Prison cells in the United States are usually 70 sq ft and include running water, but generally speaking prisons in the US don't have private cells and its a barrack type situation, so generally amenities like showers, toilets, kitchens, yards, all of that is shared. If you were to look at the military its common for beds to be shared on ships and submarines due to space restrictions.
What I'm getting at is "what is the absolute minimum of personal space that should be considered a human right?" Is it none and we should try to promote communal living spaces or is there an actual number for how much sq ft is a human right? Should everyone have a private toilet/shower/fridge/stove/television/ect?
Is there a line to be drawn on this issue or should no line be drawn? Is personal space something we should be measuring objectively or subjectively?
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We can build dense enough for reasonable projections of max global populations and have no issues with people living in closets. Sustainable density can be easily done with townhomes, duplexes, and triplexes. The real issue is taking space away from people currently have a massive excess - like @berrytopylus, there are a bunch of anglo brains committed to owning the biggest home possible.
I might be wrong, but I think I heard once that if the entire human population of the world stood completely pressed against each other (in a "sardines in a can" scenario), they would fit, with room to spare, on the Danish island of Bornholm. Which is 588.36 km2 (227.17 sq mi). Our issue really isn't a lack of space, as you say.
For 7B people to have 700sqft of living space each, you need about 5Tsqft of residential floorspace. The US alone has about 235Bsqft currently, so it's not an unbelievable number. If you assume that these housing units are stacked say 5 stories high, that means only
5T sqft1T of actual land is needed.That's about
180,000 square miles or roughly the area of France36,000 square miles or roughly the size of Portugal to house everyone in a decent sized apartment.
It definitely is our concern if someone is living in a space the size of a closet. Supporting that undermines leftist urban planning causes. Humans may be able to survive in a small confined space, they may be able to fulfill their needs using communal amenities, they could eat nutrient paste, they could wear cheap utiltarian clothing, we could all live extreme ascetic lifestyles and technically it could fulfill our needs but people have desires, settling the issue of what treats people may have must be done eventually, and if we are going to be telling normal people offline that 70 sq ft of personal space is a treat they will be right to dislike us.
No, what I meant it is, there will never be a need to put people in that kind of living situation.
I'm saying it might be good idea to have a stance on how much personal space is a human right.
I guess a marxist would naturally defer to what studies show and what the psychiatric consensus would be, so that's my answer. It's probably more complicated than just personal space, and nobody would be more ready to tackle that concept and idea than someone who's studied human psychology for years.
It would be a bad look though to promote living spaces smaller than US prison cells, no? When I was a kid I had to share a room and we put a curtains up for privacy, when I lived in a dorm I shared an even smaller room, and the communal bathroom we had was disgusting. Now that I'm renting I do appreciate having the privacy and luxury of my own toilet and private bedroom. If I had full control of the housing market I would at least regulate some kind of minimum personal space per occupant in new houses.
Yeah I guess I just mean it's a really important and cool thing to focus on, but the concrete answer would probably be best found by discussing the issue with a professional instead of internet goons. I'll say though that I've always found that sharing a room with someone else leads to increased irritability for me, but that's just me
jfc keep up, we determined long ago in 1839 that the objectively correct amount of personal space is 528 sq ft
However much it takes to prevent the psychological harm that comes from overcrowding
Worries about personal space aren't particularly that important right now as long as it's not people living out in the suburbs with huge yards and expecting the same treats they'll get in more dense areas. Cities can build up quite a bit and smart design helps mitigate the issue of larger housing putting distance between things in dense neighborhoods.
Ships and submarines have a pretty small size limiter on them, especially when they're carrying a whole lot of other shit onboard, and prison cells can only get away with being so small because nobody in power gives a shit about prisoners.
A kitchen and a bathroom for each household plus one room for each person in the household seems to be a reasonable rule of thumb for creating the physical space allowing people to thrive.
They're quite nice to have. Ultimately what is considered "enough" is to a large degree a social question. What is considered normal? Does everyone else have one? It is also a question of what the alternatives are, is it expensive laundromats several blocks away, is it a well-equipped laundry room for the entire building or is it some sort of service where you hand in your clothes to be washed at an industrial-scale laundry.
