes out to four buildings of 10,000 square meters each, or 40,000 square meters. A square kilometer has 1,000,000 square meters. So now we're at an estimate of four percent of the surface area will actually be physically covered with buildings. In other words, 96% of the residential zone will be empty.
What will go in that zone? Well, mostly I expect it will be untended parks, grassy areas, small forests, small lakes and the like. If you cluster all four apartment buildings in a square at the center of the kilometer, assuming fifty meters between buildings, you have to walk about 750 meters to get from your cluster to the next cluster. To you Americans out there, that's about eight football fields. It's a lot of distance. That's a look of park land, playgrounds, outdoor sports fields, ponds and other elements of cultivated nature. Of course, you would put some buildings out there. I would erect a great many freestanding museums, libraries, zoos, and other amenities, but all worked into the general landscape. So perhaps walking around down below won't be as gloomy as it first appeared. In fact, I bet I can double the population density, and erect eight apartment buildings per square kilometer, and only use 92% of the residential zone for parks and public buildings, without too much trouble.
With eight apartment buildings per square kilometer, at 2,400 people per building (mixed apartment sizes), we're now up to 19,200, or about 20,000 people per square residential kilometer. The land area we require has shrunk once again, to about 600,000 square kilometers.
Now, even with some generous space for parks in the residential areas, what are the grittier industrial areas like? Remember, I allocated half of the space of the megacity for commerce, industry, and other public services. So let's take a look at that.
First thing I notice is that it might be best to enlarge my apartment buildings to forty-five stories. In the five extra floors, I can designate three as Commercial, for smaller, less exclusive shops and quick repair places, one floor as Recreational for fitness clubs and indoor recreational activity, and one floor as Civil, probably most for use as small medical facilities or school space (this actually may need to be two floors per apartment building, although only one in every few apartments requires a schoolyard to be set aside. In a four apartment cluster they can be linked, and students can move building to building between classes). That reduces the amount of commercial spaces that I need.
Now add that most people will actually work in office buildings, doing management, design, and small-scale production rather than work in large factories (which may be mostly automated). Let's also make my office buildings forty five-story tall boxes (I can build one kind of building really well). Cross out five stories worth of space for reception and conference room affairs. Assume that each worker (we're working cramped, since we have to save space) needs an office of about ten square meters, a cubicle of sorts. In a floor with 8,000 meters of usable space, I can then fit in 800 offices. Expand that to a forty story building, and I fit 32,000 people (rounding to 30,000 because there will probably need to be some workshop areas somewhere). At eight office buildings to a square kilometer, I can hold 240,000 people. Take it down to 200,000 people and build a mall in place of one office building (another source of
employment).
So, if 200,000 people can work in a square kilometer, that means that for every ten kilometers of residential district I build, I need only one square kilometer zoned to a commercial sector. That seems about right, but let's assume that I'm over-compressing my work force. Make the offices bigger, and let some of these guys work in industry. Factories, even automated ones, are probably bigger and take up more space, with many less workers, so let's designate two additional square kilometers to go to industrial space. Then, for the hell of it, let's take up another square kilometer for civil buildings, prisons, large hospitals, and universities (all other buildings are probably incorporated into the residential areas already). Now for every ten kilometers of residential area, we have four kilometers of other space. What do we do with the other six that I budgeted? Thirty percent of the total land of our megacity isn't being used! Well, that's okay. Given the size of the city there are probably plenty of areas we want to turn into national parks, wildlife refuges, open-air museums and recreational areas. This looks like a perfect use for that.
So now we still have a city that takes up 600,000 square kilometers. That's still enormous, an area slightly larger than France. But at least it's not that unlivable. Right off the bat, thirty percent of the area is reserved for national parks and other open-air ventures. Of the remainder, even though it's covered by huge buildings, ninety percent of the land area can be used for everything from gardens to zoos without impinging upon the building requirements.
Now, is this practical? Probably not. Why would we all move to one area? You're probably talking about ten megacities, each taking up 60,000 square kilometers, an area about twice the size of Belgium. Can it be done anywhere? No. Bedrock has to be able to support such a proliferation of large structures. But is it possible? Well, yes. We'll need some advances in construction and industrial techniques, but it should be possible to reduce humanity's impact on the world as much as possible by concentrating the race in one part of the world.
Now, do you want to live there? Well, that's up to you.
