The worlds population has been growing at an average rate of ~83 million new human beings on our planet every year, which is around 1.1% growth. This doesn’t sound excessive, however, when you factor in compound growth, the problem really presents itself.
Earths global population was 1 billion in 1800 and has grown to a staggering 7.9 billion in 2020 (6.9 billion people in just 220 years), with predictions that show in the next 79-years (year 2100), the global population will balloon to ~11 billion people.
By running some simple math calculations and basing them on the Greater Los Angeles region for size and population compared against planet earths habitable land, we come to a relatively accurate conclusion that the planet can hold just 726 regions like Greater Los Angeles within its habitable zones. This equates to a maximum global population of ~13.8 Billion people if we keep building cities similar to that of Los Angeles.
Given the fact that the above calculations do not account for agriculture or natural land conservation to protect our beautiful wildlife, you start to see just how fast we are reaching the maximum capacity of our planet.
Lets also take into account that Los Angeles is already built up quite high, there are thousands of 5-10 story buildings, not to mention dozens of sky-scrapers and everything in-between. So this calculation is much worse for cities that are relatively flat and only consist of a majority of 1–2 story houses and large blocks of land.
I am from Brisbane, Australia and we have a motto “build up, not out” and that couldn’t be truer for what the world needs as a whole right now!
If we want to try our best to preserve the remaining wildlife on planet earth (at least what we haven’t driven into extinction already), then we need to start changing everybody’s ideas of what is the ‘ideal living situation’. As of right now, most of the worlds population aims to buy as large of a house as you can afford (or can’t afford) on the biggest size lot, even if it is for a single person, there are individuals buying 1,000m2+ houses on an acre or several, just for themselves, because that is the ‘status’ thing to do…
It is this mentality that exists today which is killing our planet.
What if we normalize living in a skyscraper and having the adequate amount of size for the living situation? A two people realistically need no more than 80m2 of living space.
If we can achieve this feat and as humanity becomes more condensed, we can provide more resources for publicly available land and activities than what currently exists in most communities today. So people normalize going outside their home and socializing rather than needing a big home to put all their fancy items so they feel more comfortable staying inside.
Our housing problem is obviously not just related to the rich and wealthy of the world, there is also the other extreme of poverty and everything in between. For example, take the favelas in Brazil, whilst these may be quite small living arrangements, they are still only 1-level, meaning that on average the square meterage of 4-favelas which house roughly 10-people, requires the same land mass that could hold an 80-story building and house 640+/- people, which is a 6,300% increase in population density, which is exactly what our mother earth needs!
An added benefit is that skyscraper cities are 100% wheelchair accessible.
There are also many other benefits to a sky-city, to just list a few:
- Everything needed for daily life is within close walking distance, no need for daily commutes
- larger cities can be ran entirely on smart and fast public transport systems, no need for inner-city roads
- there can be far greater public parks and amenities to what is currently available per the average neighborhood
- vertical farming can supply food to the city. Greatly reduced need for shipping, which reduces greenhouse gas and increases freshness
- greatly increased population density can increase the quality of living, and leaving much more room for the natural ecosystem.
I could write a PHD thesis on this (and I probably will one day), however, for now I would love to know your thoughts? Please, be honest, as I enjoy constructive criticism.
-Trent Revic
references
M Roser, H Ritchie and E Ortiz-Ospina (2013) — “World Population Growth”.
‘https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth'
United Nations — Population Growth (2020)
https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-prospects-2019.html
Greater LA population (2019): 18,710,563
- 2019 population estimates for CSAs, US Census Bureau
Greater LA land mass: 87,940 km2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles
Earths habitable land mass: 15.77 billion acres
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/Thoc/land.html
