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Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast

The Regent International apartment building in Hangzhou, China, has over 20,000 people living in it.

The building has 36 to 39 floors. It has swimming pools, barber shops, nail salons, medium-sized supermarkets, and internet cafes.

Scientifiction fans of the Twenties recall The Cubic City, a short story written by Louis Tucker and published in Science Wonder Stories in 1929. It features an enormous single building housing not just thousands, but millions of people;

"Two miles wide, two miles long, and two miles high is eight cubic miles. Eight floors to the hundred feet or four hundred to the mile give three thousand two hundred square miles of floor space. This is as large as an ancient city forty miles long and twenty wide, covered solidly with houses four stories high; and no part of it is more than two miles front any other part.”

“Obvious,” answered I, "but not enthusing.”

“You do not click it,” shrugged my guide.

('The Cubic City' by Reverend Louis Tucker, D.D.)

“Try it from another slant,” he said. “We have no traffic problem.”

“What is your population ?” I asked.

“About eighty millions.”

“You are not overcrowded,” I sneered. He took me seriously.

"Eight hundred floors,” he said: “about a hundred thousand to a floor. That is twenty-five thousand to the square mile and forty persons to the acre. We give a thousand square feet of floor-space to each. That is enough.”

Read more about the Cubic City; it even has a vast glass esplanade for sunbathing.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 4/4/2024)

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