This, by the way, is to me an example of the kind of mathematical computations that the average citizen should be able to do after graduating from secondary education, and that would help prepare them for making informed political decisions. It's not particularily useful, but it is helpful for trying to evaluate certain propositions brought to your attention. You shouldn't even need a calculator (well, except for the metric->standard conversions)
The question came out of a thread on IIDB (which I do not post on, but I read occasionally), concerning the amount of people that the earth can support. Debate over the number continues, but someone brought up the old saw that the entire population of the Earth could probably be crammed into Texas. Another asked if this were true.
This gets into the idea of megacities, science fiction constructions that house huge populations in close association with each other. Traditionally they are utopias for the elite few at the top, and distopias for the working class bums who get thrown into cramped quarters, locked into a world that cannot do more than oppress them, and are controlled by some sort of totalitarian government. Sci-fi in particular uses the motif of the super-advanced, and extremely dense cityscape to map out a future where individualism is lost in the crowd.
Throwing out that interpretation for the moment, I was curious to see if it was possible to design the basic idea for such a city that, while housing the world's population in a fairly small area, did not have to be ridiculously conformal. As to how I succeeded, you can judge for yourself.
Let's start with an apartment tower. Say it should be tall, perhaps forty stories of actual apartment housing. Now let's make it fairly large, a hundred meters on a side-a very large building for a skyscraper, but not out of reach of modern technology. For instance, the world's tallest skyscraper, Taipei 101, is 101 stories tall, and has an average of about 4,000 square meters of floor space per floor. My apartment building would have ten thousand square meters per floor, so it would be wider, longer, and shorter. Consider it for the moment a box stuck into the ground. Let's be generous and say that we have four of these boxes built per square kilometer.
Now, how many people live in a box? We have forty floors, each of 10,000 square meters of floor space. Assume that (just as a guess) 20% of the space is used up by hallways, conduits, pipes, and janitorial closets. This leaves us with about 8,000 square meters of space per level. I'm going to divide these up into apartments of 400 square meters, meaning that I can fit twenty apartments on a floor. Making another assumption (that an average of two people live in an apartment), forty people on a floor, and with forty floors, I have 1600 people living in a building.
Remember earlier that I said that there are four buildings in a square kilometer, so I house 6,400 people per square kilometer of residential districts. Rounding down to account for anything I left out, you have about 6,000 people per square kilometer of residential area. Now, let's just guess that for every square kilometer of housing, you need a square kilometer of commercial and industrial area in our megacity, which means that we get an average housing density of 3,000 people per square kilometer. This means that, for our megacity to house the 6 billion people of the Earth, we would need our megacity to expand over an area of 2 million square kilometers. That's larger than Texas, larger than Mexico, but smaller than Algeria. So, it's not too big, but it's big.
Now that we've done the first iteration, it's time to ask ourselves whether a city of this size would be livable, whether we could tolerate such a super-urban, dense environment, whether we could tolerate a little more compression to shrink the land area, in the name of conserving the Earth.
First, let's look at my apartment size. I assumed an apartment size of 400 square meters, with an average occupancy of two people. Is that accurate? No, it's a number I pulled out of my ass. For those of you who use Standard units, that's about 4,200 square feet. For reference, I pull open the Chicago Tribune real estate webpage and look for a home of similar size. So here's one, the closest I can find. Spacious. Sort of large. Four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms. There are a few other houses, one four bedroom, four bathroom, that are even smaller than this one. So perhaps 400 square meters, or 4,200 square feet, is a little bit on the large side for a family of two, although it might fit a family of four. So, let's replace half the apartments in the building with smaller apartments, 200 square meters, about 2,000 square feet, intended for couples without children, retired couples, and young roommates living together. Average occupancy for an average apartment is probably still about two, so now you have 2,400 people instead of 1,600 people living in the building. So, I've just upped my population density by fifty percent, and reduced my required land area to about 1.3 million square kilometers, probably without reducing living quality by much. After all, I wouldn't mind a 2,000 square foot single occupancy apartment.
Now comes the next part. Is there any outside? The visions that science fiction has presented us of the megacity is a pretty grim place, a jungle of buildings stretching toward the sky with the usual urban squalor at ground level. It's not a pretty place, and not the sort of place I would want to live in. Does this model suffer from that problem? So I proposed building four apartment buildings per square kilometer.
