One giant city the size of 20 New York cities

When working on the communism project I created that we could live in one large city to cut back on transportation costs and other environmental reasons.

I came to think that we could lower our population to 4 billion people. I created our living sizes to be 1200 SQ ft for singles and 1600 SQ ft for couples and those with kids.

I started with 250,000 SQ ft buildings for where we would live. I thought it could be 20 million buildings of 1200 SQ ft apartments and 20 million buildings of 1600 SQ ft apartments. Making it 10 trillion SQ ft of building space. Online I found out that NYC has 56 billion or so sq ft of building space. I was guessing that it included privately owned residential. With us needing 10 trillion SQ ft of apartment space it turned out to be 183 NYC’s in size. It’s most likely smaller than that since private houses aren’t 6 story tall 250,000 SQ ft buildings.

I then decided to think that we could plan for our population size to be even smaller, 1 billion in total being everyone in the world. That would make it 45 New York Cities in size. I then rounded down to 20 New York cities in size since there’s other factors to its size that I’m not looking at. The 45 would have been just residential but the space used for parks and extra wide streets gives us room to chop off.

Then we would need buildings for entertainment, food and work. Way less buildings than we need today for modern shopping and entertainment.

I was also thinking that all of the transportation could be subways under the city, giving us room for walking only on the surface. Possible emergency vehicles only on the surface too.

I also thought that we could have unlimited use of hotels all over the city so that if you want to stay at the end further away from your apartment. There’s probably some limits or reservations needed sometimes.