Saturday, April 2, 2011

Space - the final frontier

Everyone needs his 'space'

As I was doing my katas (karate patterns) in the area leading to the small garden in my house, I was struck by how premium 'space' has become in land scarce Singapore. At the moment there are 5 million inhabitants in our 'garden city' and if the Government has their way, they want to increase the population to 6.5 million in our small island of barely 850 square km. Currently, the density is 5,882 per square km.That is almost 6 THOUSAND people in an area about 2 and a half football fields by 2 and a half foot ball fields. Of course, you can build upwards, but people are land based, so thats a lot of people you will meet if you walked (in theory) for  every one km either  one of the 4 ways. In a simple mathematical terms, 850 square km translates to 850 million square metres, and divide that by 6 million, then each one has in theory 141 square meters to do his or her own 'thing'.

Looking at it, that is barely 10 meters by 14 meters each person or 30 feet by 42 feet each person.

Its still not too bad, but it sure feels that there are alot more people in Singapore, and adding to increased competition and stress.        

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