Crowded House
July 21, 2011 6 Comments
This chart came up in my blogs today regarding average home sizes around the world:
It reminds me of a statistic that was given in The Economist some years ago. If you put all of the houses in the UK together, with no stacking (i.e., no flats, apartment blocks, etc) what area of the country would be covered? From memory there are some 25m households in the UK. Let’s round-up the 76 sq m to 100 to allow for some garden space. 25×10^6 x 10^2 = 25×10^8 sq m in total. That’s a square of side 5×10^4 metres, i.e., 50km.
In other words, all the households in the UK would fit into a 30 mile square, which is about the distance from Manchester to Liverpool. Maybe the UK isn’t so crowded after all. (Newspaper stories and articles about Britain having the highest population density in Europe typically leave out Malta, Monaco, and a few others, and then give the number for England only).
Marc Gawley 
Uk is obviously not overcrowded however small pockets of Britain is overcrowded. This refers to the main cities like London, Manchester, etc but the villages and small town are not the problem however is how to make people move into this underpopulated areas.
I live in the US and I have to say that the concentration of population in urban area is pretty much the same. For comparison the state of Iowa is roughly the size of England with a population about 3 million. I think that if you want less dense population in urban areas then there has to be viable industry and employment in the towns and villages.
I think that Joseph has a good point. In many ways, you want to get people to move back into smaller communities. The trick is to make sure that there is economic incentive for people to live in smaller communities. Jobs being at the top of the list. That is my I feel that more companies should look at their remote worker policies to make it more viable for employees and companies.
Just felt I should add this, the Telegraph in today’s news declares that “It is estimated that English population density will rise to 464 people for every square kilometre by 2031.” That is just 20 short years away. Hmmm!
Pingback: Fitting in « Marc Gawley
Pingback: Zero waste, zero point | Marc Gawley