What is the purpose of designing something which nobody will ever build, and which nobody even wants to build?
Hypothetical architecture can serve as a proof of concept. It can show that a concept is feasible.
In the present case, it can help to answer questions about the carrying capacity of the earth. How many people can live on planet earth?
More precisely, how many people can live in first-world fashion, with sustainable and renewable sources of clean water, clean air, and nutritious food? This exploration provides 200 square feet of living space per individual (a family of 4 would have 800 square feet, a family of 5 would have 1000 square feet, etc.).
While this amount of living space is a bit low for a truly first-world standard, it represents a convenient metric for calculation. Once established, it would be easy to return to the question and recalculate to provide 250 or 300 square feet of living space per person.
Also part of the standard would be first-world HVAC, running hot and cold water, telephone, cable TV or broadcast TV, high-speed internet access, radio, electricity, etc., in each living unit.
This hypothetical architectural experiment will proceed by envisioning a 20-story apartment building which can be reproduced in a standardized fashion to fill an arbitrary number of square miles.
The building would be 54 feet wide and 421 feet long. Exterior and interior walls are calculated as being 1 foot thick. The interior space is conceptualized as square rooms measuring 20 feet by 20 feet. A 10-foot-wide hallway would run down the middle of the building with rooms to the right and left. There would be 20 rooms on each side, totalling 40 rooms on each floor of the building. Space is allotted for stairwells or elevators.
Outside of the building would be a 10-foot margin of green grass and a 10-foot sidewalk. A 1-foot curb would separate the sidewalk from a 10-foot automotive lane. (These units are imagined as replicating, so the next unit would also include a 10-foot automotive lane, forming a two-way street.)
This structure represents housing for 40 people per floor; a 20-story structure would render a building housing 800 people.
The unit, including the building, sidewalk, curb, and one lane of automotive traffic would measure 116 feet by 483 feet. These dimensions would constitute a repeatable footprint.
Replicated, 450 of these structures would be placed within a square mile, arrange in 10 rows of 45 buildings. Within that square mile would also be extra space for parks and gardens.
This would yield a housing density of 360,000 residents per square mile.
Thus housed, 9.7 billion people could be housed in an area which is equal to one-third of the square miles in Kansas.
The reader is again reminded that, in reality, nobody would ever build in this fashion, nor would anybody want to live in this fashion: it would be as unbearably dreary as the Stalinist socialist prefabricated housing (called Plattenbau in the former East Germany) which filled Warsaw Pact cities during the Cold War.
While nobody would build these structures or want to build them, and nobody would live in them or want to live in them, their function as ‘hypothetical architecture’ is fulfilled inasmuch as they serve as ‘proof of concept,’ showing that the earth’s population could not only be housed, but housed in first-world fashion.
Such a small percentage of the surface area of the earth would be occupied by residential structures that huge amounts of land would be left for agriculture, for parks, for undeveloped natural preserves, and for industry.
In any non-hypothetical scenario, obviously, the population would be spread across the various continents of the earth. The housing is here imagined as concentrated merely for the purpose of calculating population density and surface area.
The surface area and natural resources of the planet are sufficient to provide education, recreation, and meaningful work in addition to housing and other basic needs.
A population, of not only 10 billion, but rather even of hundreds of billions, could be housed. There would be ample sustainable and renewable resources to provide clean air, clean water, and nutritious food.