As much is needed for a person to comfortably and safely sleep, eat, bathe and lounge. There isn't a need for a particular square footage as the "comfortably and safely" parts will allow for different cultures and preferences as well as the changes in them over time.
Running water and electricity is something everyone should have regardless of culture, the best way we could facilitate access to these things is through public housing, now there might be variations in what housing looks like due to mostly climate but simply giving everyone more space than a us prison cell is the bare minimum, no cultural reason would justify anything less than 70 sq ft per person.
Running water and electricity is something everyone should have regardless of culture
Sure. Not always a requirement all the time but I have no disagreement there.
no cultural reason would justify anything less than 70 sq ft per person.
There's caveats to this (but in my mind they'd be temporary situations) so yeah, no problems there.
If someone is in a situation where they don't have any of these things I think its a situation that requires immediate rectifying.
sigh
Okay.
So, you're working disaster relief. You will be sleeping in a tent, using communal shower/toilet facilities (however rudimentary), with little to no electricity outside of batteries.
You're a soldier. You're sharing about 50 square feet in an armored personnel carrier with a squad. No shower/toilet facilities. Electricity is going to be provided (if at all) from batteries or splicing into the vehicles power cables.
You're a young college student who lives on campus. Communal bathing/toilet facilities and communal dining facilities. Shared sleeping quarters.
The expectation for all of these scenarios is that you're not expected to live your entire life doing these things. At some point, the disaster you're helping with will either be taken care of enough that you won't be needed or will be rotated out of the duty. The same goes for doing soldier work. A student is expected to, at some point, get past being a student and moving on to actually doing something else.
Like I said, caveats.
People who have mobility issues should obviously have different spaces from those who don’t for accessibility reasons.
Thats a very big issue as to why there should be some kind of minimum amount of space and design standards. Ideally someone in a wheelchair would have no problem accessing any location, that would require apartment design to make room for a wheelchair, that would make things like Murphy beds in an emergency situation bad, it may be hard for a disabled person to move furniture that would block an exit if we are designing every apartment to be as compact as possible. Plus claustrophobia exists.
Oh boy it's you again
Hi there!
Obviously the personal space needed depends on the person, but I think that at least having your own room is very important.
Wouldn't you say Hong Kong is too dense considering a lot of people there live in cage homes?
That's more of a poverty issue than a density issue, I do think there is such a thing as too dense, like the Kowloon Walled City (cool but not as fun to live in), slums in third world countries without plumbing or electricity, rooms where there are too many people, etc. I think that standards for density vary from person to person.
The issue is that if we don't standardize some aspect of what is acceptable living conditions then inhumane things like 100 people sharing a toilet happen. There's meeting the needs and increasing quality of life. 100 people can share the toilet, it would be efficient if kept clean, people might have to wait to take a shit but it would meet a need. It would be nice to have a personal toilet, it would be reasonable to assume that with proper planning everyone could have one. Maybe in some situations where there is scarcity and poverty that might not be possible and people will have to share. But 100 people sharing a toilet is disgusting. We should at least try to cap how many people use the same toilet.
I feel like you're trying to argue with someone who doesn't even exist. Who is suggesting 100 people to a toilet besides the planners behind Woodstock '99?
I think that number should be around the average square footage of a one bedroom apartment, 600-750sqft.
If we're just talking bedroom, then yeah half that is good. The other half is for kitchen, living, storage, and bathroom space.
But really, 900-1000 is the most livable with the ability to have a utility/office space in your living quarters as an individual.
Oh, so current housing stock is around 235Bsqft in the US. So if it was distributed equally, that would be almost exactly 700sqft person. So I think 600 is a good low end honestly. That allows for about 15% of the housing stock to be allocated as excess for say family situations, disability, or as a reward for higher labor grades (if that's a path that is decided on).
If we're looking at this through a capitalist system of allocation, then it seems like the concession is 300sqft
