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 sqft 1T of actual land is needed.
That’s about 180,000 square miles or roughly the area of France 36,000 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.
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
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.
However much it takes to prevent the psychological harm that comes from overcrowding
