Largest Possible City

NothingNow

Banned
Something like that, I just jumped to a quick refence website for Tokyo because it is well known. I don't even think it's close to the top of the list of megacities these days, but archology city-in-a-buildings frees up a lot more space.

Well yeah, but they're a pain in the ass to engineer if you build too tall, and it's not always obvious things too (Taipei 101's settling has caused small, but detectible earthquakes in Taipei, since it was built atop a closed fault line.)

We can achieve 40,000 people/km2 pretty easily just by building at the density of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon (which together are at ~35,700/km², while Kowloon exceeds 43,033/km2.) Meanwhile, the densest ward in Tokyo, Toshima, only has a population density of about 20,600/km2, (but only about 47% of the ward is residential, and the residential buildings in Tokyo aren't Skyscrapers usually while 40 stories seems kinda normal for Kowloon, so the comparison is kinda bad, but it does point the way forward.)

Estimating that about 35-40m2 per person would be suitable in terms of residential units (the approximate standard in much of the world, but somewhat tight for americans,) you could get away with building units between 70 and 160m2 (753-1722ft2,) (2 bed/1 bath at 70m2 to 3-4/1-2 at 160m2.) so that might be a good jumping off point for serious calculations.

But something like 40-50 storys could be fairly easily achieved architecturally and systematically, and would provide a higher density than Paris, with more open spaces and more comercial space. Most of the New Towns in Singapore manage Parisian densities with much lower buildings than that. Ang Mo Kio for instance has a population density of 23,777/km2 overall, and about 53,600/km2 counting just the residential areas, achieved with just 12 and 25 story blocks.
 
Marc Pasquin said:
One thing not touch on regarding water is whether you could convince people to drink it.
That's potentially solvable if you collect all the rainwater you can, preventing it from running into sewers. Which also keeps the crud out of the sewers (& rivers they empty into). So, collect runoff, filter it through (constructed) sand/rock filter systems (made to look like natural locations), & pump it into the water filtration system. Or use the "rock filters" in place of...
 
That's potentially solvable if you collect all the rainwater you can, preventing it from running into sewers. Which also keeps the crud out of the sewers (& rivers they empty into). So, collect runoff, filter it through (constructed) sand/rock filter systems (made to look like natural locations), & pump it into the water filtration system. Or use the "rock filters" in place of...

I'm pretty sure there's more contaminated water coming out then could be compensated by rain.
 
We can achieve 40,000 people/km2 pretty easily just by building at the density of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon (which together are at ~35,700/km², while Kowloon exceeds 43,033/km2.) Meanwhile, the densest ward in Tokyo, Toshima, only has a population density of about 20,600/km2, (but only about 47% of the ward is residential, and the residential buildings in Tokyo aren't Skyscrapers usually while 40 stories seems kinda normal for Kowloon, so the comparison is kinda bad, but it does point the way forward.)

Those sound pretty low. I mean there's neighbourhoods in my hometown that apparently have like 30 000/km2 and they don't seem that dense (of course they're fairly small area, but still). I think that 100 000/km2 is really fairly feasible if you try.
 
One thing not touch on regarding water is whether you could convince people to drink it. In Sydney, there was a perfectly reasonable project a few years of recycling brown water for consumption. Certain groups fan the flame of "aint no way I'm gonna drink what comes out of my toilet" and instead we ended up with a desalination plant which as a side effect churn out highly saline water which appear to cause some problem with the local ecosystem.

We recycle sewage in Singapore- no one really has a problem with it. There were a lot of jokes when the project got off the ground.

Then again, as an American friend of mine once noted, Asians aren't as icked out by bodily functions as Anglos are*.

*He used to get freaked out by how casually people in the office would discuss their diarrhoea symptoms and so forth
 
We recycle sewage in Singapore- no one really has a problem with it. There were a lot of jokes when the project got off the ground.

Then again, as an American friend of mine once noted, Asians aren't as icked out by bodily functions as Anglos are*.

*He used to get freaked out by how casually people in the office would discuss their diarrhoea symptoms and so forth

As Lao-tzu said:

"Aint no way to start a day
then to say how quickly you dropped one the back way" *

------

*This quote is disputed by some scholar however who think it refered to butterflies.
 

OS fan

Banned
This actually explains very well how East Asia could have so many big metropoles centuries before the western world.
 
From the Mexican border to north of the the Los Angeles area it is almost solid city near the coast - the only break being Camp Pendleton.
It would seem possible to have a solid "city" from San Francisco to San Diego.
Granted it would be made up of individual cities but it would comprise a contigous metropolitan area.
 

NothingNow

Banned
Those sound pretty low. I mean there's neighbourhoods in my hometown that apparently have like 30 000/km2 and they don't seem that dense (of course they're fairly small area, but still). I think that 100 000/km2 is really fairly feasible if you try.

It'd also be really expensive to do if you're talking about areas with a lot of mixed-use going on, since you can really only acheive that with like 50-60 story tower blocks as a low end feature.

By comparison, this is what 40,000/km2 looks like:
800px-Hong_Kong_Night_Skyline.jpg
 
It'd also be really expensive to do if you're talking about areas with a lot of mixed-use going on, since you can really only acheive that with like 50-60 story tower blocks as a low end feature.

By comparison, this is what 40,000/km2 looks like:

That's my desktop background. :D

I guess I was referring to the residential areas having high density, not counting the commercial zones.
 

NothingNow

Banned
That's my desktop background. :D

I guess I was referring to the residential areas having high density, not counting the commercial zones.

At that density it's a moot point to distinguish the two, as you'd be building mostly mixed-use structures, with purely residential buildings being very rare.
 
At that density it's a moot point to distinguish the two, as you'd be building mostly mixed-use structures, with purely residential buildings being very rare.
I think I remember someone complaining that Hong Kong's density includes a lot of open green space that shouldn't be counted.
 

OS fan

Banned
The aforementioned Walled City topped 1 million people per km squared, although I would not recommend repeating this anywhere.
 
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