Personal space & office space

Let's add some personal space and some office space to our totally imaginary neighborhood

Last week we began planning out amenities for our neighborhood such as entertainment, food services, park space, seating space, and recreational spaces. This week I’m going to add some personal space for each of us since we all currently only own pods and personal space is nice, and some office space so that we can work.

For personal space, I’m going to extend all the pods with one 4m by 4m room each. This room can be whatever you want from a creative studio or mini kitchen to a cozy hangout and movie room. The thought process here is that because every single person in the neighborhood gets one, you’ll still be able to partake in a variety of activities with your friends in rooms specialized for that activity.

Attempting to approximate how much space we need for working is a more difficult task. Work requires a wide variety of spaces including office space (the simplest to calculate), retail spaces, factories, service buildings such as schools and hospitals, warehouses, ports, farms, and more. For simplicity, I’m going to ignore all the spaces except for the office, the retail spaces we currently have, and service buildings. This makes the assumption that factories, warehouses, ports, farms, and others all exist outside this neighborhood.

Let’s get to it. On top of giving every pod a personal space I’m going to take our pod building and split it into groups that are spread throughout the neighborhood. Each personal space is 4 meters by 4 meters which comes out to 16 square meters of space x 877 = 14032 square meters of space. If we packed that into one square building, it would be a single building with 118-meter sides but because I probably missed something I’m going to round up to 130-meter sides. Only slightly bigger than the space we’ve given to our cars.

Let’s merge our sleeping pods, bathrooms, and personal spaces together and then split them into 56 builds which will each hold about 16 people. On top of that, I’ve added the space required for a hospital that would have ample space for 877 people.

In order to accommodate other office-related jobs, I’ve added 36 buildings each with enough space for 16 4m x 4m offices, although this doesn’t have to equate to offices and could instead be organized as more open concept spaces.

This community concept is coming together! We’ve removed 308 urban sprawl homes, given every single person a bed, private space, and a bathroom and we’ve provided a number of services and spaces for entertainment and well-being and we still have half the space left! In the rough plan inside my head, I imagine the rest of the space being used for more recreational activities and green space. Next week, in order to try and express that I am going to re-organize the entire neighborhood in a more calculated manner with some room for roads, green space, and community areas. This will likely bring this small project to a close as I am looking to take a new approach.

These last few posts have been a great opportunity for me to jump head-first into urban design, and I say that lightly as I wouldn’t consider this urban design. I can’t possibly express the number of questions that have come up for me while doing this around how urban design actually occurs, what changes are possible, what living styles actually make people happy, and more. Moving forward, my goal is to take a more calculated approach, tackle smaller pieces of the puzzle, and grow a deeper understanding of how all these things work.

Thanks for tuning in, until next time.