That's a lot. These are big, hulking buildings: forty stories is huge. It towers over the landscape, it dominates the landscape. You can't help it. These towers are bloody enormous. But then I think about land area. Four buildings per square kilometer. Each building is basically a box,taking up 100 by 100 meters of surface, which comes out to four buildings of 10,000 square meters each, or 40,000 square meters. A square kilometer has 1,000,000 square meters. So now we're at an estimate of four percent of the surface area will actually be physically covered with buildings. In other words, 96% of the residential zone will be empty.
What will go in that zone? Well, mostly I expect it will be untended parks, grassy areas, small forests, small lakes and the like. If you cluster all four apartment buildings in a square at the center of the kilometer, assuming fifty meters between buildings, you have to walk about 750 meters to get from your cluster to the next cluster. To you Americans out there, that's about eight football fields. It's a lot of distance. That's a look of park land, playgrounds, outdoor sports fields, ponds and other elements of cultivated nature. Of course, you would put some buildings out there. I would erect a great many freestanding museums, libraries, zoos, and other amenities, but all worked into the general landscape. So perhaps walking around down below won't be as gloomy as it first appeared. In fact, I bet I can double the population density, and erect eight apartment buildings per square kilometer, and only use 92% of the residential zone for parks and public buildings, without too much trouble.
With eight apartment buildings per square kilometer, at 2,400 people per building (mixed apartment sizes), we're now up to 19,200, or about 20,000 people per square residential kilometer. The land area we require has shrunk once again, to about 600,000 square kilometers.
Now, even with some generous space for parks in the residential areas, what are the grittier industrial areas like? Remember, I allocated half of the space of the megacity for commerce, industry, and other public services. So let's take a look at that.
First thing I notice is that it might be best to enlarge my apartment buildings to forty-five stories. In the five extra floors, I can designate three as Commercial, for smaller, less exclusive shops and quick repair places, one floor as Recreational for fitness clubs and indoor recreational activity, and one floor as Civil, probably most for use as small medical facilities or school space (this actually may need to be two floors per apartment building, although only one in every few apartments requires a schoolyard to be set aside. In a four apartment cluster they can be linked, and students can move building to building between classes). That reduces the amount of commercial spaces that I need.
Now add that most people will actually work in office buildings, doing management, design, and small-scale production rather than work in large factories (which may be mostly automated). Let's also make my office buildings forty five-story tall boxes (I can build one kind of building really well). Cross out five stories worth of space for reception and conference room affairs. Assume that each worker (we're working cramped, since we have to save space) needs an office of about ten square meters, a cubicle of sorts. In a floor with 8,000 meters of usable space, I can then fit in 800 offices. Expand that to a forty story building, and I fit 32,000 people (rounding to 30,000 because there will probably need to be some workshop areas somewhere). At eight office buildings to a square kilometer, I can hold 240,000 people. Take it down to 200,000 people and build a mall in place of one office building (another source of
employment).
So, if 200,000 people can work in a square kilometer, that means that for every ten kilometers of residential district I build, I need only one square kilometer zoned to a commercial sector. That seems about right, but let's assume that I'm over-compressing my work force. Make the offices bigger, and let some of these guys work in industry. Factories, even automated ones, are probably bigger and take up more space, with many less workers, so let's designate two additional square kilometers to go to industrial space. Then, for the hell of it, let's take up another square kilometer for civil buildings, prisons, large hospitals, and universities (all other buildings are probably incorporated into the residential areas already). Now for every ten kilometers of residential area, we have four kilometers of other space. What do we do with the other six that I budgeted? Thirty percent of the total land of our megacity isn't being used! Well, that's okay. Given the size of the city there are probably plenty of areas we want to turn into national parks, wildlife refuges, open-air museums and recreational areas. This looks like a perfect use for that.
So now we still have a city that takes up 600,000 square kilometers. That's still enormous, an area slightly larger than France. But at least it's not that unlivable. Right off the bat, thirty percent of the area is reserved for national parks and other open-air ventures. Of the remainder, even though it's covered by huge buildings, ninety percent of the land area can be used for everything from gardens to zoos without impinging upon the building requirements.
Now, is this practical? Probably not. Why would we all move to one area? You're probably talking about ten megacities, each taking up 60,000 square kilometers, an area about twice the size of Belgium. Can it be done anywhere? No. Bedrock has to be able to support such a proliferation of large structures. But is it possible? Well, yes. We'll need some advances in construction and industrial techniques, but it should be possible to reduce humanity's impact on the world as much as possible by concentrating the race in one part of the world.
Now, do you want to live there? Well, that's up to you.