Pod beds for the neighbourhood

Last week I explored the idea of moving cities into pod hotels in order to try and understand how much space we take up as people.

Last week I explored the idea of moving cities into pod hotels in order to try and understand how much space we take up as people. After some reflection on the post, I realized that it was difficult to conceptualize how much space that really was because I only calculated it for the lower mainland, which many people are not familiar with, and because there was nothing to compare it to. If we put everyone in the lower mainland into beds, it would take up 8.4 square kilometers but quite frankly what the f**k is a kilometer and how much space do homes in the lower mainland take up currently? That’s a tremendously difficult question so instead of trying to solve that, for now, I am going to change the scope of the problem. Let’s look at a neighborhood.

The image below is a neighborhood near Fort Worth, Texas. Surburban hell.

In Fort Worth, the average household size is 2.85 people according to 2023 census data. Within the border there are 308 homes so hypothetically there are about 877 people living in the bordered area. If we take the same calculation from before and give every one of those people a pod in a pod hotel, it will take up 877 / 2 = 438 x 5.6 square meters (For 2 pods and a hallway). That comes out to 2452 square meters. That equates to a square with ~50-meter sides.

If you put all 308 people in this area into a tiny pod hotel the building would be the size of the green square below. We also included the space required for a small bathroom for each household (blue) and enough space to park two cars per household (red), which is the average in Fort Worth.

We’ve now removed everyone’s kitchens, offices, entertainment rooms, backyards, and everything else. With the space that is remaining, what would you want to see? What amenities would you want to privatize and attach back to the homes, err pod rooms? What amenities would you want to publicize? How would you want to get food, cook, and eat? In the next issue of this newsletter I plan to tackle some of those questions with some ideas but if you have some ideas in the meantime, let me know and we'll see if we can include them.